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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

What are the main things an assistant does?

I have a hard time "visualizing" it. If I had an assistant, I wouldn't know what to task them with...

Almost everything? If we're talking secretary style assistance, a lot. From proofing presentations, to making arrangements (travelling, accommodations, etc), arranging meetings, handling your schedule, act as a (second/third level?) filter for people contacting you, handle your social media, and so on...

A more qualified assistant, even more so, down to knowing your general policy etc and acting as a go-between between you and your employees, customers, when you don't need to bother...

OK, so this is for a CEO type job.

In my software engineer job, I can't come up with any task for an assistant to do, because there aren't any.

How about testing and writing documentation? The tasks that any developer wants to forget about :D

I don't know if I am alone or not but I indeed love testing and documentation along with coding. Testing itself is very challenging. Never understood why QA folks are underrated. While for me documentation is like a sharing my cool stuff.

As a developer one typically has less assitant tasks, but dependent on organisation a shared assistant could do expense filing, (conference) travel arrangements, ensuring all things office (drinks, food, whatever) are setup ... tasks can differ widely.

The more your job is to just sit on your desk and write code the less things you need an assistant for (while somebody else might have help from an assistant to ensure the environment is in that way)

That’s easy: manage Jira (or whatever) for you so you have one less complex tool & workflow to know how to use.

Isn't scrummaster for that ?

Your assistant would also probably help you with work-life balance stuff (but don’t ask him to clean your golf clubs).

If I had a full-time assistant... let’s see... travel arrangements (would save me a couple days per quarter), Jira and related bookkeeping, tracking down people who know stuff I need to learn, scheduling social events, comparison shopping for cars/schools/gyms, reading poorly written internal docs and summarizing them coherently, organizing my meeting notes, and even just reminding me what I’m supposed to be thinking about.

I once worked in a place where the executive assistant was available to help anyone on the team, with the manager having priority of course. The most I ever dared ask for was flight bookings because she seemed really busy and I was young and shy, but I bet the senior people had her doing random stuff.

When I was doing firmware engineering, we had a lab assistant for the department that could do stuff like soldering rework, ordering parts, simple debug, running routine tests. It was kind of a catchall role that in much bigger companies might have dedicated people.

Also the office admin would help with things like routing paperwork for approvals, planning for travel, ordering meals for lunch meetings. When I was on a business trip and my plans got switch around mid trip, they coordinated all the changes to flights and hotels.

requirements gathering, testing, documentation, stenographer, gift-buying, white board cleaning, so you can focus more of your time on algorithms.

- set up text files & branches & docs to begin a new project

- compile your updates to various bugs into a status report for your management based on each project

- nag you about your upcoming meetings, preparing for them

- errands you would run if you didn't have to focus

- etc etc

the whole idea is to outsource and delegate the less important work so you can focus on the thing youre best at to maximize your productivity (however you want to measure it).

this is something you immediately must do to be successful as any sort of manager or leadership position.

In the next step, assistant can become CEO while CEO plays golf.

CEO's get paid to think and make big decisions, not to do trivial or busy work.

Yeah, but someone competent who does much of the CEOs work for some years, can learn to do more and more of it.

CEO's get paid to bear the weight of responsibility.

In the next step, the assistant can play golf.

Cause there is going to be assistant assistant. Plus CEO will he bored by golf at that point and will need someone to do that.

I imagine that a "more qualified assistant" would be the equivalent of a Chief of Staff.

I've certainly seen less qualified people called Chief of Staff. Andreesen's assistant of 20 years is probably more qualified than 99% of the Chief of Staffs in the Bay Area.

Sort out meeting times without asking the PA (much).

Here are my invoices, do the paperwork and put them in please.

X is on the phone & wants to talk, I'm busy, deal with him please. (X's issue may be real but X may waste a lot of time getting to the point).

I have to travel, I'm going to Y, sort out some travel & accommodation.

That kind of thing, the time-sucking crap. (not speaking for myself but from observations of an old boss of mine).

It's just the little stuff like scheduling calls/meetings - you don't realize how much time you spend going back and forth with people getting stuff on the calendar. It's not about proactively assigning stuff for them to do as much as just directing menial tasks like paperwork and whatever else to them so you don't have to.

If your day is booked solid with meetings, your assistant can both manage the scheduling of those meetings, and do stuff that you would do yourself if you weren’t so booked with meetings.

I can come up with a few things: managing the calendar ,sending emails printing, scanning, mailing buying lunch, handling documentation e-signatures

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