It's completely disingenuous to conflate 1) referring to someone by the purpose for which you're interacting with them (e.g. "the barrista who is making me coffee," versus "Suzie, who is working at Starbucks now but is going to really make it big with her one-act four-hour one-woman play") and 2) using generic and insulting terms (e.g. "the telephone repairman," versus "the little shit").

"Resources" may be a terrible, insulting term. But the argument against it also applies to referring to them as "programmers" (which you did in your last sentence) rather than naming them one by one, talking about their favorite IDE and language, and their reasons for working on that particular program.

I notice you also refer to 'vendors' and 'a boss'. There would be a huge amount of wasted verbiage if you told me which vendors, which boss, what the vendor does on weekends, and how much the boss loves to fish. For the purpose of your story, that doesn't matter -- for the purpose of discussing programmers, the extraneous stuff is not important.