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> Does it make sense for me, as a well-paid knowledge worker, to spend several hours a week struggling with tasks that used to be done far better by entry-level

> Does it make sense for me, as a well-paid knowledge worker, to spend several hours a week struggling with tasks that used to be done far better by entry-level workers who needed the employment? I think/talk about this all the time. I think there are some non-consumer examples of this also. For example, my wife is a Physician Assistant and spends most of her time entering information into the health system. While she's seeing a patient - she has to wait many seconds for the next screen to come up before she can continue talking to the patient. She has to to keep up with and know that system in addition to knowing medicine. But if she had someone else doing this for her. Maybe even taking raw notes and then entering them in right after - she'd free up her time for actual medicine. Another example is the fact that my boss spends a lot of his time doing non-technical managerial work. But if they hired just one more person in our department to just do that work. Basically what I'm saying is that Medical and IT people should all have assistants.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I've not sat down to really work through all the details, but I've had this notion in my head for some time that putting a kind of "developer secretary" on teams, to deal with all various tools developers are expected to navigate directly as part of their job and as just extra junk their employer makes them do (say, learning and using time-off request systems or expense-submission systems), such that the developers only needed to know & context-switch to email and maybe a chat program ("what about Jira?" ideally the secretary could do all that make-work shepherding and tracking down next-tasks, too), in addition to the actual thing they do that makes them so expensive, it could be a net-savings. I doubt the math works out well for lower-paid employees that are also required to juggle all kinds of tangential shit these days ( sorry :-( ) but I think it might for even mid-pay developers.
- scruple 4y ago
  I don't know if it's true today but once upon a time a AAA game studio everyone here has heard of had exactly these "developer secretary" roles on game teams. From what I understand it was extremely helpful and it also served as an entry point into other, more interesting roles in the company. I know of one such person who transitioned into project management work internally, having first been a development team assistant, and she's had a wonderful career in games for at least 15 years now.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  Law firms still have secretaries because the lawyers have to bill for their time, and they have to itemize their bills, and the clients read them. It turns out that if you actually keep track of both time and its value, secretarial jobs are a good bargain.
lizzardbraind 4y ago
Ah, but who is going to pay those assistants? To hear the company tell it, they're already struggling to pay their current workers what they call a "competitive wage". Just look at Intel, who recently slashed salaries so they could afford to pay a larger dividend. How do you think they'd react if you asked them to provide every engineering manager with a full-time assistant?
luma 4y ago
So, a Physician's Assistant Assistant? But who will assist them? At some point, dealing with the system is somebody's job. It used to be slow on paper, now it's slow on a computer. Your wife is being asked to do that because the physician has offloaded that to her. Maybe she can offload it to somebody else, but then that person isn't freed up for actual medicine.
- unicornhose 4y ago
  How are the computers so bad?? I don't know why, but it's personally embarrassing to me as a developer.
  - scruple 4y ago
    Hospital IT systems are infamously horrible at maintaining computer systems. I worked in healthcare tech at one point and I remember back around 2016 we were still forced to support Internet Explorer for hospital systems that had simply never updated.
  - lmm 4y ago
    The person who buys them isn't the person who has to use them, and the procurement is done at too large and abstract a scale for requirements more complicated than checkboxes.
- hateful 4y ago
  My wife is very quick to point out that it is not "Physician's Assistant". It is "Physician Assistant". She doesn't assist the doctor - she is a provider in her own right. In fact, there is talk about changing PA to mean "Physician's Associate" instead. One article I found: https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/scope-practice/pa-rebrand-physician-associates-will-deepen-patient-confusion https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/scope-practice/... Edit: here's another article https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/03/1059916872/physician-assistants-want-to-be-called-physician-associates-but-doctors-cry-foul https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/03/1059916...
harvey9 4y ago
The several seconds between screens gets me down. It's shameful that systems that slow are rolled out. I have used what I think is a pretty good clinical system where you have a free text box but it has something like code auto complete so clinical coding is taken care of and data like physical obs gets stored in a structured way so it can generate charts.
skadamou 4y ago
This is what medical scribes do - they follow providers around and write their notes for them... Scribes are not paid well enough (minimum wage) for it to become a real profession and most scribes are just trying to collect clinical hours ahead of applying to med school or PA school. When I was a scribe, our pay came directly out of the physicians pay so if they were making $100 per hour without a scribe, with a scribe they took home $85. I guess theoretically a physician could pay their scribe whatever they wanted to entice them to stick around longer than a year or two but I have never heard of this being done.
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
Yeah, I've been saying this for a while. Computers made secretarial slightly more productive, and companies responded to that by eliminating the vast majority of the secretaries and offloading the remaining work to the ICs. Then the computer-based secretarial work expanded and expanded until it became a significant fraction of everyone's job. Then companies responded to that by assigning those duties to managers, and hiring more managers, contributing to bureaucratic bloat. The key difference between a manager and a secretary is power. My manager can have me fired, a secretary probably can't (unless I really deserved it). By empowering the people handling bureaucratic bloat as their full time job, you incentivize the creation of more bloat.
slyall 4y ago
Article by Atul Gawande from a few years ago talking about Medical software, scribes and "virtual scribes" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

