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Comment by jerrya | Hacker News Reader

I said that’s what happens when we hold events for women in IT when there aren’t that many women in this industry – we tend to broaden the definition of women in IT.

I can't really speak to this point, but I am curious, when did computer science and software engineering get rolled into IT?

15 years ago, I would not have said software developers, software engineers, or test engineers were part of IT. IT was that department that kept the corporate computers working and worked for the CFO, not part of the department that shipped products and worked for the VP Engineering.

In the past 5 years, it's become much more inclusive (or so it seems to me.)

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Outside of Silicon Valley anything that has to do with a computer has always been called IT.

I always tell people I'm a developer; and IT is "did ye try tairnin' it off and back on again?"

This is entirely wrong. I've always thought one of the peculiarities about the UK is that they refer to all things computer as "IT" while the rest of the english-speaking world differentiates.

I don't work in IT and I never will, it's a different job with a different skill set. I'm not tech support, a dba, or 'the network guy'. I'm a software engineer and I work in R&D.

I'm not sure it is - in the same way the battle for the word >hacker< has been lost, I know that in New Zealand >IT< is a catch all that means someone does computer stuff.

In the UK too. While I'm mainly a developer, most of the jobs I've worked have also involved being a defacto IT person.

Thing is , I work with unix 99% of the time so when it comes to fixing driver problems in Windows 7 or whatever I'm just as clueless as the next man most of the time.

Well, outside "Silicon Valley" - i.e. the software industry itself - most programmers really do work in IT . The code they write is usually for use in internal operations, and not itself a product they ship to customers.

I'm pretty far outside of silicon valley, and that hasn't been true here at all. IT has always meant help desk, sysadmins, network admins, etc. Developers could be in IT if they were developing internal tools for IT. But software development in the "make software to sell" was always separate. It has only been recently that people have started to call everything relating to computers IT.

> 15 years ago, I would not have said software developers, software engineers, or test engineers were part of IT. IT was that department that kept the corporate computers working and worked for the CFO, not part of the department that shipped products and worked for the VP Engineering.

When I worked for an enterprise software company close to 15 years ago, there was clear recognition of both IT-as-internal-organization and IT-as-industry, and both people who worked in IT-as-internal-organization and people who worked in the development and support of products in firms in IT-as-industry were widely recognized as working "in IT". AFAICT, that is exactly the same situation as now.

(This shouldn't be surprising, since IT-as-industry is effectively just the outsourced version of IT-as-internal-organization.)

> (This shouldn't be surprising, since IT-as-industry is effectively just the outsourced version of IT-as-internal-organization.)

You're right. I've never thought of writing the software for a self-driving car as the outsourced version of configuring Active Directory for IE7, but when you put it that way it seems so obvious!

Yes, pushing bits around here to suit an external set of requirements is totally different to pushing bits around there to suit an external set of requirement. As different a skill as laying tile in the shower recess of a new house or inspecting a sheep for signs of a disease.

> > (This shouldn't be surprising, since IT-as-industry is effectively just the outsourced version of IT-as-internal-organization.)

> You're right. I've never thought of writing the software for a self-driving car as the outsourced version of configuring Active Directory for IE7, but when you put it that way it seems so obvious!

"Configuring Active Directory for IE7" is only (in some organizations) what is left for the internal IT organization to handle because they've outsourced the rest (like "implementing operating systems, web browsers, etc.") to other firms in the IT industry, whether via purchasing COTS products to meet common requirements or by having custom development done by contractors to fill less-common requirements.

IT is the industry. Software companies are in the IT industry. However, the actual "IT Guy" sysadmin/tech-support job is a role within the IT industry. I work in IT, but IT is not my role personally, I'm a developer.

Outside of Companies who's core competency is related to technology 'IT' means everything that is computer related. Actually its even further, I cant 100% pin it down, but the feeling is its like, if you dont have a CTO or Chief Science Officer or something of that ilk, everyone who reports up to your CIO is considered IT. Try that on, its the closest to what I have seen in my career.

It probably varies depending on the industry. I first heard the term in 1985, and it referred to the computer programmers as well (or software engineers, if you prefer, but nobody I knew back then used such a pretentious-sounding title). I'm sure the term is older than that.

Well, in practice (at least some time ago) the vast majority of programmers/software engineers/whatever work on code that "keeps the corporate computers working" instead of "shipped products".

The ratio used to be that in the industry only 10-20% of code was written in organizations that ship software as the product or inside of a product; maybe now it's a bit different - but it can't be estimated by intuition, simply because in everyday life we see only the external part of the iceberg.

I'm one of the rare programmer-who's-not-IT guy.

My job title is 'software engineer', in the sense that I'm an engineer, whose primary duty is to write software for machines. I'm technically under a different department from IT, which manages infrastructure. It gets confusing sometimes.

I'm under the impression that this is a British/US thing. I've always associated use of IT to include software in general with British authors.

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