The fix for that is don't have the cage monkey care about server "names", but instead physical servers.
I've done this, and it works very, very well with third parties. You simply give them their work-order, and it consists of working on particular physical devices.
I.E.
Row 10, Rack 11, RU-15 - Serial Number 103527382 - Replace Hard Drive.
Row 13, Rack 9, RU 6 - Serial Number 103528942 - Replace Power Supply.
etc...
The work orders are generated from your CMDB, which tracks things like serial numbers and physical locations.
As organizations grow, this is eventually where they all end up (after multiple iterations of other less scalable systems)
Having worked with datacenter technicians, I can confirm that providing step-by-step handholding instructions such as these is way more effective than telling the tech to "look for the server with the sticker that says unicorns.thenextfacebook.tk".
The human interface problem is solved by physical directions, not type of data provided.
That helps you track it down but it doesn't help you relate it to another human in a non-location context. Hence why dp-t75x-013 is nice ("oh hey, it's that dell precision T7500 that keeps segfaulting, maybe the RAM's bad..." versus "oh hey, it's that Serial 103528942 that keeps segfaulting"). Good to name it something relatively simple to pronounce, too ["deepeetee seventyfiveecks thirteen"]. A less common problem is serials/macs/tag numbers become duplicated when you buy enough servers...
Depends on the size of the organization and how many servers they have and who you are working with.
In the above case, the question was how to direct technicians to gear - and, specifying a physical location and a faceplate label (Serial Number or what have you) does the job.
In the case of Humans - they usually have cnames for the function they are interested in anyways.
I do work on about 4500 servers - and I couldn't tell you the name of a single one of them (though, I note they have some long convoluted DNS PTR, even harder to understand than a serial number) - But, I have a ton of cnames when I want to login to a particular customers server (based on customer, production/test/dev/fste, function).
Teams that need to do maintenance on servers have tools that group them based on role, location, data center, etc... They never actually "ssh" into a server the way I might.
A lot depends on whether you are talking about scales of 100+, 1000+, or 10,000+ servers (or network devices for that matter) At each stage you start to lose more and more of human naming convention, and move everything into a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
I've done this, and it works very, very well with third parties. You simply give them their work-order, and it consists of working on particular physical devices.
I.E.
Row 10, Rack 11, RU-15 - Serial Number 103527382 - Replace Hard Drive.
Row 13, Rack 9, RU 6 - Serial Number 103528942 - Replace Power Supply.
etc...
The work orders are generated from your CMDB, which tracks things like serial numbers and physical locations.
As organizations grow, this is eventually where they all end up (after multiple iterations of other less scalable systems)