Mythical Man Month describes secretaries in a software context. What spoke to me about it was none of things, but instead: scheduling meetings, taking and distributing agendas and notes for those meetings, being the curator and librarian of project documentation. Just because these things are digital now, doesn’t mean any of the engineers on the team will step up to do them consistently or well. Many projects could run more smoothly with someone in that role.
Every minute an engineer spends doing those things is a minute they aren't coding, debugging, or architecting. So what happens? We have to hire another engineer to pick up the slack. When we could hire an administrator for much less to handle those things.
I continue to be amused that the many of the activities and artifacts promotion committees want to see when they consider engineers for the highest levels, are exactly this kind of "admin" work.
