Your assistant would also probably help you with work-life balance stuff (but don’t ask him to clean your golf clubs).

If I had a full-time assistant... let’s see... travel arrangements (would save me a couple days per quarter), Jira and related bookkeeping, tracking down people who know stuff I need to learn, scheduling social events, comparison shopping for cars/schools/gyms, reading poorly written internal docs and summarizing them coherently, organizing my meeting notes, and even just reminding me what I’m supposed to be thinking about.

I once worked in a place where the executive assistant was available to help anyone on the team, with the manager having priority of course. The most I ever dared ask for was flight bookings because she seemed really busy and I was young and shy, but I bet the senior people had her doing random stuff.

As a developer one typically has less assitant tasks, but dependent on organisation a shared assistant could do expense filing, (conference) travel arrangements, ensuring all things office (drinks, food, whatever) are setup ... tasks can differ widely.

The more your job is to just sit on your desk and write code the less things you need an assistant for (while somebody else might have help from an assistant to ensure the environment is in that way)

When I was doing firmware engineering, we had a lab assistant for the department that could do stuff like soldering rework, ordering parts, simple debug, running routine tests. It was kind of a catchall role that in much bigger companies might have dedicated people.

Also the office admin would help with things like routing paperwork for approvals, planning for travel, ordering meals for lunch meetings. When I was on a business trip and my plans got switch around mid trip, they coordinated all the changes to flights and hotels.

That’s easy: manage Jira (or whatever) for you so you have one less complex tool & workflow to know how to use.

Isn't scrummaster for that ?

How about testing and writing documentation? The tasks that any developer wants to forget about :D

I don't know if I am alone or not but I indeed love testing and documentation along with coding. Testing itself is very challenging. Never understood why QA folks are underrated. While for me documentation is like a sharing my cool stuff.

- set up text files & branches & docs to begin a new project

- compile your updates to various bugs into a status report for your management based on each project

- nag you about your upcoming meetings, preparing for them

- errands you would run if you didn't have to focus

- etc etc

the whole idea is to outsource and delegate the less important work so you can focus on the thing youre best at to maximize your productivity (however you want to measure it).

this is something you immediately must do to be successful as any sort of manager or leadership position.

requirements gathering, testing, documentation, stenographer, gift-buying, white board cleaning, so you can focus more of your time on algorithms.