Orthogonal nit, you tripped over one of my soapboxes: "employ a new resource".
People are not resources, like a vein of coal. They are individual. Which was your point. But using the word "resource" instead of "person" perpetuates bad ideas.
People are not resources, like a vein of coal. They are individual. Which was your point. But using the word "resource" instead of "person" perpetuates bad ideas.
It's hard for a lot of people on here to imagine dealing with 100k+ other coworkers but at a point you oftentimes have to abstract away what makes people human to work in most large corporations. I'm not advocating that this is correct, but much like slavery and flat world theory, I hope this becomes outdated and struck out as both completely ineffective from a business standpoint as well as unconscionable.
Really? Seems like most people describe it these days as a craft.
> Assembly lines reproduce a product model in volume.
Right, and software development is the process of building the assembly line.
> People forget that developing the model takes loads of time from designers and engineers.
But they know design an assembly line for a new task takes loads of time from designers and engineers...
> Software developers are the designer, engineer, and assembler all at once.
You can break of that work if you are working on a project of sufficient scale.
It's more like the process for developing the prototype.
Working myself for a company of 150K+ employees, I can confirm this is totally true.
I hate a lot of high-level business speak like "resources", but what I've come to realize is that one cannot think of 150K people as individuals. It's too much for the human mind. If you see this as an indictment of large corporations, I wouldn't blame you. Just realize it's a reality of operating inside them.
A resource isn't intrinsically a fungible commodity (when they are, we call them "commodities" ;-); often they are unique. The common trait of resources from a businesses perspective is that they are valuable to the business. Sure, I'd like to think I have more significance to this world as a person, but the day my employer doesn't see me as valuable is the day I start sending my resume around...
The other way to look at it is that while employees are individuals, they all take a paycheck. So, on the cost side, employees are all just different sized paychecks. When you are looking to assign employees to a task, you absolutely think about which individuals could/should be dong what, but before that, there is a decision about how much in the way of paychecks, if any, you ought to burning on that work. That first decision has little to do with the individuals involved.
A person is not a resource outside of contexts in which chattel slavery exists. Labor is a resource, of which persons -- laborers (whether independent contractors or employees) -- are contracted suppliers, not units.
This dehumanizing confusion of supplier with the resource they supply seems to only happen with labor.
I have a hard time fathoming how it is dehumanizing to suggest that labour from one person is not the same as labour from another.
Your reference to chattel inspired me. Consider the cow. Cows are resources. There are a ton of rules about what one can and cannot do with cows, but businesses still think of the "cow" as their resource, and "beef" and "milk" as some of the value they get from the resource.
Now, to your point on slavery, the rules for what you can and cannot do to people are very different from cattle. Of course, slavery is pretty irrelevant to whether someone is considered fungible (owning people is horrible, but it doesn't change whether they are interchangeable or not).
In practice resources are often suppliers and often the value the business extracts from them are provided under contract or at least a generalized regulatory framework. You are again confusing properties of certain kinds of resources with properties of resources in general.
Labour is very much how you marshall your "people" resources. It's a far more impersonal window through which to view people's relationships with businesses.
> Labor is a resource, of which persons -- laborers (whether independent contractors or employees) -- are contracted suppliers, not units.
Check out the definition of a "resource". It's the asset you draw upon to accomplish something.
Strictly speaking, the real "resource" is the employment or contract with the person, not the labour. However, thinking in those terms is terribly impersonal and not terribly useful for reasoning about a business (outside of legal disputes); in reality the person(s) under a contract correlate with suitability, outcomes, etc. a heck of a lot more than the contracts themselves. So what you really think in terms of are the people, not the contracts.