The Case of the Disappearing Secretary

Some real gold from SuburbanWhiteChick in the comments:

  Fifth. Computerization has not improved standards; it has merely homogenized them. When humans do work, even soul-killing work, they either get bored and get out or they start to slack or sabotage or, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they start to pay attention and make it matter, they get fussy, they figure out how to do it better. When computerization was introduced in the offices in the 80s (I was there) there was more hue and cry among the clerks and secretaries that they were being asked to do a worse job only faster, than among those who objected to learning the computer, and this applied not just to document production / handling and records management but to communication protocols. When companies ordered their clerical workers to fit their duodecahedronal tasks into square computerized holes, data was lost forever, as well as these workers' hard-won, thoughtfully developed methods of tracking and processing data.

This is PRECISELY the divide I see in engineering today - those temperamentally inclined to do things well / keep learning are entering a very exciting time. Those inclined to clock punch are rightly worried.

There's a lot to unpack in that post. And, while I never had a personal assistant, I did depend on secretaries to type up memos early in my career. One or two were good; others struggled to get something mostly correct through multiple iterations.

And even a bit later--in the computer biz--there were some senior managers who had their secretaries/admins print out their emails. They'd handwrite responses, and have the secretaries/admins type them in and email them. (Though the email was only internal to the company at that point.)

I don't disagree with or even lament the sentiment that a lot of secretarial work has basically been smeared across a large number of workers. While a personal assistant can be useful for some people with very busy lives, I honestly never found a shared assistant/secretary terribly useful especially as computer-based tools came into the picture and got better.

I was a executive assistant when in college twenty years ago. Recognizing the writing on the wall and the fact that EA never translated into the E-suite was a huge motivator for moving past an associates degree and continuing education instead, with a left turn into computer engineering eventually. If the economy won't let me be a computer at the very least I can understand and work to build computers instead.

Honestly, I think the initial surge wasn't down to Jevons Paradox, but simply the general ignorance of those needing secretarial staff. They were incapable of using any "machinery" themselves and saw having staff as a status symbol: "I can afford to pay extra people, it shows others I'm rich, that means my business is doing well, and I don't have to scrape the barrel by doing everything myself"...

Today is slightly different; we aren't in a period of general growth but in one of deep crisis. So, while not everyone is doing badly (as always), many really do need to cut costs by any means. Just as back then, they are generally as thick as two short planks, so they think they can axe functions they don't like, typically technical roles with specialists who aren't "low-level workers" and who might tell the manager of the day, "you're asking for nonsense, it can't be done"; the manager then discovers through failure that they actually couldn't do it, that marketing played them like a fiddle, and the real potential of the service they bought is far lower, the reality is different from what the salesman described. But it happens, and the manager just hops from one job to the next; they just need something for their CV that acts as self-promotion. The company went bust? "Well, I left just before that for that very reason, because I realised there was no future there", omitting any responsibility.

What I can say as a sysadmin today is that I'm seeing:

- a new collapse in code quality, the likes of which hasn't been seen, so they say, since 2008 (they say, because I was a 22's CE student, so I saw very little in person)

- a massive increase in software without design, without a concrete idea, thrown together on the fly following a whim where the details are missing, and often the actual purpose needed to turn a fleeting late-night idea into a concrete project is missing too.

This, along with other dynamics, makes me see nothing good ahead, not specifically for those working in IT, but for society in general. And it's not because of the "LLM effect", but because of decidedly human decision-making.

One day, purely by chance, I found myself at the corner of Young and Bloor, at noon, late 1980's, early 90's, and later I found out that business wisdom of the day was to attempt to compromise the cognitive powers of visitors to the high power offices in the area by paying secretarys to perform there duties while leaving nothing, or perhaps everything to the imagination, and getting a grand a day to do it, there bemused reactions to whatever look on my face as they hit the street going to lunch,is still fun to think about.

When the CEO of our company left after a merge in 1999, his executive assistant was forgotten in the ensuing turmoil and the move of the company 's headquarters from a city to another. She just kept her office in front of the empty CEO office for months, playing Solitaire on her computer with nothing to do, until someone remarked her.

> clerical work

Ah yes: reading religious tomes, preaching, healing injured adventurers with divine magic.