Do organizations really pretend they are not made of people? How/when?
incompetence only matters so long as the company is doing badly. happy employees are tangential to successful companies.
Human resources, what a concept huh?
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).
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 province in Canada has treated healthcare workers like absolute shit and now the leaders and the people who voted for them are genuinely shocked that those healthcare workers are leaving the industry or finding jobs elsewhere.
It's absolutely insane because you need these people to train the next generation of healthcare workers which isn't going to happen now because they're leaving.
It’s the heart of convincing people to work hard for very little. If I were the most gruesome capitalist ever, I’d be a socialist. The TikTok dances are nice, though.
most doctors don't participate in clinical trials, they just do what they are told to do by protocols.
(of course most startups fail, and they do whatever is hype at the time.)
Startups aren’t particularly human in average, neither in their goals nor internally.
It’s just that, at the beginning of a new industry, all the low hanging fruits like “Register everyone in a big directory with photos”, “Make a video app where you can learn things” seem like advancing humanity, because it’s a leap forward. But they’re no better than in a mature industry, doing proper business.
A doctor, a nurse talking with a dying person is advancing humanity. You, noticing a depressed man in the office; a kid talking to the bullied kid in class, that’s advancing humanity.
No, Jira isn’t advancing humanity, no more than Carrefour negotiating rebates on vegetables against farmers.
And ... selling weapons might be positive might be negative. Selling weapons to defend against Russia might be positive right now. Selling weapons to dumbass US civilians who then can't keep it safe seems negative.
How is talking to anyone dying actually advancing humanity? Hitting the brakes on the cult of meaningless clinging to life in hospitals would be some advance. Allowing people to say goodbye while they still can...
Jira definitely is from hell, but when it was not this cruel cloud-crazy incumbent it was doing some things better than the alternatives back then.
I'm not saying startups are good because they are small/new/risk-taking, but I'm trying to say that incumbents are usually bad because they have more monopolistic tendencies (than the startups that want of course also usually want to eat the market).
Both models match to some extend (i.e. potential to make life hell for everyone), when all productive capital is allocated to a single company.
Make the system shitty so that there is a justification to privatize. AB is just the most balls-out about it since Danielle Smith is basically a female Bill O'Reilly who got elected to Premier (aka Governor for the USA-ians).
Boomers dying earlier than their parents, and stressing the system in large numbers, are also stretching these systems. Even if a NDP-led-double-down-on-healthcare approach there would be serious issues due to demographics.
A pattern I've repeatedly seen is companies will plan out the next few quarters of work and then assign some number of people, one person for one quarter to a project, two people for three quarters to another, etc. This process enables executives to make decisions about costs, priorities and project funding. This works for it's purpose, however, the roadmap creation and review process perpetuates the fiction that people are interchangeable, that people can be generically abstracted over.
I agree with your whole post, but there is a nuance here that's important. This fallacy becomes true in a project large enough to average out individual variance. If you need 5000 software engineers, you probably don't care about their individual traits (you might care about the selection process and aggregate traits, but that's another level up).
So at a certain level of executive, this fallacy serves them well. And it probably serves their reports (who might manage 750 people) decently. But their reports, managing 150 people, hear the language and see the behaviors of their bosses and emulate this belief in fungibility, and it really breaks down at this scale. Even worse for the next levels down, who might manage 30 and 5 people respectively. Yet everyone who sits in at an important meeting of skip-levels and execs sees this model used for resourcing.
Organizations are not just people. Those days are a distant memory. The people will be the most replaceable components, due to their ephemeral nature.