5 ms·

Do organizations really pretend they are not made of people? How/when?

by bnegreve 3y ago

dclowd9901 3y ago
They might say they are, but I think whether they believe they are is a different animal.
- bnegreve 3y ago
  Yes and that is my point: most organizations will pretend they are human centered, because it is good PR. Hence my surprised reaction to GGP.
Teever 3y ago
Look at healthcare during covid. My province in Canada has treated healthcare workers like absolute shit and now the leaders and the people who voted for them are genuinely shocked that those healthcare workers are leaving the industry or finding jobs elsewhere. It's absolutely insane because you need these people to train the next generation of healthcare workers which isn't going to happen now because they're leaving.
- eastbound 3y ago
  That makes healthcare cheap, though. We have the same in France, doctors have quite a low pay (of course in the top of the locals, but not as much as even a startup, and startups don’t advance humanity), nurses have a really low pay, some can’t afford living nearby. But on the upside, I barely pay 26€ to see a doctor. It’s the heart of convincing people to work hard for very little. If I were the most gruesome capitalist ever, I’d be a socialist. The TikTok dances are nice, though.
  - pas 3y ago
    why do you think startups don't advance humanity especially compared to doctors!? most doctors don't participate in clinical trials, they just do what they are told to do by protocols. (of course most startups fail, and they do whatever is hype at the time.)
    - eastbound 3y ago
      Everything is advancing humanity, then. Selling weapons might be seen as advancing humanity. Startups aren’t particularly human in average, neither in their goals nor internally. It’s just that, at the beginning of a new industry, all the low hanging fruits like “Register everyone in a big directory with photos”, “Make a video app where you can learn things” seem like advancing humanity, because it’s a leap forward. But they’re no better than in a mature industry, doing proper business. A doctor, a nurse talking with a dying person is advancing humanity. You, noticing a depressed man in the office; a kid talking to the bullied kid in class, that’s advancing humanity. No, Jira isn’t advancing humanity, no more than Carrefour negotiating rebates on vegetables against farmers.
      - pas 3y ago
        Just that there's a spectrum, and because most things are very close to zero (and because there's a lot of small positive things) it doesn't mean that everything is above zero :) And ... selling weapons might be positive might be negative. Selling weapons to defend against Russia might be positive right now. Selling weapons to dumbass US civilians who then can't keep it safe seems negative. How is talking to anyone dying actually advancing humanity? Hitting the brakes on the cult of meaningless clinging to life in hospitals would be some advance. Allowing people to say goodbye while they still can... Jira definitely is from hell, but when it was not this cruel cloud-crazy incumbent it was doing some things better than the alternatives back then. I'm not saying startups are good because they are small/new/risk-taking, but I'm trying to say that incumbents are usually bad because they have more monopolistic tendencies (than the startups that want of course also usually want to eat the market).
  - groestl 3y ago
    > If I were the most gruesome capitalist ever, I’d be a socialist. Both models match to some extend (i.e. potential to make life hell for everyone), when all productive capital is allocated to a single company.
    - 8jef 3y ago
      Indeed. Capitalist: this pie is the whole world, and I own it - you want some, pay up front. Socialist: I want a piece of that pie, damn I helped you cooking it, only for scraps - you can't have it for yourself. Me: a whole universe subsist within and around that pie that nobody care about, let's enjoy that.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The UK has for a long time "solved" this by importing healthcare workers from abroad, contributing to exacerbating the same problem and driving up the average cost per staying healthcare worker for a whole range of third world countries... Can't blame the people coming here who see significantly better opportunities in the UK, but definitely can blame the politicians not doing enough to ensure enough are educated here and/or ensure they are treated well enough to stay in the jobs longer.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  I'm going to guess Alberta. I don't live there, but my wife is Canadian and she has a few things to say about it...
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    ON, SK, and other Conservative Party-led provinces are seeing the same thing, or moves in that direction. Make the system shitty so that there is a justification to privatize. AB is just the most balls-out about it since Danielle Smith is basically a female Bill O'Reilly who got elected to Premier (aka Governor for the USA-ians). Boomers dying earlier than their parents, and stressing the system in large numbers, are also stretching these systems. Even if a NDP-led-double-down-on-healthcare approach there would be serious issues due to demographics.
