Why I Always Wanted to Be a Secretary

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/why-i-always-wanted-to-be-a-secretary.html

by e15ctr0n • 11 years ago

70 32 11 years ago

Shivetya• 11 years ago

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.

vilhelm_s• 11 years ago

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

coliveira• 11 years ago

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.

lkrubner• 11 years ago

Personal assistants are still common for high level executives. I have a friend who works as the personal assistant to someone very high up in Google. What has changed is that the middle-level managers no longer have secretaries. This probably has an upside, in terms of keeping the mid-level managers in touch with the tedious administrative nonsense that the lower level workers have to struggle with.

arethuza• 11 years ago

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.

mioelnir• 11 years ago

I fondly remember at university, the secretary of one of the CS departments wrote all the snail-mail in vim, formatted in TeX. Then mailed it to the print-server.

elcct• 11 years ago

Relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehqKpPmVcK4

unknownzero• 11 years ago

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.

agentgt3• 11 years ago

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).

pfarnsworth2• 11 years ago

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.

mpdehaan22• 11 years ago

I always found this somewhat amusing, encountering it enough.

Email to someone. Suggest meeting.

Someone's email, CC you: assistant, schedule this.

Email to assistant. Let me see when X is free (cc you, person).

Person's reply to everyone, you and assistant: tell so and so, let's do X at 2pm.

Assistant's email (cc you, the person you were talking to): we'll do X at 2pm.

I think somewhat the same about why travel agents are dying out, having to tell them exactly what flights you prefer and where, and how to not screw up your layover (and be able to easily reschedule when they are not around), it's usually far faster to just do it yourself.

morgante2• 11 years ago

That's just the sign of a bad assistant, not a problem with the role itself. Competent assistants have full knowledge of their boss's schedule and will make the appointment without their involvement.

blisterpeanuts• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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."

invalidOrTaken• 11 years ago

Secretarial work is perfectly respectable work.

I feel like there's a feedback loop here: it is not respectable, because it is not respected. "Only a loser," we think, "would be so desperate as to accept a contemptible job."

pfarnsworth2• 11 years ago

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.

agentgt3• 11 years ago

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).

poslathian2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

poslathian2• 11 years ago

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.

nassirkhan• 11 years ago

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

6d0debc071• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

Or Zirtual?

rabbitheart• 11 years ago

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.

mmmBacon• 11 years ago

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.

rdlecler1• 11 years ago

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?

rbanffy• 11 years ago

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

Why I Always Wanted to Be a Secretary

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