The Case of the Disappearing Secretary

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.

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.

I love tables. If I can replace a paragraph with a table I usually do, to a fault. In college I was a research assistant in a bio lab and got assigned gobs of tables and charts to make. The way my boss did it, it was a highly non trivial task that required understanding the whole mission in general and experiment in particular. I was effectively his secretary, but it wasn't a shallow thing, it required domain expertise, which is common in secretarial work.

But if I were now that professor I'd fire me, just because he could generate the table five times in the time it would take me to start the task. Maybe I could do better than the LLM on the first pass, but I couldn't keep up with the machine on the iterations, and the end result is a better match to the intention.

And now the same budget can go to an actual researcher rather than the assistant. There really isn't a limit to the amount of valuable research to be done. Empowering is the right word for this technology.

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.

> clerical work

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