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Comment by nickporter | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that people group IT and software development together? To me, they are two completely different fields.

For example, I see an IT person as a mail server administrator in a large company, and a developer as the person who would write the mail server software.

I'm not saying that an IT professional never writes code, or a developer won't ever touch a Nginx config file. I just mean they are two different types of work.

It's something I have noticed for a while now, not only with your article.

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It's not like this any more. That's why recently there are so many "software engineers" - you write your Ruby code, install and configure NginX, Passenger etc., even support a cluster of machines (LB, DB, Apps), maybe with a little help for Chef.

I think it's interesting that people with a computer science and technical background are often referred to as "engineers" in tech.

It seems like such a general label that can apply to anyone from a chemical engineer to a CS major, it all depends on the context.

I just graduated from Uni (in Maths). I had a lot of engineering friends, who didn't mind the CS students going into "engineering" jobs. They got really annoyed with a "telephone engineer" installing their telephone line - they were like "No, you're a technician". The difference in their eyes is that engineers are designing and implementing systems, which we ofc do in software development, whereas technicians solve low-level problems in those systems.

At least in university I went, first 2 years was pretty much general engineering, with chemistry and biology etc. included. Even now, most of grantpas and grantmas around, I'm speaking with, if I tell them, that I'm engineer, they trying to ask me to fix their TV/computer/washing machine etc. In most cases, I'm trying...

To train drivers to army bridge builders.

DevOps changed that. At my first few software engineering jobs, if I didn't write any config files, they wouldn't have got written.

Agreed! I've worked at mostly start-ups, and I have yet to work at a start-up that didn't require us all to be DevOps.

Because people as a general rule abstract anything related to computers or computing into one lump object. This vague, ossified amber of the interwingled nature of computer media causes problems with understanding computers.

That and the sort of person who does development ends up doing some IT and Vice versa.

> Because people as a general rule abstract anything related to computers or computing into one lump object. This vague, ossified amber of the interwingled nature of computer media causes problems with understanding computers.

The same thing happens with every field. If you're at all medical, you're lumped into the 'doctor' category regardless of whether you're a neurosurgeon or a scrub tech, and all doctor-type humanoids know everything about everything from the cingulate gyrus to my granny's chilblains.

Which is still closer to the truth than imagining that everyone who is 'good with computers' can instantly diagnose and fix every single problem that has ever come up for everything that can run software.

Yes they are different, but they are so close aswell. After all how much job movement is there between IT & development? Lots. Compare that to the job movemement between IT & being lawyer (not that much) etc.

I wish there was more movement between IT and lawyers; then we'd have some developers who understand data protection and copyright principles and some lawyers who understand IT.

Whatever you do, don't get into a bikeshed argument with a lawyer-turned-programmer. If they were a good lawyer, they will be an expert in persuasion, and can get you fired for disagreeing with them about Allman-vs-BSD indenting. Not out of malice, but just by following their old habits.

Let's start with getting some lawyers to understand math first before moving on to IT.

    class Computer:
        pass

    class IT(Computer):
        pass

    class SoftwareDeveloment(Computer):
        pass

    #that's how people see it.

old style object or python 3?

None. Just pseudo code. :)

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