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ghaffyesterday at 2:25 PM1 replyview on HN

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.


Replies

true_religionyesterday at 8:41 PM

I know a certain senior manager who refuses to use Figma because complex designs aren’t easily printable so you have to use the tool directly. Instead, they have my manager transcribe all the Figma interactions with screenshots into a PRD, then they print that and handwrite notes on it for their meetings.

They’re not old enough to have this be a habit from the pre compute days, but now AI has made it more and more possible to automate this kind of transcribing so I think everyone is happier for it.