Can someone elaborate the difference? To me IT is more on the operation side while engineering is on development side. Would love to hear other perspective
This is a little weird to me, because for my age group (I'm 50), both sets were typically made up of the same tribe of computer-obsessed folks who begged a 6502 machine from their parents in the early 80s and took degrees in unrelated fields because of how far behind industry most university CS programs were in the early 90s. (And there really weren't any MIS programs.)
Somewhere along the way, though, a split happened. And in many (but not all) companies, IT became a lower-tier support organization. Salaries stagnated, and a quality gap happened. It might just be that, in lots of places, developers are a revenue source while IT is nearly always overhead. It's a rule of thumb that the more talented folks will probably venture towards being revenue and not overhead, because the compensation is typically better, and the organization will treat you with more respect.
So now, in many but not all places, there's a perception of a class difference between the two. The IT guy is derided as someone 5 hours short of an associate's degree with a cheap certification, no ability to troubleshoot beyond obvious steps, and zero interest in computing when off the clock while the developer is an ivory-tower whiz kid with hobby projects in Haskell and his/her fingers in half a dozen FOSS projects.
I am obviously exaggerating. But this view, which is not uncommon, and reflects a shift that IS real even if not to the degree I lampoon above, is probably why a developer would make the distinction.
My exposure to big-co IT is that BOFH attitudes are sadly common.
One thing that stuck with me from an early mentor -- who as NOT, I should be clear, talking about IT or software at the time -- is that too many people think there is power in saying "no"; real power comes from the ability say "yes".
Only the "executive engineer" held any kudos and there only a handful of those in the country.
In my company (a big Fortune 500) engineering and IT are totally different things if you look from the bottom of the hierarchy. BUT (this is a big but) when you talk to management the higher you get, the more SW engineering and IT are the same. I have been in several meetings where the CEO always referred to the CIO whenever a tech question came up. So the CIO answered all these questions although in reality she has no input into any software development decisions that are being made for our products and her knowledge basically consist of reading vendor whitepapers. It's quite annoying because this way IT often gets multi million dollar budgets for fancy AI/digitization/ML projects that are all wasted because they have no clue about SW engineering.
In summary, there is a very common perception that everybody that uses a computer is part of IT.
In software companies I usually found an IT and an R&D department.
In non-software companies I found IT departments that did everything. From IT support to software development.
This probably shows a lack of understanding of cultural differences by the person surprised by the use of the term rather than the speaker.
Engineering is external facing, their customer is the end user and they generate revenue.
The terms being so clearly deliniated is more obvious in the US, in my experience. But some old brick and mortar companies still treat their engineering departments as a cost centre and it shows.
IT support isn’t even employed here, it’s contracted out.
I have always seen Engineering to be a cost center and not revenue generating. This is the case, since Engineering doesn't directly add to profit but still costs money to operate.