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Comment by elboru | Hacker News Reader

> From those big IT companies who treats employees as resources.

I've worked in those companies, they do treat employees as resources. I was amazed how executives, RH and even Project Managers refered to developers literally as "resources", example: "We are happy to announce we have five new resources in project X".

No one seemed to care, that mentality was just sad.

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The best response to people calling individual contributors "resources" is to politely correct them. If the abusive terminology continues, then the "resources" have the right to "return the favor" by setting the standard in the culture of referring to managers as "overhead" (e.g. "I should ask my 'overhead' if I really need to attend that stupid meeting. I might be able to dodge it so we can get this new feature checked in.")

Problem is large orgs are political by nature. If you acted that way chances are you'd be sidelined into some dead end thing, given all the crap work, or even laid off as "not a good fit" or something. If you were the kind of person who didn't care about those possibilities then you might as well be working for a small company where you'd have a lot more fun... which is a backward way of saying that the people who work at large corps often do value security and stability and do care about keeping their jobs.

Personally I'm just trying to figure out where I can get the quote "Make game of that which makes as much of thee" tattooed on my body.

I once had a lead engineer refer to me as a "resource" during a meeting while I was in the room. As in, my boss was having a discussion with a senior manager and pointed at me, referring to me as "that resource."

That lead engineer was later promoted to VP...

Well, at least they're honest about it. It's a shame the people under can't be as open.

My boss has often used the term ressources when talking about me and my collegue, usually saying that she has only two ressources to work on the current project. But since it's usually when pushing back against more demands of the sales people, I don't mind.

Although I would be offended (and weirded out) too, is it possible it's a quirk of geographical variation in language? Resources are by definition valuable, after all.

When you deal with enough people, this just becomes a fact no matter where you are. In big companies, this happens.

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