I cannot agree more with this, especially for organizations with incompetent management…

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.

The infamous "fungible resource".

Yeah people often are treated as a resource that happens to be human.

Human resources, what a concept huh?

This is what is taught in business school. Also why we are "human resources"

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.

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).

> people who live it all day end up using when vernacular is called for

I think it's probably that, yeah. Just felt like a very de-humanizing label, for someone who isn't used to that world.

Beep boop, I am resource, here to provide service until ready for replacement with like kind, boop beep.

My favourite corporate dystopian term that has popped up because of that is "body lending"