As a CEO, my executive assistant saves 60% of my time | Hacker News Reader

As a CEO, my executive assistant saves 60% of my time

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The list of things that the Executive Assistant is doing makes me wonder what real work is left for the CEO.

I also doubt the EA is making 60% of what the CEO makes.

Something about how our work is structured is really screwed up

Yeah this kind of makes it sound like the EA should be running the company. The only work the CEO admits to actually doing when she's not taking cooking classes or surfing is "showing up and doing my thing" at pitch meetings.

Such value!

If she knows the right people, that can more than pay for her salary.

I'm guessing the CEO is involved in technical development. Nowhere does any project management, roadmapping, customer interaction, new product development, customer outreach, etc appear in the tweet about her EA's responsibilities.

I did not read this as "I only work 40% of the week thanks to my EA", I read this as "A CEO can get inundated with the machinations of running a company, so much so that the vision and direction-making is lost". So, they outsourced the machinations to focus on vision and direction. That's _fine_. C-suite folks always have legions of assistants, just they are sometimes called Vice-somethings.

And separating "work that can be done by anyone with a little training" from "Work that can only be done by me or an expert" is a great thing to focus on for management. It allows a business to get the right people for the right things. This even has a name: Business Abstraction Layer (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab... ).

I work at a company where EAs are assigned to multiple people. As in, John Doe is an EA for Alice, Bob, Carson, and Dave.

They do the basic EAs things: Check emails, schedule meetings, review finance reports, etc. I doubt it's anywhere close to what Christine's EA does, but the idea that you're juggling the tasks of multiple people sounds like insanity to me. I hope they're well-paid.

EAs are typically compensated fairly well. Over 100k is not uncommon. It is a very high skill job. But there is of course a huge range of opportunity and comp.

... my executive assistant does 60% of my job for 2% of my income.

That sure is not going into any job description for EA. This CEO either lucked out or this poor EA is overworking 10x.

Is that even legal? Sounds like an export control problem to move that much sensitive data to the Philippines.

Also talk about inequity...

This reads like a tweet about how much time you can save by outsourcing your homework.

I didn't see anything about their EA being virtual.

CEO replied to a tweet saying the EA is "in the Philippines." CEO's Twitter profile says her location is Hawaii.

I ended up doing most of these things as a business development manager (in addition to some engineering work) at a small manufacturing company. Often I felt like an executive assistant. My first project was to take a drawer full of invoices and bills, sort them, and put them into accounting software. Sometimes I made copies for people. Other times I cleaned the bathrooms before important meetings with customers when they seemed too dirty.

When a company gets to a certain size (and it's probably smaller than you might think), I think you eventually want a smart person to keep the "knucklehead stuff" off of everyone else's desk. It has to be the kind of person that has an intuitive understanding of the technical side of how the company runs internally, how the external sales process works, and a willingness to do things that other people don't want to do.

Shameless plug: If you are looking for someone to do this in the New England area, drop me a note. I'm not available immediately though.

Where does one find an EA this capable? I'd consider this, but don't see how this is realistic

So how much does the Executive Assistant make?

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