Aren’t they all the same…?
It was a fresh and fragrant morning…! I was sitting with my dad and was having a small chit chat over a cup of coffee. Out of the blue, he asked me about the well-being of a friend of mine from school. “He is doing good. He works as a computer engineer at a multinational company.” “Great…! And what about your other friend?” he asked. “He is also doing well. He is a software engineer.” I replied. “That’s good to hear. I never knew that he is also a software engineer just like Mr. XYZ’s daughter,” he replied. “No, dad, she’s a data analyst. She is not a software engineer,” I replied in a vexed tone. After a long pause, he asked me — “Aren’t they all the same…?”
I am sure most of you, just like my dad, who is not familiar with this technical IT industry-related jargon, feel the same way. Whenever we all hear the professions like ‘computer engineer,’ ‘software engineer,’ ‘IT engineer,’ ‘data scientist,’ ‘web developer’ and so on, most of us feel like they all do somewhat the same jobs or just the proxy names of the same profession. To be honest, until recently, I used to think the same. But this is far from reality! They all do different jobs and play different roles. Let us try to understand it.
Now when you buy a computer, it comes with two components — the hardware and the software. The hardware is the physical part of the computer like — hard drive, processor, integrated circuit (IC), etc. The design and maintenance of these components are usually done by a person who is a ‘computer engineer.’ These computer engineers often have a background in electrical engineering, which aids them in hardware development unless they need the help of Electrical Engineers to develop the computer system’s internals. Now, moving onto the other component of your computer — the preloaded software packages, which are often termed as operating systems — like Apple Mac OS or Microsoft Windows or Linux, etc. The designing of these operating systems that manage computer hardware is usually done by ‘Computer Science (CS) Engineers.’ Now, these operating systems are loaded with programs like Microsoft Word or Excel, or PowerPoint. This software that you use in your day to day screen time is mostly designed and developed by people known to be ‘Software Engineers.’ These guys mostly do the designing and development of the application software. Now, finally, when you set up your laptops or computers in a company environment or a closed network, they often require testing, configuring, hardware, and software troubleshooting to meet the company’s needs. This task is accomplished by professionals that are termed as ‘Information Technology (IT) Engineers.”
To summarize, the computer that you buy is designed by Computer and Electrical Engineers, the software that comes pre-installed in these computers to coordinate between different hardware components of the computer is done by Computer Science or CS engineers, and last but not the least when these computers are configured to function in a private network say, in an office environment, the troubleshooting, software installations, and maintenance is done by IT Engineers.
Apart from these engineers, other engineers help and ease our lives during our day to day internet usage. An example could be, a Web Developer is a person who develops the ‘frontend’ (what you see on your screen in the browser such as Google Chrome) as well as ‘backend’ (all the processing that you cannot see on your screen and happens in the background on a software level). Furthermore, Data Analysts gather a large amount of data, organize it, and then extrapolate it to reach meaningful conclusions. For instance, if you buy anything on Amazon, you will get suggestions about the similar products that go well with your order. Or on Netflix, you receive recommendations based on your watch history. Depending on their expertise, they are often termed as data engineers or data analysts or data scientists.
This was my humble attempt to explain the difference between all these professions in layman’s terms. Thus, I hope that next time when you hear that someone is a Computer Engineer or Software Engineer, you won’t mistake them all to be the same…!!
Till then, happy reading…!
Dedicated to engineers who are working day and night to shape the technological front of the 21st century.