Why I Always Wanted to Be a Secretary

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!).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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