rdn32

One criticism of contemporary life is the tendency to treat everything, and everyone, as a resource to be optimized and exploited. This was part of the idea behind Ian Bogost’s satire on Zynga-style social games, Cow Clicker:

In social games, friends aren’t really friends; they are mere resources. And not just resources for the player, but also for the game developer, who relies on insipid, “viral” aspects of a design to make a system replicate.

Now, it’s one thing to treat someone like a resource, but it’s something else to use that sort of language about someone with their knowledge, even to their face. Yet it happens. It really is quite bizarre.

I’ve worked for a number of different company’s over the years. This has some drawbacks—I have more pension plans than I would ideally like—but it isn’t that big a deal: realistically, the days of a job for life are long-since gone. And, on the plus side, it’s interesting to compare and contrast my different experiences.

One thing I’ve been lucky about is that I’ve generally managed to avoid being at the sharp end of bullshit management-speak—in particular the demeaning language that gets used for describing employees.

That’s not to say I’ve had no exposure. I once worked in the Cambridge office of a multinational software company where employees were called “headcount”. However, the senior management were all safely on the other side of the Atlantic, so there wasn’t any great need to take that sort of thing very seriously. (“All hands” company meetings happened via conference calls: people in the Cambridge office openly played buzzword bingo.)

I got more interested in the word “resource” when at a start-up. One of the co-founders, a software developer by background, announced that we were going to get “some executive resource”. There was something about the way he said this. I wouldn’t call it contempt, but the impression it created wasn’t “We need someone to lead us into the future.” It was more like “I guess we could do with one of those guys to keep the investors happy.”

I’ve only worked at one company, and it was a software company, where the developers were referred to as “resource”. Moreover, only the developers were called this. Well, sometimes the QA people were called “test resource”. But I never, for example, heard anyone talk about “project management resource”.

One thing that companies often say is “People are our most valuable asset.” Most people have heard that one. A newer development is to call recruitment “talent acquisition”. The irony here is that users of this kind of language assume that people will be flattered by being described as “valuable”, or as “talent”, rather than notice the governing metaphor.

Now, at this point it could be objected that I’m reading too much significance into these phrases. People use clichés like this unthinkingly; they don’t literally believe that they own their underlings’ souls.

Well, perhaps they don’t, but they sometimes act like they do. Companies try to claim all sorts of powers with respect to their employees, and it is very hard for an individual to know what is actually enforceable. At one company I was asked to sign a new contract that, in exchange for getting an extra day of holiday, would have given them the right “given reasonable notice” to search my house. (I didn’t sign.)

Another point to consider is that the unthinking use of clichés itself may send a message, and not a particularly good one. Sounding like the boss from Dilbert ought to be a fairly big clue. But then, consider this quote about Apple’s dark days prior to Steve Jobs’ return:

The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.

Not that I would have wanted to work for that arsehole Steve Jobs, mind you.