People are not fungible resources
"Fungible" means easily replaceable for use. For example, one cup of granulated sugar is almost exactly like any other cup of granulated sugar, and so, for any two cups of granulated sugar, either can be chosen without altering the use. A cup of granulated sugar is fungible.
Crude oil is (more or less) fungible - one barrel of crude oil is roughly equivalent to another.
I have been hearing IT managers refer to IT workers as "resources" for almost ten years. The language is deeply troubling because, eventually, we think as we talk. Hear it and speak it often enough in management meetings, and eventually, the brain adjusts and people really become (to the managers at least) resources.
Worse, people become fungible resources. The other troubling thing about the resources word is the implication (never stated) that resources are fungible - in other words, interchangeable. This unspoken assumption is manifestly false.
Take two Oracle DBAs, each with 15 years of experience, but different careers entirely. The will have an intersecting subset of knowledge common to both, but that intersecting subset depends on the two DBAs chosen. Almost all DBAs know what a table is, but how many know the exact details and causes of various wait events? (Never mind what a wait event is, it is technical)
The common subset between any two DBAs is in general different, happens at a much lower level than their current experience level (so, for example, both of them probably know everything a newbie DBA knows), and managers have no clear way of defining that level, or even what it should be. But, managers think they can do this.
Johnny Development DBA can carry on a conversation with George Physical DBA and both of them will understand 80% or more of what the other is saying. The rest would take either documentation, simple examples, or (better by far) real experience. Interchange them at their jobs and trouble would start happening right away. Both would apply mindsets and skill sets to their new jobs that are not applicable to the job, and both would immediately go into cognitive dissonance as their previous, highly-developed competencies evaporate. Been there, done that.
If you have ever been in a meeting with lots of eggheads arguing minutiae of technical details, you know even two team members doing the exact same kind of job can have wildly different notions about what to do. Managers have to knock their heads together to force a coherent plan of action.
This is one of the reasons eggheads are not allowed to talk to customers. Eggheads speak Martian, and customers are very simple people. Speaking Martian to a customer will make the customer's head explode. This is normally considered bad for business.
People are not fungible resources. They can learn. They are people, often doing very hard jobs under tight time constraints. It was the giant demands of the modern workplace that created these specialists in the first place. Those same market forces will eventually cause the same companies to lay these specialists off in droves and make them unemployable.
Add enough pressure, and character, rather than knowledge, becomes more important. Character, my friends, is where individual people differ from each other a lot. Treating people like replaceable parts in a machine - what kind of character is that?
Crude oil is (more or less) fungible - one barrel of crude oil is roughly equivalent to another.
I have been hearing IT managers refer to IT workers as "resources" for almost ten years. The language is deeply troubling because, eventually, we think as we talk. Hear it and speak it often enough in management meetings, and eventually, the brain adjusts and people really become (to the managers at least) resources.
Worse, people become fungible resources. The other troubling thing about the resources word is the implication (never stated) that resources are fungible - in other words, interchangeable. This unspoken assumption is manifestly false.
Take two Oracle DBAs, each with 15 years of experience, but different careers entirely. The will have an intersecting subset of knowledge common to both, but that intersecting subset depends on the two DBAs chosen. Almost all DBAs know what a table is, but how many know the exact details and causes of various wait events? (Never mind what a wait event is, it is technical)
The common subset between any two DBAs is in general different, happens at a much lower level than their current experience level (so, for example, both of them probably know everything a newbie DBA knows), and managers have no clear way of defining that level, or even what it should be. But, managers think they can do this.
Johnny Development DBA can carry on a conversation with George Physical DBA and both of them will understand 80% or more of what the other is saying. The rest would take either documentation, simple examples, or (better by far) real experience. Interchange them at their jobs and trouble would start happening right away. Both would apply mindsets and skill sets to their new jobs that are not applicable to the job, and both would immediately go into cognitive dissonance as their previous, highly-developed competencies evaporate. Been there, done that.
If you have ever been in a meeting with lots of eggheads arguing minutiae of technical details, you know even two team members doing the exact same kind of job can have wildly different notions about what to do. Managers have to knock their heads together to force a coherent plan of action.
This is one of the reasons eggheads are not allowed to talk to customers. Eggheads speak Martian, and customers are very simple people. Speaking Martian to a customer will make the customer's head explode. This is normally considered bad for business.
People are not fungible resources. They can learn. They are people, often doing very hard jobs under tight time constraints. It was the giant demands of the modern workplace that created these specialists in the first place. Those same market forces will eventually cause the same companies to lay these specialists off in droves and make them unemployable.
Add enough pressure, and character, rather than knowledge, becomes more important. Character, my friends, is where individual people differ from each other a lot. Treating people like replaceable parts in a machine - what kind of character is that?
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