It matters how companies refer to the people who 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 as 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 required in such a stunningly oblivious depersonalization?
And resource isn't meant in the sense of something treasured. No, it is meant in the sense of a bulk commodity input to a process. The kind of input 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 body. We need 5 bodies for this project. Any bodies will do. Now i have competing dreams of bodiless heads and headless bodies floating around a ghostly cubescape.
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 the lack of a 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 lifeless jump to dropping people for labels and forgetting the people behind the labels. 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 a conflation occurs where people become perceived as the problem. Everything would get done better and faster if it wasn't for 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 domesticated dogs who have lost their weariness and hunting instinct, preferring instead to be fed and tended.
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.
6:42:35 AM 
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