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Ask HN: Are there secretaries or administrative assistants at Google?

2 points by uberuberuber ↗ HN
I come from a non-technical background (flight medic), but I have always wondered if Google has secretaries or administrative assistants in the traditional sense of a large corporation?

I have heard many Googlers remark that the company is quite email intensive, but surely they have the standard office supply needs, sending faxes of legal documents, fetching a book from the far side of campus. Thanks!

4 comments

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kondro
I'm sure they would have, but probably not for stuff like this. If you want another one, go get it yourself. If you want to send a fax, go send it yourself. If you want a book, get off your lazy ass and get it.

The trouble with giving "important" people staff is it leads to misuse and laziness. People start arguing that they're too important to do something, or are too busy to learn how to use the fax machine. If your engineers are starting to complain about learning, there is something wrong with them.

uberuberuber
I understand the importance of learning to do things for oneself within an organization, but at a certain point doesn't it become wasteful to have someone making $50/hr fetching packages when it could easily be done by a lower wage earner, thereby ensuring that the "brain power" (in this context...not denigrating intelligence based upon career path) can focus on what they're getting paid for?
kondro
Do you really think that developers spend their 40 hours (or whatever allocated time they have) steeped over a monitor writing code??

People need variety, and sometimes a walk across an office is a welcome break to a particularly annoying problem - whether they admit it or not.

uberuberuber
I'm just postulating. I am a cubicle monkey in medical publishing nowadays and use support staff for tasks that don't require a higher level of expertise, thereby freeing up my time to produce more value.