Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

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50% of what middle management is what secretaries used to do. If I ever run my own company I will hire a team of secretaries to work with my developers and our productivity will shoot through the roof. No everyone is organized, good at scheduling, following up on things, focusing at work, interpersonal discussions, sending memos, navigating bureaucracy, etc.

A great secretary allows you to focus on getting development or whatever work you do in and out instead of on the day to day running of life.

I don't want a scrum master, I want a secretary.

As a manager, 90% of what I do as a manager is follow up with people, act as an escalation point for managing timelines, organizing who can do what, and none of this really is a skill related to my actual skillset.

Luckily I am able to commit to 20/hrs a week of development, but I could probably do 35 with a secretary - and use those last 5 hours to focus on strategy, direction, leadership stuff that's actually important.

Hallelujah! I felt this exactly when I was a director managing about 40 people. I would say at least half my day was taken up with logistics. The amount of actual mentorship and engineering leadership I did was less than the amount of time I had do to compared with a lot of bureaucratic responsibilities of my job.

At the time, there was an admin assistant who worked for our CTO, and she was fantastic - extremely detail oriented, organized and proactive. I kept thinking "All my training is in software engineering, and yet I'm doing all these tasks that she is much better at." Kept thinking that if my job was "split" down the middle that everyone would be much happier and my company would be getting a much better deal, with people's time largely spent on the stuff they are best at.

So much this. And also this applies to many roles. I heard similar from people who ran buying and merchandising teams at my old company: “Why are they paying me to file my expense report? An assistant could do this and then I could spend an additional hour doing my job!!”

I hadn’t ever really thought about this until then. It seems like most companies just think “having an assistant or secretary is extravagance” so obviously they can’t afford it. But if they really knew what kind of unskilled grunt work highly-paid people spend so much time doing I think they would change their minds.

In my experience, so purely subjective, high-paid leaders/managers spend upwards of 90% of their time on things that do not justify the pay. The same was true for me. I can't tell you how often I felt simultaneously underpaid for the value I COULD bring, and radically overpaid for the work I was required to perform.

I completely agree with this. Not much more to add other than that, but you've put into words what I have been thinking of my own situation.

I've had this conversation with my various managers many times: "Oooookaaaay, if you really want to pay me my salary to spend my time filling out expense reports, copying status updates from one document to another, scheduling meetings for people, and all these other administrative tasks, then that's what I'll do. But, wow, what a waste."

Completely agreed. I was a marketing director for about a year and a half, and I stepped back from it because I was personally spending about 60 hours a week on items I would consider management, which I've never been that interested in. I'm interested in leadership; in building productive relationships; and excelling as both a marketer and developer.

If I'd had a secretary or assistant or something to handle keeping on top of projects and KPIs, I would have been able to focus on being great as a leader. Alas, that wasn't an option, so I got out of the way for someone who excels as a manager to take my place.

On the plus side (and admittedly an aside as well), stepping out of that role allowed me to write and publish a book in 6 months, which is something I'd always wanted to do but couldn't find the time for.

People forget the plan recommended by Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. Surgical teams with delegated duties led by an experienced surgeon. Positions of a secretary, language lawyer, documentation writer, (and others I forget). I would love to just once work or lead such team.

Whatever happened to secretaries anyway? Were they really cost-cut for managers to do by themselves?

You're right though, it's a valuable job being the glue of a business. In more than one way, not just work-wise. Social stuff matters too, and was often the domain of the secretaries.

Symptom of "MBAs eating the world". They got fired in the first layoff round, back around 1998.

Secretaries spent a lot of time typing, and therefore were considered to be typists. In the 1990s using a keyboard went from a subservient role (typist) to a prestigious role (computers are expensive!) and then achieved ubiquity.

If you look at things through the lens of social status signalling among primates, an awful lot becomes clear. Consider office arrangements. What primates like is having:

- a private space to retreat to, and

- a team/family shared space, and

- a tribal/company shared space that strangers can be invited to visit, often decorated to show off success/wealth.

Control is established by the leaders awarding better territories to themselves and favorite allies, and by removing private spaces for those of low status. The worst insult is to remove space ownership altogether for some low status people, making them "hot desk" or "hotel".

In theory, they were replaced by technology. Answering machine (later voicemail), word processor/grammar checkers, email calendars, etc.

Part of the problem is that some of the time this was supposed to free up was consumed by managing the tech itself.

Hire some psychologists to replace HR and you'll have people stick around forever.

> you'll have people stick around forever

that's not the goal

HR is evil because its goals are evil, not because of the type of people employed there.

If you tell HR that some guy should go, be it a liberal arts major or a psychologist, they're gonna employ any trick they know to nudge the guy out of his job. In fact, the psych might be even more effective

I heard a similar sentiment from a high performing colleague from a company my employer partered with. He said something along the lines of "if they (client) wants me to make constant PowerPoint reports, they better pay extra for an intern in the contract because I am not wasting time on that".

A ton of that can be automated through your delivery system as well. Managers need to become flow engineers and get away from managing people.

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