
Why I Always Wanted to Be a Secretary - e15ctr0n
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/why-i-always-wanted-to-be-a-secretary.html
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poslathian
I don't often post here, but this is close to my heart. A few years ago, my
team started making noises that we needed a company secretary and I needed an
assistant. That rang true to me, but I had zero concept of what this person
might do, what our relationship would be, or whether there would be a clear
benefit. I hired one, employee #10, the first person on our team who would
never be expected to write code.

In 6 months, this person had doubled my productive output (at a fraction of my
salary, for right or wrong), and built clean, useful, stable systems for our
company's information management (bookkeeping, correspondence, recruiting,
health insurance, tax matters, and far more) where previously there was a lot
of duct tape and bailing wire. I quickly lost the ability to imagine how we
could be running this company without bonafide, competent, secretarial
support.

Since then, I have lavished extremely well-earned raises on this person, with
zero thought of "market rate admin salary," after two years I trust this
person with my life. We have hired yet another office secretary who is also
great. Our company has 15 in the local office and another 10 working remotely.
Dollars spent on a good secretary are some of the best dollars you can spend:
they can return to you one of the most productive, positive, and important
relationships you have in your professional life. If I could go back, I would
have hired one in the first year of business (as opposed to year 5!).

~~~
boxy310
A "secretary" as they first began was a person you entrusted your secrets to.
In the same sense that a "personal assistant" app is supposed to raise
productivity, a real-life secretary does so but with all the intelligence and
ambiguity-tolerance that a normal human brain is capable of. It is a
considerable asset, and anyone who treats them as interchangeable cogs is
likely to not take advantage of the increased headspace.

~~~
poslathian
No question. Find the right person and the value of the relationship goes up
with time and trust. I suppose that's why it's not uncommon to hear about
folks with 30+ years with the same secretary.

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unknownzero
Totally anecdotal but everyone I know at the VP level and above would be
largely nonfunctional without their admin assistants. You can make a lot of
noise about technology replacing this job but I just don't see it until that
technology is some sort of super advanced AI capable of being talked to like a
human and working 100% of the time. Otherwise it's pretty much impossible to
beat a highly competent person to delegate to that knows your
schedule/preferences very well. That person could very well use more advanced
software to help them in those tasks, but won't be replaced by it.

~~~
agentgt
My wife is a pseudo executive assistant and I have to agree 100% with your
comment. In fact I'm not even sure besides making decisions what the executive
does as my wife writes everything for him including his speeches. As an owner
of a tech company its so irritating to see some one with my wife's work ethic
and capabilities be stereotyped, marginalized and taken advantage of in an
industry that is still pretty much a white ole man club.

The executive has blocked my wife from getting promoted because of his
dependency on her. Oh she could leave but she is not in the tech industry so
its not like jobs are all over the place.

The worse part is that her taking the role many years ago was in large part my
faulty recommendation as I thought being closer to the money would allow for
greater compensation (which it did but was not worth it).

~~~
pfarnsworth
I have a friend who is an EA and has worked for many of the biggest names in
Silicon Valley. She makes well over 6 figures and she loves her position. Her
employers value her greatly, so she was able to command very good compensation
packages including stock options, etc.

~~~
agentgt
Yes the problem is my wife is not in silicon valley and although she makes
plenty of money (6 figures or so) she is tired of not having a more important
role. She has effectively been type-casted.

~~~
meric
She _is_ important, otherwise the executive wouldn't keep her even by blocking
her from promotion. Six figure salary is very decent. I suggest she ask for a
pay rise, if she isn't happy, but she _is_ important.

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blisterpeanuts
What a shame that we Americans, who pride ourselves on what we think of as our
democratic, egalitarian society, are among the worst when it comes to contempt
for certain professions.

Secretarial work is perfectly respectable work. Someone has to do it, and it's
not something just anyone can do. Would the denigrators of secretaries prefer
that no one answer the phones, no one answer the emails, no one keep an
organization humming smoothly? Ridiculous.

Technology of course has reduced the body count; gone are the typing pools of
yore, the large administrative offices full of (mostly) women typing and
filing and answering phone calls.

Yet, there still exists the need, to some extent anyway. It's hard to imagine
an organization other than, say, a 5-person start-up, getting by without a
professional answering service and professionally composed correspondence,
reports, well organized filing systems, as well as the intangibles that make
office life more bearable, such as selecting plants and artwork, remembering
people's birthdays, keeping the kitchenette well stocked, etc.

~~~
Kalium
I submit that it's _because_ of the egalitarian ideals that certain
professions are looked down on. Work that is seen as doing the scutwork that
someone else is too lazy to do for themselves is vaguely looked down on. In an
egalitarian society, you are a _servant_. You have _chosen_ to degrade
yourself.

It's a repulsive thing, in that mindset. It's an active betrayal of ideals,
and not even for a particularly good payout.

~~~
raziel2701
There's a part in Bioshock that touches on this, I think it's in one of the
audio logs that someone resentfully says: "Even in a utopia someone has to
scrub toilets."