mirekrusin 3y ago
He means they drive decisions based on some arbitrary, often flawed, short sighted, partial picture metrics (revenue, number of clicks, all kpis) forgetting that there are real people with ambitions, talents and feelings that are not accounted for behind it.
pavlov 3y ago
A lot of organizations operate as if they are made of headcount slots, and heads to fill those slots are some interchangeable commodity.
- quantum_state 3y ago
  I cannot agree more with this, especially for organizations with incompetent management…
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    are profits stable or increasing? stock going up? incompetence only matters so long as the company is doing badly. happy employees are tangential to successful companies.
- ansmithz42 3y ago
  The infamous "fungible resource".
- Levitz 3y ago
  Yeah people often are treated as a resource that happens to be human. Human resources, what a concept huh?
- pdntspa 3y ago
  This is what is taught in business school. Also why we are "human resources"
- coldpie 3y ago
  I was literally referred to as "a resource" by a big company client at a previous job. Like, "once your resource [i.e., me] is on site, let's...". This was years and years ago and it still stands out in my memory.
  - brookst 3y ago
    I hear this a lot and it really doesn't bother me. It's just an abstraction over the concepts of employee, contractor, seniority, team, etc. One resource is roughly equal to one person, but can also be half time each from two people, so "person" doesn't work. It's a little odd to use the abstraction when you know exactly the person you're dealing with, but like any jargon, people who live it all day end up using when vernacular is called for (e.g. the electrical engineer who tells their spouse that the dishwasher's heating element has become too resistant).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lr4444lr 3y ago
Customer lock in, hubris about the superiority of their product or service, IP or reputational dominance in the industry... lots of reasons leadership can treat the people as expendable cogs who should either shape up in gratitude for their salary, or ship out.
dstroot 3y ago
One of the worst cognitive biases which humans suffer from is the belief that observations about individual people can be generalized. How much faulty thinking, including racism and sexism, stems from this simple error? An extension of this common mistake is thinking of people as interchangeable, or fungible, when planning work - pretending who does the work doesn’t matter. A pattern I've repeatedly seen is companies will plan out the next few quarters of work and then assign some number of people, one person for one quarter to a project, two people for three quarters to another, etc. This process enables executives to make decisions about costs, priorities and project funding. This works for it's purpose, however, the roadmap creation and review process perpetuates the fiction that people are interchangeable, that people can be generically abstracted over.
- brookst 3y ago
  > An extension of this common mistake is thinking of people as interchangeable, or fungible, when planning work - pretending who does the work doesn’t matter. I agree with your whole post, but there is a nuance here that's important. This fallacy becomes true in a project large enough to average out individual variance. If you need 5000 software engineers, you probably don't care about their individual traits (you might care about the selection process and aggregate traits, but that's another level up). So at a certain level of executive, this fallacy serves them well. And it probably serves their reports (who might manage 750 people) decently. But their reports, managing 150 people, hear the language and see the behaviors of their bosses and emulate this belief in fungibility, and it really breaks down at this scale. Even worse for the next levels down, who might manage 30 and 5 people respectively. Yet everyone who sits in at an important meeting of skip-levels and execs sees this model used for resourcing.
xwdv 3y ago
Organizations are built with people but often made of pure assets: machinery, software, capital, databases and datalakes, business rules make up the soul of the business. And eventually with GPT, you could feed tons of business data to the AI and the business itself will begin giving instructions for what markets to expand to, who to hire and fire, what changes need to be made, how to set prices. Organizations are not just people. Those days are a distant memory. The people will be the most replaceable components, due to their ephemeral nature.
rcthompson 3y ago
How many people do you interact directly with when ordering something from Amazon? (Not to pick on them specifically, they're just an example, hardly unique in this way.)

