Ask HN: Management keeps assigning me IT work unrelated to my responsibilities

I’ve been working at this 100 employee company for about 2 years. I was originally hired as a Platform Engineer. In short, my responsibilities were to operate the company’s Kubernetes cluster and related tools that would be used by the engineering team. As a random example, setting up log collection to archive our pod logs for a customizable period of time.

Since I’ve joined, more and more people are coming to me with tasks that have nothing to do with this. Like, “You have access to our Microsoft Azure account, right? Can you fix this problem with our Microsoft Outlook?” I genuinely have no idea why I am asked these questions in particular but every day this seems to spread. They come from everyone: engineers, designers, managers, executives… I think someone at the top is telling people I’m our IT team and people are happy to go along with it because we actually don’t have an official IT team!

I’ve tried to push back against these things. When I explain this isn’t my job, usually that person complains to some high up who then tells me they’d “really appreciate it”’if I helped. Usually this is when my manager tells me I have to do it. I’ve spoken about this with my manager a hundred times. He’s in full agreement with me that I shouldn’t be doing these things, and he promises “I’ll talk with them about how this is the last time” but that never seems to help.

Just last week I was brought into a meeting to discuss a new product the company is releasing soon and they asked me for help creating Kubernetes credentials for the dev team. I said “Absolutely I can do that, but I can’t help with email or anything else like that. I can only do the Kubernetes stuff.” Everyone agreed, even the CTO. And now a week later, “We really need your help setting up our website.” It makes me want to scream that I keep having the same conversations over and over again.

The systems I’m responsible for are really crappy and everyone knows it and hates it. I don’t enjoy being a person that is constantly asked about bugs reported to me months ago that I still haven’t fixed. My manager is constantly defending me to other engineers, telling them I’m so busy and it’s not my fault, and he has negotiated a lot of leeway in the deadlines for my normal tasks. I appreciate that, but this shouldn’t be necessary.

How do I fix this? I don’t want to be pessimistic but it seems impossible for me to fix the underlying problem, which is that a company with 100 employees needs an IT team. But management doesn’t seem interested in this, and I don’t blame them: they’re probably thinking it would be a waste since they’ve already got one (me).