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vilhelm_s
Knuth mentions that his secretary used TeX when he developed it [1]. In the
preface to the "Waite Group's Unix System V Primer", it says it is written for
"a secretary or a manager in an office, or student in a computer science
class, or a computer hobbyist". And the "ENIAC girls" were the first (low-
level, machine code) programmers, and their work was basically considered
secreterial.

I guess, back in the day when secretaries were called secretaries, their work
might also have been more "advanced" (i.e. more similar to the work of the
scientists they supported). Nowadays there is no formal barrier to women
holding the same job titles as men, so women interested in programming do not
become administrative assistants.

[1]
[https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb17-4/tb53knun.pdf](https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb17-4/tb53knun.pdf)

~~~
coliveira
The result of the removal of personal assistants is that today's workers need
to spend a large chunk of their time doing secretarial work. For example,
maintaining a public schedule, arranging travels, filling simple reports,
typing simple code, sorting and answering standard email, could all be done by
a personal assistant. This would increase the productivity of programmers and
other knowledge workers. Instead, our society has evolved to make these chores
a inevitable part of everybody's lives -- and as a result make money selling
software that promises to help with these shores.

~~~
arethuza
Only one of those tasks that I like having help with is travel planning and in
that case you've got to have someone who is good and who you _completely_
trust.

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pfarnsworth
My mother-in-law started out as a secretary, and is now the COO of a mid-sized
company.

The CEO of Xerox had a similar career track, being an executive assistant and
then somehow making the shift to management and then working her way up to
CEO. It's something that is rare, but doable in the past, but this is
something that could never happen in this day. I think people are more
pigeonholed now that 30-40 years ago, unfortunately.

~~~
agentgt
Any chance your mother-in-law might be interested in giving advice or
mentoring? As I mentioned in a previous comment my wife has been desperately
trying to rise up the ladder but has been shunted (none of which has anything
to do with her effectiveness or capabilities).

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mmmBacon
I used to work for a CTO who had his prior company bought in one of the
largest acquisitions in SV history. His opinion is that there is a large
untapped talent pool of older (40+) smart, college-educated women who had been
maybe been stay-at-home moms who made great candidates for executive
assistants. His assistant was one such woman. She was very well paid, pulling
down 6 figures.

His view is that they are loyal (most important quality for him), extremely
reliable, and can be delegated complex tasks. While his assistant did do
things like make his travel arrangements and schedule his meetings, she also
did a lot of his grunt work, write emails, make powerpoint decks, write
conference speeches, write papers/articles for him. By this, I mean she often
generated the content (with input from others of course). Without her, he
would be totally ineffective. You could always tell when he had to make a
slide himself because it was usually full of typos.

At one time, she was a shared resource with our former CEO. After the company
went public, I recall overhearing a conversation where she was explaining to
our CEO what he needed to do to fly commercial (he had not flown commercial
since the 90s). She had a a great way of handling situations like that and
could be firm without being condescending.

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Shivetya
I always remember my mom's comment about being able to go home on time and
leave work at work. She got out when IBM offered early retirement to
Administrative Assistants back during one the purges of the 80s and 90s. They
really do keep things going in the right direction and more often than not
remember the important anniversaries for both male and female management.

The other observation she had at the time was more than a few women passing
through the secretarial pool were husband shopping and these were the ones
stereotypes were for and not looked upon nicely.

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rabbitheart
I am not a secretary, but like the author was raised in a similar environment:
It was my mother who took me to work in her small, dark offices where she
taught me to type and file as she worked. We couldn't afford daycare. I became
a highly efficient mini-secretary. I took similar jobs in high school/college.

Although I work as a technical writer/sysadmin, I often find myself using the
skills my mother taught me to organize, keep track of projects, etc. We're a
small company, and I'm the only one with any decent office administration
skills. Right now my main desire (and after-work project) is developing a
system for internal information I can take to my boss and coworkers to
hopefully improve productivity/prevent everyone from pinging everyone else
with dumb questions. (I'm weighing my options. I'd enjoy something like a
well-configured Confluence [at my last job Confluence died a lot -- but it was
easy and effective from a user standpoint], and am looking at open-source
alternatives I can use as a base.)

I don't think I would be able to look at the company I work for and figure out
what we need in terms of "getting our shit together" if I didn't know
secretary work, honestly.

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rdlecler1
My wife if an EA for SVP (Heads 800 people) at a major Fortune 500 company.
She's fantastic at her job, exceptionally personable, very organized and
professional (and everything that she does), but she's wants more
responsibility and it's not clear how she can make a shift. Anyone have
experience ideas?

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rbanffy
Secretaries are the nurses of an office. Any doctor will tell you it's nurses,
not doctors, that make a hospital work.

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nassirkhan
Is there a market for virtual secretaries? And would people here consider one?

~~~
6d0debc071
Isn't that essentially what Cortana, Siri and whatever that Google assistant
(Google Now?) are supposed to be? They don't seem to work very well atm.

~~~
krakensden
Or Zirtual?

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elcct
Relevant
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehqKpPmVcK4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehqKpPmVcK4)

