Dawn Olsen thinks Human Resources is an oxymoron – I’m inclined to agree. Back in the Elder Days when Men were Men and beer was one-and-six a pint, “Human Resources” was called “Personnel”, implying that employees were actually people, rather than numbers in a spreadsheet
The Gline has a long article recalling his experiences being laid off. Because his permalinks seem to be broken (Blogger archiving playing silly buggers again, in all probability), I’m quoting the best bits here:
It wasn’t being fired that I minded. I’ve lost jobs before and I probably will again. What I hated was the pencil-nosed officiousness of it all, the way we were being treated as just so much rubbish to be dumped somewhere and forgotten. I had a talk with my former boss about the whole thing, and I said that while I didn’t believe in paranoid conspiracies, I wondered if there was something to the fact that this sort of corporate b.s. could be traced directly to the rise of the business management degree. He agreed: if you give people the business degree as a substitute for arts or sciences degrees, and tacitly condone the idea that you don’t have to be curious about your world or even particularly giving towards it to get by, then you can more easily do things like fire forty people more or less on a whim without blinking. You can see people more easily as “resources” or “personnel”, things to be slotted out and interchanged with each other the way we stick pegs into a Lite Brite board. None of this should be particularly surprising; it’s something I think we all tacitly know. But there’s no open condemnation of it, because the business administration degree is, well, good business for universities, which now charge ever-more extortionistic tuition without passing on any of that money to their professors. Where does the money go? To the companies that do the on-campus management; to the administrators and to the third-party people who make money on campus selling books. Certainly not to the people who do the teaching.
I was sick of the whole “Franklin Plan-et” mentality long before any of this happened to me, but once it actually happened, I was doubly sick of it. Corporate culture is ugly because it hides its nihilism and soullessness behind a welter of nice-sounding words, because it has no sense of history other than the last annual report, because it is not ultimately accountable to anything. Don’t quote Adam Smith at me as a defense of all of this, either, because Smith was talking about independent craft houses and merchants, not massive conglomerates that waste billions of dollars in senseless, unproductive mergers.
Ah, mergers. I worked for a software house producing industrial plant maintenance software for many years. Although this was itself a product of a merger it was still a pretty decent company to work for. Then it merged with it’s principle competitor, and everything went pear-shaped. I was finally laid off when they shut down their UK development wing, and wasn’t prepared to relocate to an American suburban sprawl resembling Bracknell on steroids, where it was completely impossible to live without a car.
The Gline gives an early warning sign when things are going wrong:
One of the first signs of the Creeping Corporate Crud was actually something that had happened long before this first layoff wave: the introduction of Lotus Notes. Notes is quite possibly the biggest scam, the most appalling con job I have ever seen — a tricked-up database masquerading as an email client. It’s unintuitive, cantankerous, crashes when you sneeze at it, is loaded with stupid annoyances masquerading as features, and was a wretched pain to retrain on. The simplest things, like forwarding messages with edited content, were no longer possible. Everyone hated the program and when the lady came around to ask us about it, I gave her a solid earful about how much the program stunk on ice. “I don’t care about collaborative databases,” I told her — something they had been crowing about since they installed the program on our machines, and something which NO ONE used, because it was too damn difficult to figure out. “I just want my email.” Our complaints went unheeded. Notes was there to stay until we were all unceremoniously booted two years later.
Hmm. That sounds depressingly familiar too…