Are employees interchangeable parts?

[duncan drennan]

Are employees interchangeable parts? From a top level management perspective I would guess that we want to be able to think that they are, but does that degrade the value of our employees?

Paul Graham is actually writing about programming and solving problems, but this part jumped out at me,

Even more striking are the number of officially sanctioned projects that manage to do all eight things wrong. In fact, if you look at the way software gets written in most organizations, it's almost as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong. In a sense, they are. One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable. And that's what programs are: ideas.

It's not merely true that organizations dislike the idea of depending on individual genius, it's a tautology. It's part of the definition of an organization not to. Of our current concept of an organization, at least.

Maybe we could define a new kind of organization that combined the efforts of individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable. Arguably a market is such a form of organization, though it may be more accurate to describe a market as a degenerate case�as what you get by default when organization isn't possible.

Read the full essay by Paul Graham

To me this is a question of firstly how we treat people (i.e. are you a person or just a number that can be replaced), and also how we value their contribution. It is more about our mindset towards people.

If you think that people are interchangeable (and therefore treat them that way), do you degrade the morale of your workforce?