IT Professional vs Developer

Question

What are you?

Mahesh Chand · Answer

I always thought everybody in IT is IT pro. But I was on Microsoft.com website and they separate Developers from IT Pros. Check this out and this has been there for years now :)

Vulpes · Answer

I'd say I'm both, though IT Professional is a more generic term which would include people who aren't developers - for example, hardware experts.

Sam Hobbs · Answer

The important thing is that there is not a law or anything like that requiring people to use specific terms. A discussion could go on forever if we were to try to specify what the correct terminology should be.

Ibrahim Ersoy · Answer

@Sam & @Mahesh; They're also known as IT Professionals.Look at certifications section of Microsoft to get a view of MS on that one Although its Desktop Technical Support,it doesnt differ much from Development Support.So we could say that "Support Technician is also an IT Professional" Thats my idea.No offence

Mahesh Chand · Answer

That's a good question Sam. Almost every company has a technical support staff that helps installations, hardware and software fixes but I am not sure if Microsoft puts them in IT pros category.

Sam Hobbs · Answer

When I got out of the US Army I went to work for Carte Blanche, which was a credit card company. After being in application development for a while, they promoted me to Technical Support. That was more than a decade before the IBM PC (the one most people know about at least) and of course Microsoft existed. I wonder if that job title still exists; it probably does somewhere. A Technical Support person installs software, whereas an application person would have no authority to do that. A TS person also debugs problems with the operating system and other software. I remember one time I tried to balance my checkbook using hexadecimal, since I was reading so many dumps that are in hexadecimal. If a TS person is lucky they get to write programs but that was rare for most TS people. So how does Technical Support compare with "IT Professional"?

Mahesh Chand · Answer

I guess you are correct Vulpes. Microsoft could not come up with a better way to separate developers (that is programmers, leads, architects) from other IT folks (system admins, network engg etc).

Vulpes · Answer

Perhaps, they couldn't think of a better description for IT Pros who aren't developers which would fit into the box :) Still, Microsoft have never been noted for consistency!

Manikavelu Velayutham · Answer

can you little bit elaborate on this ?