We need to talk about the R-word.

Not that one. I mean “resources.” That cold, clinical label slapped onto actual human beings. You know—the ones solving complex problems, debugging chaos, sharing snacks, and occasionally crying in the bathroom between meetings. Those “resources.”

Let me be clear: I am not a resource.

I’m a human being. I have skills, preferences, bad hair days, great ideas, and an allergy to being referred to like a printer cartridge.

Somewhere along the way, corporate culture started talking like Gantt charts had feelings and Jenkins jobs had coffee breaks. We started asking for “more front-end resources” or complaining that “resources are at capacity.” Gross.

Scrum and Agile, on the other hand, remind us that people—not abstract labor units—are the heartbeat of successful teams. Collaboration. Interaction. Individuals over processes and tools. Sound familiar?

When you say “resource,” I hear:

• “You’re interchangeable.”
• “You don’t have agency.”
• “I didn’t bother to learn your name.”

Try this instead:

• “Developer” (wild, I know)
• “Teammate”
• “Engineer”
• “Designer”
• Or, hear me out—my actual name.

When we reduce people to resources, we strip away their creative spark, their context, and their humanity. It’s demotivating, and worse, it’s dangerous. It reinforces a culture of burnout, devalues individual contributions, and turns teams into task factories.

So I’ve removed “resource” from my vocabulary (along with “low-hanging fruit,” but that’s another post 😉). And I invite you to do the same.

Here’s your user story:

As a thoughtful team member, I want to refer to my coworkers as actual people, so that we can build a culture of respect, empowerment, and high performance.

Let’s retire the term “resource” for good. Save it for the cloud credits and AWS instances. Your people deserve better.