Small Victories on the Path to Humanity

In the middle of a meeting today, a small group, just a couple of us I had one of those “Doing my part” happy-dance moments.  We were talking about the staffing needed for a particular project, understanding the availability.  And one of the attendees said something about how many people we need.  People.  Yes, People.

If you’ve been in this business very long, you know that sizing projects with people is something of a rarity in most parts.   Projects get staffed with resources.  As dehumanizing a term as ever existed.   Resources are managed like office supplies, with counts of how many pads of paper or pens or binder clips are needed per month to keep the notebooks humming.  Resources are managed like reusable grocery bags, stuffed and emptied at the pleasure of someone, then tossed in the back of the car for the next shopping trip need.  Resources are managed by spreadsheet, where some bean counter assesses how many board-feet per quarter-acre, and what sort of Resource Management (I’ve even seen this term applied to people managers!) is required to get the most value from this renewable resource sector after it’s been thinned or clearcut.

Those thinnings or clearcuts are called layoffs or RIFs or WFRs and are done with all the heart and soul of a forestry resource management plan or office supply spreadsheet when you start calling people “resources.”  Much easier to stomach than laying off real people with real lives and real families. Resources are nameless and faceless and so “safe” to think about abstractly.  Even if they’ve been to your house or helped you move.

My rule of thumb is very simple: If I see you in the coffee room and I know your first name, know that you have a newborn twins or a new car at home, have met your partner, know that you have a kid off at college, that you acted in a theater guild production over the weekend or just came back from a trip and showed me the pictures (I always love vacation pictures :)) you are most decidedly not a resource to me.  You might be very helpful, but you’re a person, a person with hopes and dreams and ambitions and things you find fun and things you procrastinate on and things that you gut through.  And I will treat you as such, because I work with people and that’s incredibly important to me – acknowledging our common humanity.

If I worked at a big company and met with the CEO in the coffee room, I am content to be a “resource” from her perspective.  I wouldn’t be asking her how her  weekend was, or that new car that she bought, or whether the new baby was keeping her up at night.  Instead, our coffee-room chatter would be a bit more formal (I’m rarely fully formal), about industry trends and directions, company initiatives, or even how fast the parking lot fills up in the morning.

Besides, I will forever be on record for saying and with apologies to Mr. T., “My momma didn’t raise no resources.“

I’ve been fighting this battle for years, always using “people” in my own speech and answering back with “people” when other folks ask me if there are any resources in my area that could be applied to a particular project need.  Not rudely, but in the same way that I always lead my examples with a female pronoun/name first (“first the sysadmin does this, then she does that), then the next example is male, and I alternate, and I substitute person-hours for man-hours.  Use any of these and dollars to donuts, my next time speaking comes back with conversation that includes s/resources/people/g and s/he/she/g and s/man hours/person hours/g .  That’s just the way I roll.

Mostly though, it’s not been making much progress.  Between Microsoft Project’s use of “resource” to describe the person working on a task (bleargh) and the culture of resource that surrounds me, it’s hard to effect a change.

But when one of the folks in the meeting used the word “people” rather than resource when discussing how we’d do the work we were discussing, and pointed it out and that he was doing it based on my history of trying to move the needle back to working with humans with hopes and dreams, well, it made me very, very happy.  And when the other person in the meeting heard the discussion, she picked up on the distinction too.  Dare I hope for another footsolder in the battle against dehumanization?

In one small corner of the software developer universe, humans are coming back!  People. Not Resources.

Thanks, folks, for making my day and for explicitly letting me know that (at least at that moment) I’ve made the world a bit better of a place for people, not resources.