15th Jul 2008 by Mark Turansky
I’m published, and I struck a nerve.
Filed under The JavaLobby (now java.dzone.com) asked to republish my article on human “resources.” I was happy to oblige!
http://java.dzone.com/articles/were-not-resources
I think the theme of the article touched on a strong undercurrent in the developer community. My blog post received more than 6k hits over the weekend, has the highest number of comments of all my articles, was republished on JavaLobby, Reddit, and others, and each of the publishers has received a bunch of comments on their repost.
There’s clearly something to the idea that we’re more than just “resources.” But this is not a new theme or idea.
Forrester Research published a similar article not long ago: http://blogs.forrester.com/appdev/2008/04/what-is-more-im.html Similarly, there are several links in the comments of my blog article echoing the same sentiment.
The times they are a-changin’.
This is such an easy concept to grok and an easier one to change. I suspect that more organizations will begin to rename their “Human Resources Department” to “Human Talent Department.” It’s definitely more PC and it’s a sign that organizations value the talent their employees provide more than they value the warm body in a cold seat. That is, unless you’re a government contractor, in which case you really do just want warm bodies.
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I received the most appropriate quote yesterday from an email newsletter:
“If a team is to reach its potential, each player must be willing to subordinate his personal goals to the good of the team.” — Bud Wilkinson, football coach
I know programmers love to stress their uniqueness, but the consequences are unfortunate. I babbled a bit more at my site:
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com/2008/07/resources-for-software-development.html
Paul.
Paul, it seems that you’re addressing an issue that’s orthogonal to the one being discussed by Mark. Mark’s not saying that software developers are irreplaceable or should act like prima donnas, but that there’s a real cost to swapping people in and out of projects and that no two people are exactly the same. When employers refer to employees (software developers or otherwise) as resources and assume that a task estimated by Employee A to take 2 days will take the same time for Employee B, they’re thinking of the employees as interchangeable. There’s a big difference between being replaceable and being interchangeable. In contrast, one of the appeals of cloud computing (particularly the Amazon EC2 flavor of it) is the ability to allocate 10 identical virtual machine resources, have them work on a problem for you for 8 hours and then just give them back to the pool. I think that Mark’s pointing out that we’re not like those virtual machines.
P.S. You’re not on firm ground with sports analogies, since there are too many easy counter-examples. Would you swap a linebacker for a kicker, a DH for a pitcher, or an offensive player for a goalie? They might be able to learn the skills necessary for the new positions, but it certainly wouldn’t be a seamless transition.
Great info - keep up the great work.
I am a lawyer specialising in picking up the pieces in failed and failing software implementations.
have long campaigned against the use of the term “resources” in software contracts. The term deceives the customer by (a) giving the impression that the implementation is primarily a mere mechanical process rather than the rendering of professional services; (b) hides “personnel risk” by conveying the assumption that all programmers are equally able and equally skilled in the use of the tool used for the development; (c) gives the impression that the speed of the development increases with the number of “resources”, while the opposite rule is ueually more true.
No lawyer would ever stand for being described as a “resource”. It would be a misdescription of the services being provided by the lawyer. Why then does a lawyer describe a programmer as a resource when drafting a contract. Probably because few lawyers, or for that matter business people generally, really understand what a programmer actually does, from day to day. If they only began to understand the plethora of problem solving, individual programming styles, and different intuitive thinking among programmers, they would at last begin to understand fully the risk and delay inherent in software implementations.
Robert
“double my salary and you can call me anything…”
Really, in poor countries, the most disgusting way of modern slavery is to focus on words instead of reality… people never earns how much they value and they will never do… basically because the goal of the exploiter is to continue to exploit
Doesn’t matter if a company put a big neon TALENT on the front door, if the salary of the people remains unchanged… quality of life, salary and security feelings are more important than words…