Resource: Did you mean person?

I’m on a mission against calling people “resources”. It’s endemic. And it needs to stop.

Why?

First up, let’s be more human at work. A whiteboard pen is a resource. A chair is a resource. An EC2 instance is a resource. A person is a person. The whiteboard pen doesn’t spend any time wondering why it does it’s job. A chair doesn’t worry about how it’s current assignment is going to help it’s career. And an EC2 instance doens’t need to worry about a kid needing to be picked up from nursery in an emergency.

Secondly, resource thinking is project thinking. It implies a thing needed to do a job. And that the job will be done. In product, the job is never done.

Finally, it suggests a fungibility that isn’t true in “knowledge work”. The clue is in the name: knowledge. The acquisition of product specific knowledge is a time consuming process. Even on product teams that have invested in the developer onboarding experience it is a slow ramp to full confidence and efficiency.