Secretaries became admin assistants who are much more productive and valuable since they switched their job to things like helping with the content of written communications, preparing presentations, and managing relationships. I saw my mother go through this transition and it wasn't really rough (though she's a smart and hard-working person).

> Secretaries became admin assistants

That doesn't mean anything. The last 20 years have seen an absurd chase of more and more stupidity in job titles to make people feel they are "executive assistants" instead of secretaries, "vice presidents" instead of whatever managerial role, etc, etc.

but secretaries are still a thing, they are just usually shared by a whole team / department these days

I had a corporate gig as a coder reporting to at most three economists at any one time. I spent at least two hours of every day getting them to explain what they wanted, explaining the implications of what they were asking for, explaining the results of the code to them, etc. So even if I didn't need to code at all my efficiency would have expanded by at most a factor of 4.

The future as I see it is that coding will become a relatively trivial skill. The economists would each know how to code and that would remove you from the equation. They would implement whatever thing they were trying to do themselves.

This would scale to support any number of economists. This would also be a simpler model and that simplicity might lead to a better product. In your model, the economists must explain to you, then you must write the code. That adds a layer where errors could happen - you misunderstand the economists or they explain poorly or you forget or whatever. If the economists could implement things themselves - less room for "telephone" type errors. This would also allow the economists to prototype, experiment, and iterate faster.

That game of telephone is certainly an enormous pain point, and I can imagine a future where I'm out of a job -- but it's extremely hard for me to see them learning to code.

And if what the economists needed to do could be programmed trivially with the help of AI then their job is probably also replaceable by AI.

That would be harder. I shuffled data into a new form; they wrote papers. All I had to understand was what they wanted, and how to get there; they had to understand enough of the world to argue that a given natural experiment showed drug X was an effective treatment for condition Y.

That was the point, I think.

>Tools like email, instant messenger, and online calendars made secretaries much more productive which increased demand for the skills. Wait...

There are more "secretaries" than ever, and they get to do far more productive things than delivering phone messages.