Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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At my company managers have started referring to engineers as "resources". I think it reflects the attitude towards the workers. An engineer is just a number on a spreadsheet and there is no difference between them. If something goes wrong you just hire more resources as cheaply as you can.

"I bought my boss two copies of The Mythical Man Month so that he could read it twice as fast." - @rkoutnik

https://twitter.com/RichRogersIoT/status/864963914483855360

When I was a lad there was a bit of advice when interviewing called the Dilbert Index. When they are walking you through the building for your interview, check out how many Dilbert cartoons people have posted in their cubes. I believe the advice went on to say that if you see more than 2 you should be worried, but maybe it was a higher number.

I'm starting to believe there's a similar rule for how many copies of MMM you see on the bookshelf. I've seen as many as 5 stacked together, and that place was whackadoodle.

My own theory is that the morale of a workplace is inversely proportional to the number of Dilbert strips hung on the cube walls.

I use the Dilbert-o-Meter as a measure of how bad the job is once you're actually in it - how many Dilbert cartoons do you witness play out in real life exactly as in the strip. I had this happen in my first job out of university, watching strip after strip happen in front of me without any irony. I lasted three months in that job before I quit.

I now use the same metric to decide when to quit a job and move on. I'm now at a startup, and keeping a close eye on its inevitable transformation...

Somebody once told me in a meeting: "The company was going to deliver their presentation, but the resource had a baby."

We really need to end this craziness.

I'm curious if it has coincided with things going downhill at your company? It seems like this is in general a red flag, but I only worked one place that they referred to people as resources.

It was a terrible place to work if you cared about what you did at all as you never got to finish anything. They shuffled you around like cards, different teams, different buildings, different projects, basically rearranged things based on the whims of those currently with the clout as a way for them to increase their clout.

It's more prevalent at the IT department and they are a complete disaster. Boatloads of architects and managers not doing any work but farming everything to offshore developers. I think in my department it started with the opening of an office in India.

A resource is someone who rewrites your source.

I wonder what that tells us about the purpose of the Human Resources department....

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