Do organizations really pretend they are not made of people? How/when?

dclowd9901 3y ago

They might say they are, but I think whether they believe they are is a different animal.

bnegreve 3y ago
Yes and that is my point: most organizations will pretend they are human centered, because it is good PR. Hence my surprised reaction to GGP.

Teever 3y ago

Look at healthcare during covid. My province in Canada has treated healthcare workers like absolute shit and now the leaders and the people who voted for them are genuinely shocked that those healthcare workers are leaving the industry or finding jobs elsewhere. It's absolutely insane because you need these people to train the next generation of healthcare workers which isn't going to happen now because they're leaving.

eastbound 3y ago
That makes healthcare cheap, though. We have the same in France, doctors have quite a low pay (of course in the top of the locals, but not as much as even a startup, and startups don’t advance humanity), nurses have a really low pay, some can’t afford living nearby. But on the upside, I barely pay 26€ to see a doctor. It’s the heart of convincing people to work hard for very little. If I were the most gruesome capitalist ever, I’d be a socialist. The TikTok dances are nice, though.
- pas 3y ago
  why do you think startups don't advance humanity especially compared to doctors!? most doctors don't participate in clinical trials, they just do what they are told to do by protocols. (of course most startups fail, and they do whatever is hype at the time.)
  - eastbound 3y ago
    Everything is advancing humanity, then. Selling weapons might be seen as advancing humanity. Startups aren’t particularly human in average, neither in their goals nor internally. It’s just that, at the beginning of a new industry, all the low hanging fruits like “Register everyone in a big directory with photos”, “Make a video app where you can learn things” seem like advancing humanity, because it’s a leap forward. But they’re no better than in a mature industry, doing proper business. A doctor, a nurse talking with a dying person is advancing humanity. You, noticing a depressed man in the office; a kid talking to the bullied kid in class, that’s advancing humanity. No, Jira isn’t advancing humanity, no more than Carrefour negotiating rebates on vegetables against farmers.
    - pas 3y ago
      Just that there's a spectrum, and because most things are very close to zero (and because there's a lot of small positive things) it doesn't mean that everything is above zero :) And ... selling weapons might be positive might be negative. Selling weapons to defend against Russia might be positive right now. Selling weapons to dumbass US civilians who then can't keep it safe seems negative. How is talking to anyone dying actually advancing humanity? Hitting the brakes on the cult of meaningless clinging to life in hospitals would be some advance. Allowing people to say goodbye while they still can... Jira definitely is from hell, but when it was not this cruel cloud-crazy incumbent it was doing some things better than the alternatives back then. I'm not saying startups are good because they are small/new/risk-taking, but I'm trying to say that incumbents are usually bad because they have more monopolistic tendencies (than the startups that want of course also usually want to eat the market).
- groestl 3y ago
  > If I were the most gruesome capitalist ever, I’d be a socialist. Both models match to some extend (i.e. potential to make life hell for everyone), when all productive capital is allocated to a single company.
  - 8jef 3y ago
    Indeed. Capitalist: this pie is the whole world, and I own it - you want some, pay up front. Socialist: I want a piece of that pie, damn I helped you cooking it, only for scraps - you can't have it for yourself. Me: a whole universe subsist within and around that pie that nobody care about, let's enjoy that.
vidarh 3y ago
The UK has for a long time "solved" this by importing healthcare workers from abroad, contributing to exacerbating the same problem and driving up the average cost per staying healthcare worker for a whole range of third world countries... Can't blame the people coming here who see significantly better opportunities in the UK, but definitely can blame the politicians not doing enough to ensure enough are educated here and/or ensure they are treated well enough to stay in the jobs longer.
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
I'm going to guess Alberta. I don't live there, but my wife is Canadian and she has a few things to say about it...
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  ON, SK, and other Conservative Party-led provinces are seeing the same thing, or moves in that direction. Make the system shitty so that there is a justification to privatize. AB is just the most balls-out about it since Danielle Smith is basically a female Bill O'Reilly who got elected to Premier (aka Governor for the USA-ians). Boomers dying earlier than their parents, and stressing the system in large numbers, are also stretching these systems. Even if a NDP-led-double-down-on-healthcare approach there would be serious issues due to demographics.

