Published earlier this year, but still relevant.

  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Computer science is not IT. IT is about knowing how to use, deploy, and administer existing software solutions, along with a bit of light development to get things to work together when they aren’t necessarily directly compatible.

    CS is about creating software solutions and understanding how the pieces fit together (at a low level), as well as how to evaluate algorithms and approach problem solving.

    It’s not even coding, though coding is obviously involved. For a coding class, they’ll teach you the language and give problems to help learn that language. For CS classes, they might not care what language you use, or they might tell you to use specific ones and expect you to learn it on your own time. The languages are just tools through which you learn the CS concepts.

    An IT professional might know about kernel features and how they relate to overall performance. A coder might be aware that there is a kernel doing OS stuff under the hood. A computer scientist might know the specifics of various parts of what a kernel does and how one is implemented, perhaps they’ve even implemented one themselves for a class (I have, though I was personally interested in that kind of thing and it was for a class notorious for being difficult, so most grads didn’t).

    • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      My employer considers developers, infra, SRE, PC Support, even QA all to be part of the “IT department”. I’ve always used the term “IT” to just cover any specifically “tech” sort of function. As opposed to, say, finance, sales, HR, operations, etc.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Guessing you mean in a similar vein to the connection between various degrees and food service jobs?

        Personally, I’ve been able to avoid IT jobs so far.

        • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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          46 minutes ago

          IT as in information technology is a stupid broad category, and the only people who say otherwise are just trying to not be painted as in IT.

          Network engineer, IT. Software Dev, IT. Program manager for that big roll out, still IT. Call center meat in a seat, IT.