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Use Jira, make your own bookings (etc), and submit reimbursement requests or have an assistant and earn quite a bit less... hmmm.

by Apofis 5y ago

alexjplant 5y ago
Are the savings from not hiring assistants being passed on to rank-and-file employees via salary or distributed to shareholders and the C-suite? An employee's salary doesn't magically go up because their burdened rate goes down. Let's also not forget the fact that if you're in contracting/consulting it's more lucrative for you to charge the customer for a technical person's expensive time spent on administrivia than it is to hire additional labor and bill them for "the help".
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Let me clarify: my salary didn't go up because the company fired all the admin assistants. My salary is higher now because I'm a senior engineer. What they pay me and all the other engineers for is our programming ability, but they also pay us to do admin self-service. If there truly was an overall cost savings attributable to reduced headcount (and I'm skeptical), I don't know where it went. I do know that for accounting Reasons, public companies love to show reduced personnel costs on their annual report.
WJW 5y ago
Looking at it from the company perspective, you save a few lower-paid assistants but now you need to hire more devs because they spend 10-20% of their time on administrative trivia. The extra costs for the devs will be higher because not only is their hourly wage higher, they are also slower at the work than the assistants used to be since the assistants could do the same thing all day and become skilled around the process.
cratermoon 5y ago
My pay went up because I'm much more senior than I was back when my employer had administrative assistant pools. Whether or not it would have gone up less if employers still did that is an open question. Certainly lower personnel costs look good to the accountants, but for the price the company pays me, on an hourly basis, to inefficiently muddle my way through self-serve portals, they could probably hire two admin assistants and handle the tasks in half the time for twice as many expensive engineers.

Use Jira, make your own bookings (etc), and submit reimbursement requests or have an assistant and earn quite a bit less... hmmm.

by Apofis 5y ago

Use Jira, make your own bookings (etc), and submit reimbursement requests or have an assistant and earn quite a bit less... hmmm.

alexjplant 5y ago

Are the savings from not hiring assistants being passed on to rank-and-file employees via salary or distributed to shareholders and the C-suite? An employee's salary doesn't magically go up because their burdened rate goes down. Let's also not forget the fact that if you're in contracting/consulting it's more lucrative for you to charge the customer for a technical person's expensive time spent on administrivia than it is to hire additional labor and bill them for "the help".

cratermoon 5y ago
Let me clarify: my salary didn't go up because the company fired all the admin assistants. My salary is higher now because I'm a senior engineer. What they pay me and all the other engineers for is our programming ability, but they also pay us to do admin self-service. If there truly was an overall cost savings attributable to reduced headcount (and I'm skeptical), I don't know where it went. I do know that for accounting Reasons, public companies love to show reduced personnel costs on their annual report.

WJW 5y ago

Looking at it from the company perspective, you save a few lower-paid assistants but now you need to hire more devs because they spend 10-20% of their time on administrative trivia. The extra costs for the devs will be higher because not only is their hourly wage higher, they are also slower at the work than the assistants used to be since the assistants could do the same thing all day and become skilled around the process.

cratermoon 5y ago

My pay went up because I'm much more senior than I was back when my employer had administrative assistant pools. Whether or not it would have gone up less if employers still did that is an open question. Certainly lower personnel costs look good to the accountants, but for the price the company pays me, on an hourly basis, to inefficiently muddle my way through self-serve portals, they could probably hire two admin assistants and handle the tasks in half the time for twice as many expensive engineers.