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Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

Consider this: if you use Magic for 40 hours a month, you end up wiht a bill of $4,000.

That's the salary of a full-time assistant who would be on call only 8-12 hours a day.

If you are the kind of guy who is rich enough for a personal assistant, I'm pretty sure $100/hour isn't unreasonable

What? A personal assistant is someone that you know, that you vet, that you can gauge the skills and reliability of, and that you can hold genuinely accountable. And you are comparing hiring this person on a full time basis to an ad hoc and in many cases inferior "assistant" who is only available for a fraction of that time with no guarantee or indication of quality ahead of time.

And not just that, but only extremely rich people have truly personal assistants, and if they can afford them then they probably don't need this apparently mass-marketed service. Most "personal assistants" are hired by a company that the said "rich person" is involved with, making it a company expense. And why would a company with the resources to hire a personal assistant (and likely other flexible personnel) go to some $100/hr service when they have their own employees to service their general needs and who can be responsible for tracking down and hiring the specialists who actually do those tasks.

I mean, seriously. You could hire a full-time minion to go out and find and pay specialist deliverers, caterers, etc. for a similar or smaller cost than it takes to hire someone unknown and unreliable to do it ad hoc for a quarter of that time, given that 40hr/month estimate.

You completely hit the hammer on the head with both this comment and the parent. I just assume that a big amount of 20-25-ish developers here that make $180.000 are excited at the prospect of having a personal assistant to match their other unreasonable status enhancing purchases.

As if any 'rich person' would spend any amount of time texting some random employee and give them access to his e-mails. If I were rich and would deem myself in need of a PA I would want to know them very well before allowing them access to my personal information and I would expect them to take care of certain things without me having to tell them what to do all the time, let alone text them.

You are discounting a strong trend: expensive products become commodities.

Plus there are degrees of richness. It's easy to name examples where rich people have been trusting their personal information to faceless entities for years.

> to match their other unreasonable status enhancing purchases

You don't know the purchases of the audience you are referring to.

> You completely hit the hammer on the head

http://dannybaranowski.blogspot.hu/2012/06/idioms-for-idiots...

Point well taken.

Hiring good people and keeping them happy is enormously difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Finding the right person can easily take a month or more--and the process must be repeated each time you lose your employee. The better and more qualified the employee, the more likely he or she is to go on to better things. If you can find a good person for $48K yearly, then you will also need to pay benefits, bringing the cost closer to $72K. To keep your employee happy, he or she will need time off, probably during times that he or she would be most useful to you. Your assistant will need to sleep, too, perhaps during times that you may be awake and hungry. You will also need to pay your employee for many hours in which they are not engaged in helping you because you haven't asked for help.

In short, I cannot imagine having the kind of wealth that would be needed to hire and maintain a group of employees that could assist me around the clock--and would do all of this without imposing a significant additional burden on my life. But I and probably many others can imagine paying a few hundred dollars for assistance with burdensome tasks.

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