People at work who are now above certain tasks

[Iam]

Thanks. That helped, quite honestly. After I arrived back from a 7 hour round trip to a regional office, having had no lunch and knowing a desktop full of my own work needed attention.

I could have done without it (but I still did it!). And I'm not allowed to rant like that in the office.

 

[mauvais]

I'm a software engineer. I have to do lots of menial tasks already, like err, building the software. I would have issue with answering helpdesk calls, because it's not in my job description, unless it's some weaselesque 'anything reasonable' excuse. If I was supposed to be engaging with customers, I wouldn't be a geek.

Working for a very large company on a fairly large site, I'd also have issues with doing the other chores like collecting mail.

What this all comes down to is that we're supposed to have other people doing these things. It's nothing to do with 'below me', it's that the company would be trying to do them on the cheap with its development staff, which isn't acceptable to me. A small business would be different but I've already seen enough of this where I work now.

 

[Iam]

Asking development staff to do support always struck me as a bit silly, but it wouldn't be the first time I've heard of it. When I was contracting at HP, all the software engineers fixed their own computers, or asked other (IT) people to do it for them if they didn't know how, because the helpdesk took weeks to acknowledge anything, never mind fix it. I didn't mind so much there, cos I was getting well paid and didn't have very much to do most of the time, anyway.

My current job is easily the smallest IT dept. I've been a part of - I'm one of 6, or 8 if you count the database guys... but apart from their stuff running on our network and servers, I don't interact much with them professionally (although I chat to one of them a lot).

I knew coming in that even though everyone has a defined role, there would be expectations to pull together when necessary. Part of what makes the job so good is that for the first time in ages I'm doing lots of different stuff - everything from basic user admin to looking after the network and servers, systems admin and all the regional offices and users - rather than being focussed on one specific area, which was starting to really bore me. But that's a long stretch from doing a fair proportion of someone else's job for an extended period of time and I've had enough of it, quite frankly.

I like my job and I don't want to leave. I deal with users everyday and very few have problems approaching me, or asking me to do stuff for them and I'll always help if I can. I hate telling people to "log a helpdesk call, and I'll get to it" if I can do it quickly as I'm passing. I don't mind actually having work to do and I can manage my own workload pretty well. I fix stuff. But I'm starting to buckle under doing his too, and being treated like a muggins about it.

Bah.

Still, one more day this week to keep my gob shut and get some stuff done and then I've got two whole weeks of annual leave in which to vegetate and not think about it. Hopefully, my boss will speak to him (although I'm not super positive this will happen, for reasons I don't even want to start to get into) and when I get back, things will have settled down.

*crosses fingers*