yamtaddle 4y ago

I've not sat down to really work through all the details, but I've had this notion in my head for some time that putting a kind of "developer secretary" on teams, to deal with all various tools developers are expected to navigate directly as part of their job and as just extra junk their employer makes them do (say, learning and using time-off request systems or expense-submission systems), such that the developers only needed to know & context-switch to email and maybe a chat program ("what about Jira?" ideally the secretary could do all that make-work shepherding and tracking down next-tasks, too), in addition to the actual thing they do that makes them so expensive, it could be a net-savings. I doubt the math works out well for lower-paid employees that are also required to juggle all kinds of tangential shit these days ( sorry :-( ) but I think it might for even mid-pay developers.

scruple 4y ago
I don't know if it's true today but once upon a time a AAA game studio everyone here has heard of had exactly these "developer secretary" roles on game teams. From what I understand it was extremely helpful and it also served as an entry point into other, more interesting roles in the company. I know of one such person who transitioned into project management work internally, having first been a development team assistant, and she's had a wonderful career in games for at least 15 years now.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
Law firms still have secretaries because the lawyers have to bill for their time, and they have to itemize their bills, and the clients read them. It turns out that if you actually keep track of both time and its value, secretarial jobs are a good bargain.

lizzardbraind 4y ago

Ah, but who is going to pay those assistants? To hear the company tell it, they're already struggling to pay their current workers what they call a "competitive wage". Just look at Intel, who recently slashed salaries so they could afford to pay a larger dividend. How do you think they'd react if you asked them to provide every engineering manager with a full-time assistant?

luma 4y ago

So, a Physician's Assistant Assistant? But who will assist them? At some point, dealing with the system is somebody's job. It used to be slow on paper, now it's slow on a computer. Your wife is being asked to do that because the physician has offloaded that to her. Maybe she can offload it to somebody else, but then that person isn't freed up for actual medicine.

unicornhose 4y ago
How are the computers so bad?? I don't know why, but it's personally embarrassing to me as a developer.
- scruple 4y ago
  Hospital IT systems are infamously horrible at maintaining computer systems. I worked in healthcare tech at one point and I remember back around 2016 we were still forced to support Internet Explorer for hospital systems that had simply never updated.
- lmm 4y ago
  The person who buys them isn't the person who has to use them, and the procurement is done at too large and abstract a scale for requirements more complicated than checkboxes.
hateful 4y ago
My wife is very quick to point out that it is not "Physician's Assistant". It is "Physician Assistant". She doesn't assist the doctor - she is a provider in her own right. In fact, there is talk about changing PA to mean "Physician's Associate" instead. One article I found: https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/scope-practice/pa-rebrand-physician-associates-will-deepen-patient-confusion https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/scope-practice/... Edit: here's another article https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/03/1059916872/physician-assistants-want-to-be-called-physician-associates-but-doctors-cry-foul https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/03/1059916...

harvey9 4y ago

The several seconds between screens gets me down. It's shameful that systems that slow are rolled out. I have used what I think is a pretty good clinical system where you have a free text box but it has something like code auto complete so clinical coding is taken care of and data like physical obs gets stored in a structured way so it can generate charts.

skadamou 4y ago

This is what medical scribes do - they follow providers around and write their notes for them... Scribes are not paid well enough (minimum wage) for it to become a real profession and most scribes are just trying to collect clinical hours ahead of applying to med school or PA school. When I was a scribe, our pay came directly out of the physicians pay so if they were making $100 per hour without a scribe, with a scribe they took home $85. I guess theoretically a physician could pay their scribe whatever they wanted to entice them to stick around longer than a year or two but I have never heard of this being done.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

Yeah, I've been saying this for a while. Computers made secretarial slightly more productive, and companies responded to that by eliminating the vast majority of the secretaries and offloading the remaining work to the ICs. Then the computer-based secretarial work expanded and expanded until it became a significant fraction of everyone's job. Then companies responded to that by assigning those duties to managers, and hiring more managers, contributing to bureaucratic bloat. The key difference between a manager and a secretary is power. My manager can have me fired, a secretary probably can't (unless I really deserved it). By empowering the people handling bureaucratic bloat as their full time job, you incentivize the creation of more bloat.

slyall 4y ago

Article by Atul Gawande from a few years ago talking about Medical software, scribes and "virtual scribes" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...