While in Washington DC for Agile 2007 a group of us visited the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.
The line "No Country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources" quoted on one of the inscriptions entertained us.
The use of the phrase 'human resources' had attracted our attention. The concept of developers often being treated as nothing but resources to be swapped about had been raised many times during the conference.
From Wikipedia:
In the very narrow context of corporate "human resources", there is a contrasting pull to reflect and require workplace diversity that echoes the diversity of a global customer base. Foreign language and culture skills, ingenuity, humor, and careful listening, are examples of traits that such programs typically require. It would appear that these evidence a general shift to the human capital point of view, and an acknowledgment that human beings do contribute much more to a productive enterprise than "work": they bring their character, their ethics, their creativity, their social connections, and in some cases even their pets and children, and alter the character of a workplace. The term corporate culture is used to characterize such processes.
The traditional but extremely narrow context of hiring, firing, and job description is considered a 20th century anachronism. Most corporate organizations that compete in the modern global economy have adopted a view of human capital that mirrors the modern consensus as above. Some of these, in turn, deprecate the term "human resources" as useless.
I have yet to work out why the phrase "No Country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human capital" would be any more preferable.
