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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

That's a bad trend you see everywhere. Admin assistant positions are being reduced and now the specialists have to do everything themselves.

In my company we used to have somebody who made all travel arrangements but now we have to do it ourselves which is a major pain and takes a lot of time if you use the system only once a year.

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A term for this is "Shadow Work," unpaid labor in the form of self service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_work

I guess this is in line with a lot of people having to work from home in the evening or weekend because they get nothing done during the regular working hours due to meetings a other stuff.

Thanks for the reference.

As we develop systems that take software developers out of the loop because it seemed a cool idea to work on, we'll only have ourselves to blame.

It's short sighted cost cutting. An assistant/admin position is easy to justify for the chopping block, it's removal reduces headcount and the increased load on the specialists is not seen directly on the balance sheet for a while.

It also reduces organizational liability, which produces the usual externality. <sarcasm> Why does the assistant have a need to know about patient X's medical issue? They shouldn't be able to see that data! Only the Dr. should see it! </sarcasm>

You can bet, though, that the C-execs and maybe one or two levels below them still have assistants and are not booking their own travel.

On the other hand most people who write the software don't have assistants and are also expected to do all their arrangements themselves. It is even culture in software development circles that one should be self sufficient. For instance that created terms like RTFM (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM).

So for them it's quite likely hard to imagine that other people might have assistants to do things for them.

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