The Jargon Graveyard

There comes a time in every programmer’s life where he or she must finally come to grips, as hard as it is, with the fact that certain terms on the resume are, unfortunately, outdated. Sure, you can leave these words on your resume, but compared to the newer, high-tech jobs you’d really like, you’ll probably end up in a job using punch cards and monochrome monitors and programming in languages like (gag) COBOL. (Do kids these days even know what COBOL is? I better fix my resume, pronto. I’m almost afraid to go look at it.)

SOAP. The computer world loves acronyms revolving around cleaners. (I just scrubbed my kitchen with Ajax™ before writing an AJAX (not ™) program). SOAP is actually a low-level technology that exists behind the scenes, and still exists to this day. But rarely do programmers directly use it. If you’re writing software that communicates, SOAP might be happening under the hood, but you’re probably not making calls directly into a SOAP API. Instead, the API you’re using is probably making them for you. Nearly ten years ago I started learning SOAP until I realized that to use SOAP, you don’t really use it yourself. So I stopped learning it and instead turned on the TV for an evening of The Simpsons.

CORBA. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture was, simply, cool. It allowed you to make remote calls on another system. But it was huge, archaic, and, to be blunt, a pain in the, uh, “back office” to use. Newer technologies exist these days that work much better.

Client-Server. This word existed in virtually every single ad about any high-tech thingamajob throughout the early 1990s. (Yes, 18 years ago.) Then in the late 90s, with the advent of the Web, it actually started to have meaning. It still does, in fact; we write client-side code in JavaScript and we write server-side code in RUBY or with ASP.NET, for example. But do we need “client-server” as a single, compound word? No.

Web Service. Did you even learn the technology behind web services anyway? Really, web services are great. And we’re still using them. Except today they’re under the big, fancy umbrella of newer, much cooler terms like SOA and SaaS (see above).

Distributed computing. This is so 20^th century. It’s a great idea, and technically we’re still doing it and always will be as long as we have more than one computer talking to each other. (Hey, that thing called The Internet comes to mind.) But nobody cares anymore. It just is. And leaving it on your resume makes you look old and outdated like you’re trying to compete for a job with that old balding guy like me who still uses the command prompt and always will. Instead, opt for cooler, more modern-sounding terms like Cloud Computing and Grid Computing (again, see above).

Event-Driven Programming.  Yawn. Pretty much all software today is event-driven. Back in the day (when I was younger; that’s what “in the day” always means), it was  seriously cool to say you understood event-driven programming (and to use the word “cool” all the time). And at heart, all it really meant was tying code to button and listbox events. Again, yawn. Today that’s pretty much the way all software works, so nobody cares about the actual word anymore.

Object-Oriented Programming. Wait! Don’t take this one off your resume yet, because, unfortunately, there are still organizations out there who don’t understand it. But hopefully soon OOP will be so obvious and common that there will be no reason to have it on your resume. A couple years ago I heard somebody saying that they were working on a project and the team was “thinking about using Object-Oriented Programming.” I scoffed at the idea, and said that once you understand OOP, you don’t “choose” to use it, that it just happens. (OOP: It just happens.) And if you’re forced not to use it, you feel like you have one arm tied behind your back. So on one hand, I think everybody should know what it is, as it’s so fundamental to programming these days, and we shouldn’t have to have it on our resumes. But we’re not there yet. So leave it on for the next couple years. (And in the interview, when asked about it, remember to rattle off from rote the three words: Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism.)