[opportune]

I think this is a cultural distinction that depends on where you are. I have seen many Europeans group both engineering and “operations” stuff like help desk into IT. Whereas in the US we limit IT to only operations and in practice may also exclude highly technical operations like SRE or devops from the “IT” bucket.

I see it as like distinguishing the engineers that design cars from the mechanics that help people with their cars. The distinction blurs when your “mechanics” are operating on bespoke and highly complicated machinery that may have maintenance that includes extensive engineering knowledge (like race cars, or large backend production systems) or requires the operations to be done by the same engineers that created it. But being an IT person that specializes in printers, or internal networks, or Windows configuration and policies is more firmly in the “mechanics” area. Which is not to devalue their skills as setting up a big network can be very complicated and difficult; just as being a mechanic on something like a nuclear submarine is also probably pretty complicated and difficult.