people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources
Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and desperately needs to end.
It really got my blood boiling and I've said something very similar to: "No we don't have a resource on the call, we have engineers, colleagues, employees, humans and friends on this call. Resources are air, water, memory, cpu and time, please don't call people like that". This followed by silence, and a lot of red faces.
Couple of weeks later, had a talk with my manager who is a true and true programmer I really respect. And then he says something with that "resource" referring to our team members...
I have experience across various industries, and many professions think very highly of themselves. But over here I have seen the working population be so easily manipulated, self-effacing, and self-abnegating. Most of the time bad managers just say "jump!" and engineers just ask "how high?".
The thing they kept saying was "We'll run it through the machine." Meaning "We'll hand that off to our software team and have them complete it." Of course today, the one who stayed in tech might be salivating about running software requirements through an actual machine to produce code.
You can keep calling yourself whatever you like, or more to say, swallow whatever little pride you still have. But I don't subscribe to that and I won't be called a tool/object/resource in my presence.
> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product
Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.
It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.
As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.
The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.