Stephan Schmidt, CTO Coach - November 29, 2024
Pets and Cattle in HR
TL;DR: Cloud infrastructure shifted from treating servers as unique "pets" to replaceable "cattle" for scale—but applying this same mentality to employees through standardized HR processes and productivity metrics dehumanizes teams, and small startups should resist imitating tech giants by continuing to treat people as individuals, not interchangeable resources.
In DevOps with the introduction of clouds, we shifted from treating servers as pets to servers as cattle:
“The “Pets” service model describes carefully tended servers that are lovingly nurtured and given names like they were faithful family pets. Zeus, Apollo, Athena et al are well cared for. [..] Cattle on the other hand aren’t afforded quite the same loving attention [..] This service model typically tags servers like svr01 svr02 svr03”
Pets and cattle - because we had three servers in the old days and have hundreds of servers in today’s landscape.
Pets and cattle. We have the same in HR in growing companies. You can either treat employees as pets, with names, as individuals. Or you can treat people like cattle with numbers.
With everyone in one room, everyone is a pet. In small companies and small startups people are treated as individual humans by HR. But when you grow, people think it is no longer cost-effective to treat employees as individuals. To take the effort to hand hold every individual. In a growing company the company no longer knows it’s employees. The company no longer trusts managers, because it has too many, to manage people individually. This gives rise to policies, HR processes, employee surveys, standardized yearly performance reviews. People are treated as cattle, not as pets that have a name.
The name human resources gives you the hint.
Today we see this with developer productivity too. No longer is it important to manage individual productivity, treat the developer as an individual being with likes and dislikes and a personal life. We introduce metrics for productivity, to make people and teams comparable. Exchangeable. Scalable. No longer is the team lead responsible for individuals, but for the numbers. Treating people as individuals does not scale, so they are no longer treated as pets. But if you are a small startup, don’t imitate tech giants, but treat your employees as individuals instead of cattle.
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About me: Hey, I'm Stephan, a CTO Coach with 40+ years of software development and 25+ years of engineering management experience. I've coached and mentored 80+ CTOs and founders. I've founded 3 startups. 1 nice exit. I help CTOs and engineering leaders grow, scale their teams, gain clarity, lead with confidence and navigate the challenges of fast-growing companies.
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