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Why does HR language sound so dehumanizing? I mean terms like 'terminating employees' 'bus factor'
by MichaelMoser123 3y ago
Why does HR language sound so dehumanizing? I mean terms like 'terminating employees' 'bus factor'
- ironmagma 3y agoIt’s to make you forget that your coworkers are people instead of “resources” and are being “terminated” instead of “quitting.”
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoI'm fully aware that they're people. That doesn't mean I'm obligated to stick up for them. If they're good, I would stick up for them even if they were a hyena.
- MichaelMoser123 3y agobut then one would need to invest lots of effort into improving team synergy and collaboration at the workplace. Isn't that a bit of a paradox?
- ironmagma 3y agoNever assume companies (or people for that matter) act in their overall best interest.
- t-writescode 3y agoI don't believe Bus Factor was invented by an HR person. I believe it was invented by ... probably an engineer, actually as a reflection of "something irreversible". A person who gets married or wins the lottery might be able to be contacted to help; but, if they're dead or in a coma, there's no communication. It's a way of putting weight into something that a company might actually understand.
- oxygen_crisis 3y agoIt's definitely not HR language, they are especially squeamish about evoking gruesome images like a person being run down in the street by a bus. Wikipedia's sources suggest it's a metaphor conjured by developers, as you suggested: > An early instance of this sort of query was when Michael McLay publicly asked, in 1994, what would happen to the Python language if Guido van Rossum were to be hit by a bus. > "Truck number" was already a recurring concept in the Organizational Patterns [of agile software development] book published in 2004, itself an evolution of the work published in the first book of the Pattern Languages of Program Design series in 1995, which was the publication record of the first Pattern Languages of Programs conference in August 1994, where it was referenced in patterns including Solo Virtuoso. ... It was seen in engineering by 2003, and the Debian project in 2005.
- slyall 3y agoI always got the impression it was actually quite neutral. One day the employee was gone due to an unexpected external force. Neither the employee's nor employer's fault. It is a lot less neutral to say an employee was "fired" or "quit"
- oxygen_crisis 3y agoIt's distastefully ghoulish and trivializes the trauma of people who have lost loved ones to vehicle accidents. For anyone who hasn't led a wonderfully sheltered life that lets them conceptualize the situation as if it were something out of a "Looney Tunes" cartoon, it's going to evoke imagery of pools of blood and viscera on asphalt. Not the kind of mentality you'd usually expect from an HR department.
- cultureswitch 3y agoStill more humane than "terminated"
- MichaelMoser123 3y agomaybe not invented by an HR person, but they seem to have adopted this expression. Do you agree?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- markdown 3y agoI first heard 'bus factor' used in an open source community (Joomla) around two decades ago. Not a corporate HR person in sight.
- ht_th 3y agoIt starts with the name "human resources". All HR departments I worked with treated employees as resources rather than humans. Bureaucracy all the way, with a thin veneer of human connection that'd be gone the time you walked out of HR's offices.
- cdchn 3y agoSame, the very term "human resources" feels dehumanizing.
- itronitron 3y agoI thought bus factor was a measure of employee throughput, like an IO bus, but it turns out the macabre definition is the correct one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
- cdchn 3y agoI always thought the phrase "human resources" was itself intensely dehumanizing.