"To me IT is more on the operation side while engineering is on development side. " In my company (a big Fortune 500) engineering and IT are totally different

"To me IT is more on the operation side while engineering is on development side. " In my company (a big Fortune 500) engineering and IT are totally different things if you look from the bottom of the hierarchy. BUT (this is a big but) when you talk to management the higher you get, the more SW engineering and IT are the same. I have been in several meetings where the CEO always referred to the CIO whenever a tech question came up. So the CIO answered all these questions although in reality she has no input into any software development decisions that are being made for our products and her knowledge basically consist of reading vendor whitepapers. It's quite annoying because this way IT often gets multi million dollar budgets for fancy AI/digitization/ML projects that are all wasted because they have no clue about SW engineering. In summary, there is a very common perception that everybody that uses a computer is part of IT.