Programmer's Guild
Submitted by softwarejanitor on Wed, 07/02/2008 - 2:58pm.
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So I have a ancillary question: The mission statement says it applies to Information Technology professionals. I have never considered software engineers to be under the IT umbrella.
How do you define the boundary between IT and SW engineering / programming? Or is there a boundary at all?
There is no boundary in general usage in the trade press. IT is generally used to describe all tech workers including software development and designers. I think your definition is limited to only areas like help desk, tech support and possibly systems and network administration.
I have considered those who do network administration, sys admins, infrastructure support and tech support to be "IT". Those who develop software for most of the day are "Software engineers". I just asked because "IT" seems to have become a catch-all term for anyone that touches a computer for a good part of their day.
That is basically what the term has come to mean, and its easier just to go with that than to try to fight it.
Old geezers like me can remember back in the 1980s when the generic term for all tech workers was "Data Processing". Seems like the non-techies of the world need a generic umbrella to put all of us into.
While possibly being included in the 'old geezer' community, I think the definition of "IT" (and soundness of the definition) really depends on the context in which it is used. Inside companies (and most companies don't *produce* technology), "IT" is a differentiator for jobs types, departments, etc in an organizational sense. In the cross-industry realm of intellectual property practitioners (licensing executives, attorneys, scientists, etc) "IT" differentiates the collection of computing-related technologies from others like life sciences, pharma, materials, energy, etc. So, a CS-degreed software engineer might not fit into "IT" as a job or organizational label, but does fit within "IT" as a broad category of technologies. I imagine that there are other contexts in which IT takes on additional nuances.
I would more or less agree with you on that, especially in regards to techies who work for non tech industry companies.