What Are You Called

It matters how companies refer to the people that do the real work. Metaphor is destiny.

I've been called a head. A disturbing image of heads floating around the building always comes to mind. How do i type? Where did my body go? Shivers. Clearly without a body i don't need exercise, nutrition, medical care, or vacation. Strangely though having only a head would imply having a mind, but still we get treated has not having minds. Odd. We have a head count, but not a body count. Sometimes i worry the counts won't match. Cubes are like morgues so maybe...

I've been called a resource. For some reason this one bothers me the most. I had a manager email another manager, while CC'ing me, to ask if this resource could be used on a project. Can you imagine the narrow-scoping of mind that it would take to do this?

And resource isn't meant in the sense of something valuable that is treasured, it is meant in the sense of a bulk commodity input to a process. The kind of input that gets piled large outside a rusty manufacturing plant. Dump trucks load more when the pile gets low enough. Huge bulldozers move the pile around when it needs organizing. Nobody ever sees the resource enter the plant to be used, but somehow the pile empties anyway.

I've been called an ONTG (one neck to grab). This is so disgusting further comment is unnecessary.

I've been called a grunt. A respected friend who became a manager unselfconsciously called me and other workers grunts. He realized his audience and retracted, but we both understood. That is the view of management. Bodies to throw at bullets. Interchangeable. Undistinsguished. Unworthy of involving in any of those decision thingies.

I've been called an individual contributer. A VP said he didn't understand why someone would want to be an individual contributer, but some people do. He actually said this in front of a room of individual contributers (heads, resources, whatever). The obvious question though if you are not an individaul contributer, what the hell are you doing? Unsuprisingly this same manager was too busy to personally visit any of the people he managed.

One reason to like small companies and startups is that there doesn't seem to be the blinding need to label people. People can remain peers for longer, but as humans tend to form social hierarchies, it may always just be a matter of time.

Labeling arises out of the need to put people in lists. Lists like microsoft project, spreadsheets, budget projections, head count reports, org charts, building diagrams, etc. In a list you don't matter, what matters is the aspect of you that the list cares about.

It's a short jump to dropping people for labels and forgetting there are people behind the labels. And once you forget about the actual people the people become just another problem to be solved, a resource to be deployed and optimized. It's so much easier to deal with resources instead of people.

Eventually the people are perceived as the problem. Everything would get done better and faster if it wasn't for the stupid faulty resource cells in the spreadsheet.

Management becomes insular because they obviously only need to talk amongst themselves because resources have nothing to contribute. Resources do. Managers think. Or at least think they think. Having excluded any troublesome subject experts the need to think disappears altogether, like a dogs hunting instinct.

Once started this relationship is self-reinforcing. Resources gradually drop out of any loop of any importance. Resources are the problem. Bad resources miss schedules and bust budgets. Managers inevitably conclude more thinking by managers is the solution. Any problem is met with another level of centralized control by management.

Management as an institution is fundamentally a reversion to childhood. As a child you get to be concerned only about yourself. As a child you can count on your parents to bail you out of stupid decisions. Children make messes that others clean up. Children form cliques. Children cruel to those outside of the clique only associate with those in the clique.

Having had good managers makes having perennially childish management all the more painful. Consider the metaphors used in your organization. Consider having managers manage people and not gravitate responsibility for all technical issues to themselves. Consider having fewer lists.

My previous manager routinely referred to people as bodies (as in "Do you need any more bodies for your project?"). Like your reaction to head, this evoked images of horror.

The first time our company president came to our office, he talked for ten minutes about "applying resources" before I realized he meant us. I was young and naive then, and felt insulted, but I now know that resource is one of the kinder terms.

Being called "geeks", "hackers", "computer weenies", or "propeller-heads" is worse. A friend of mine who works for Unisys says that the series of commercials where Unisys employees are portrayed as having computer monitors for heads, and that they "Eat, sleep, and drink this stuff", was judged to be very offensive by those employees. The marketing people didn't understand why.

But then again, I've known lots of developers who use terms like "sales drones", "suits", "pointy-haired bosses", and "damagement" during meetings and in e-mails that include sales and management personnel. We can be just as insensitive as they can.

As most of the contribution at the top of this page proves

True or not, I think this paragraph is out of place. "Metaphor is destiny" seems to be the basic idea of the topic, but this psychoanalysis of managers weakens it by turning it into another "Workers good, managers bad!" piece.

If "metaphor is destiny" is the only idea here, and unsupported by independent evidence and argument, then it is a weak idea. Removing the justification would weaken the idea of this page til it were absurd. Institutions don't exist because of any disconnected "laws of human nature" or disconnected "ideas" or "metaphors". They arise because of concrete factors, because of concrete people doing concrete things. Management exists because of managers, and not vice versa.

So what we need is apage called MetaphorIsDestiny? where people can provide evidence and argument about that idea. That way this page can focus on the different ways companies refer to their staff.