For my job, I spend a lot of time trying to write job descriptions for people who do extremely technical work in various disciplines in which I have little or no background.
I don’t have to be an expert in these fields; I merely have to make enough sense of the person’s job to convince a government official that the person qualifies for the appropriate visa category. It’s much easier to relate the person to the visa category, though, if you understand at least the gist of what the person does. I’m getting to the point where I’m OK with the chemists and other scientific/engineering types, but it’s the IT people of various sorts who make me bonkers, because their resumes are chock-full of acronyms. Sometimes, when I’m reading them, I feel like I’ve swallowed freeze-dried alphabet soup and am in the process of puking it back up.
A few technical term, acronym, and abbreviation samples from today’s work assignments included:
Stabilized code
Message routing/validation/translation/mapping
Order fallout
Query tables
SQL querying tools
End-to-end reference documents
So what’s a poor liberal arts person to do? I know technical terminology, especially in the IT world, changes all the time, but is there some reliable standard reference source (something comparable to the Black’s Law Dictionary, but for the IT industry, if you’re familiar) where I could look these things up? Sometimes I can’t tell the hardware from the software from the operating systems, or even which terms are specific to a particular company vs. those used in the industry at large.
Even if I can convince a U.S. government official knowing what little I know now, I really want to do a kick-ass job, so what I write makes sense to knowledgeable people in the field. Your insights would be greatly appreciated.