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Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

Why does HR language sound so dehumanizing? I mean terms like 'terminating employees' 'bus factor'

I don't believe Bus Factor was invented by an HR person. I believe it was invented by ... probably an engineer, actually as a reflection of "something irreversible". A person who gets married or wins the lottery might be able to be contacted to help; but, if they're dead or in a coma, there's no communication. It's a way of putting weight into something that a company might actually understand.

It's definitely not HR language, they are especially squeamish about evoking gruesome images like a person being run down in the street by a bus.

Wikipedia's sources suggest it's a metaphor conjured by developers, as you suggested:

> An early instance of this sort of query was when Michael McLay publicly asked, in 1994, what would happen to the Python language if Guido van Rossum were to be hit by a bus.

> "Truck number" was already a recurring concept in the Organizational Patterns [of agile software development] book published in 2004, itself an evolution of the work published in the first book of the Pattern Languages of Program Design series in 1995, which was the publication record of the first Pattern Languages of Programs conference in August 1994, where it was referenced in patterns including Solo Virtuoso. ... It was seen in engineering by 2003, and the Debian project in 2005.

I always got the impression it was actually quite neutral. One day the employee was gone due to an unexpected external force. Neither the employee's nor employer's fault.

It is a lot less neutral to say an employee was "fired" or "quit"

It's distastefully ghoulish and trivializes the trauma of people who have lost loved ones to vehicle accidents.

For anyone who hasn't led a wonderfully sheltered life that lets them conceptualize the situation as if it were something out of a "Looney Tunes" cartoon, it's going to evoke imagery of pools of blood and viscera on asphalt.

Not the kind of mentality you'd usually expect from an HR department.

Still more humane than "terminated"

maybe not invented by an HR person, but they seem to have adopted this expression. Do you agree?

It starts with the name "human resources". All HR departments I worked with treated employees as resources rather than humans. Bureaucracy all the way, with a thin veneer of human connection that'd be gone the time you walked out of HR's offices.

Same, the very term "human resources" feels dehumanizing.

It’s to make you forget that your coworkers are people instead of “resources” and are being “terminated” instead of “quitting.”

I'm fully aware that they're people. That doesn't mean I'm obligated to stick up for them. If they're good, I would stick up for them even if they were a hyena.

but then one would need to invest lots of effort into improving team synergy and collaboration at the workplace. Isn't that a bit of a paradox?

Never assume companies (or people for that matter) act in their overall best interest.

I first heard 'bus factor' used in an open source community (Joomla) around two decades ago. Not a corporate HR person in sight.

I thought bus factor was a measure of employee throughput, like an IO bus, but it turns out the macabre definition is the correct one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

I always thought the phrase "human resources" was itself intensely dehumanizing.

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