mirekrusin 3y ago

He means they drive decisions based on some arbitrary, often flawed, short sighted, partial picture metrics (revenue, number of clicks, all kpis) forgetting that there are real people with ambitions, talents and feelings that are not accounted for behind it.

pavlov 3y ago

A lot of organizations operate as if they are made of headcount slots, and heads to fill those slots are some interchangeable commodity.

quantum_state 3y ago
I cannot agree more with this, especially for organizations with incompetent management…
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  are profits stable or increasing? stock going up? incompetence only matters so long as the company is doing badly. happy employees are tangential to successful companies.
ansmithz42 3y ago
The infamous "fungible resource".
Levitz 3y ago
Yeah people often are treated as a resource that happens to be human. Human resources, what a concept huh?
pdntspa 3y ago
This is what is taught in business school. Also why we are "human resources"
coldpie 3y ago
I was literally referred to as "a resource" by a big company client at a previous job. Like, "once your resource [i.e., me] is on site, let's...". This was years and years ago and it still stands out in my memory.
- brookst 3y ago
  I hear this a lot and it really doesn't bother me. It's just an abstraction over the concepts of employee, contractor, seniority, team, etc. One resource is roughly equal to one person, but can also be half time each from two people, so "person" doesn't work. It's a little odd to use the abstraction when you know exactly the person you're dealing with, but like any jargon, people who live it all day end up using when vernacular is called for (e.g. the electrical engineer who tells their spouse that the dishwasher's heating element has become too resistant).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lr4444lr 3y ago

Customer lock in, hubris about the superiority of their product or service, IP or reputational dominance in the industry... lots of reasons leadership can treat the people as expendable cogs who should either shape up in gratitude for their salary, or ship out.

dstroot 3y ago

One of the worst cognitive biases which humans suffer from is the belief that observations about individual people can be generalized. How much faulty thinking, including racism and sexism, stems from this simple error? An extension of this common mistake is thinking of people as interchangeable, or fungible, when planning work - pretending who does the work doesn’t matter. A pattern I've repeatedly seen is companies will plan out the next few quarters of work and then assign some number of people, one person for one quarter to a project, two people for three quarters to another, etc. This process enables executives to make decisions about costs, priorities and project funding. This works for it's purpose, however, the roadmap creation and review process perpetuates the fiction that people are interchangeable, that people can be generically abstracted over.

brookst 3y ago
> An extension of this common mistake is thinking of people as interchangeable, or fungible, when planning work - pretending who does the work doesn’t matter. I agree with your whole post, but there is a nuance here that's important. This fallacy becomes true in a project large enough to average out individual variance. If you need 5000 software engineers, you probably don't care about their individual traits (you might care about the selection process and aggregate traits, but that's another level up). So at a certain level of executive, this fallacy serves them well. And it probably serves their reports (who might manage 750 people) decently. But their reports, managing 150 people, hear the language and see the behaviors of their bosses and emulate this belief in fungibility, and it really breaks down at this scale. Even worse for the next levels down, who might manage 30 and 5 people respectively. Yet everyone who sits in at an important meeting of skip-levels and execs sees this model used for resourcing.

xwdv 3y ago

Organizations are built with people but often made of pure assets: machinery, software, capital, databases and datalakes, business rules make up the soul of the business. And eventually with GPT, you could feed tons of business data to the AI and the business itself will begin giving instructions for what markets to expand to, who to hire and fire, what changes need to be made, how to set prices. Organizations are not just people. Those days are a distant memory. The people will be the most replaceable components, due to their ephemeral nature.

rcthompson 3y ago

How many people do you interact directly with when ordering something from Amazon? (Not to pick on them specifically, they're just an example, hardly unique in this way.)