Today my manager - at one of the big4 - told me the whole dev team needs to help another team to finish their tasks in time. They working with excel files, typing values in the cells. You know.... compliance process administration. I just simple responded no way. Dev guys will never do any secretary work at all.
He told me then he just realized they hired wrong developers and he going to find a better HR selection process.
Whats wrong with this type of guys? Experienced devs - as we all are - can find another job in no time. So we just laughed about this kind of threat. Does he really think if we quit and his idea to solve the mess of the another team fallen apart he can explain the story to his director?
So my manager is not so good and smart at all. What about yours?
I like that approach, I also don't complain when I am asked to help another member on their tasks even if it's not in my field.
I develop and use tools to help me with the boring tasks and it helps me to learn new things. Also taking a break from my main task is good sometimes.
I've just kicked off my blog and my experiences with Management, both in managing people in a Multi-National and in my own software company will be something I blog about.
With 60+ staff in my own company I learnt a lot of things the hard way so hopefully some of what I write will be of interest whether you are a manager or an employee.
Manager is a useless low-level job, however, good managers exists and you will probably won't see one in most firms. Real manager is a high position which requires years of coding experience as well as at least basic cross-domain experience in fields like design, business development, operations, sales, marketing. So it explains why it's much harder to find a good engineering manager then a good engineer and why most of managers are "kids"/"freshies" who often put themselves in a such laughful situation like described one in the question.
Anyway, each professional should master self-management and teamwork skills on a personal basis.
The problem of other team in that case is only problem of that team and the only who should be fired, are them. However, if any of your teams in organization is using old technology or any tools inefficiently, it is yours, engineers, responsibility to propose changes, in any case it is mostly the responsibility of the CTO/VP of Engineering/Lead Engineer/etc.
There is no my team, their team, there is no I, they, there is only WE and OUR ORGANIZATION and if part of that organization suffers, the whole organization suffers, but again if the Business Operations in that organization are not well established or not transparent/known enough, then cross-team/department work can't be efficient and one team won't be able to help another. This is the responsibility of COO or CEO, while most companies, especially, smaller ones and those "design/dev agencies" don't have real executive officers.
Instead of just laughing in your situation, I would at least propose a solution which could be an implementation of the own tool/back-office/panel/whatever or use of the any 3rd party ready solution.
Answering your direct question I don't have managers and will never have typical management system in my organization. As I said anyone MUST master management skills, it's part of your "professional" definition, which includes self-management, self-control, proper communication (including cross-team/department), awareness, proposal of solutions and ACTING on your own without waiting for permission, orders, tasks, confirmations.
So the only manager for me is myself and this one manager is still not satisfying me enough, however, talking from the perspective of people under my leadership, I always try to be a Leader not a Manager and there is a huge difference between both, but in any case one person may help another even if it's not your direct skillet or job.
Anyone must work, adapt or die.
Todd
Software Security TechLead
The way I see it is it's a nice break from the routine. It's only a problem when it becomes routine. But if it's a 1 time help and they want to pay you developer pay to do admin work, who cares?? You win in that one and if any firm is smart, they won't keep doing that because they could hire an admin assistant for a lot cheaper. Again, if it's a rare occurrence, I say crap happens and get over it. If it's all the time, that's when it's time to bring it up that it's not what you're there for.
When I've had to do boring stuff in the past, it's actually helped my development because now I can write a program or script to help do that boring stuff or it gives me insights into how the company could benefit from a program. I would not have seen these facts without doing the work myself.
However, I suppose if you were truly happy there you wouldn't have Even posted this!