Calling all geeks: Techie-to-English translation assistance requested

Factual Questions
1

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.

2

Acronyms sprout like weeds on software projects, because the engineers love to use acronyms to describe every component, system, and subsystem involved. Most of the time, these acronyms have little or no bearing outside of one particular project, but they end up on resumes because it sounds cool. :wink:

(“Why, on my last project, I was developing the DATM interface through CORBA to the OCI back-end, processing information from the VIPP, VEPP, TRIP, EMS, and RTS subsystems!”)

Now, let’s look at some of the stuff in your list:

Stabilized code
Sounds like bullstuff to me. The meaning probably depends on whether “stabilized” is a verb (as in, “I fixed the bugs in this code”) or an adjective (“I wrote some code that didn’t blow up”)?

Message routing/validation/translation/mapping
Computer A sends a message to Computer B. Computer B has to translate the message to an understandable format, make sure the message is valid, map it to a list of known messages, and/or send it to the proper recipient (routing).

Query tables
SQL querying tools
Probably means a lookup table, not unlike a dictionary. SQL is merely a form of database.

Much of the time, no, because of the project-specific nature. There are some common names for commonly-used technology, such as SQL, CORBA, EJB, J2EE, and IIS, but unless you’re already somewhat versed with the specific fields, you won’t have an easy way to identify them as common acronyms.

Call up the moronic engineer in question and ask him to elaborate on what all those acronyms mean. S/he should not be surprised by this, because he doesn’t really expect most folks to understand them anyway – again, they’re there primarily to (a) impress another fellow geek, and (b) look impressively complicated.

Bottom line: don’t sweat it, you’re not a dummy, and ask the responsible nerd to spell 'em out.

3

SQL is Structured Query Language; it is a simple yet very powerful tool for (in it’s most basic usage) selecting and extracting information from databases; it is particularly useful in extracting related (relational) data from multiple sources and combining it (for example customer data from a table of customers with their relevant sales data from a separate sales data table).

4

I understand your confusion. I interview IT people very often, and some of the verbal gymnastics they use to express simple concepts are apalling.

This sounds like a BS phrase meaning “bug fixing”. What would one say if they didn’t do this - that they de-stabilized code? Yeah, I’d want that on my resume…

Ummm…yeah. This is a meaningless phrase out of context. It could apply to numerous tasks and numerous situations.

Also known as “sorting” by some.

This is either a verb (where it says they requested or input data into a database) or a noun (where it refers to a collection of data used to store routines that put data into or extract data out of a database).

This is a very generic term that means a tool that extracts or puts data into a database. It covers the gamut from Microsoft Access to Oracle.

This means they wrote a document, and started with “Chapter 1”, and ended with “Appendix Z” or whatever. Seriously.

5

Yes, this sounds pretty funny, but to be fair, at bigger development shops, documentation can be written by several people. “End-to-end” is just a way (a vaguely pretentious way, yes) of indicating that the individual was responsible for writing the whole thing, instead of just the chapter on subgranular frohickes or whatever.

6

Have a look at http://www.webopedia.com/ It is a kind of online geektionary.

7

http://whatis.techtarget.com/

8

The easy thing to do is to befriend a geek in the IT department and have her/him look over your writing to make sure you don’t mess up the jargon overly badly. :smiley:

9

FOLDOC: The Free Online Dictionary of Computing

The only techie dictionary you need.

10

Before I forget: FOLDOC isn’t strictly technical. It explains cultural references (such as ‘foo’ and ‘bogons’ and the different meanings of random) and enables you to get a good bearing on the computer culture and even the pre-computer influences on the computer culture (Alice in Wonderland is a good book to read :)).

11

Stabalized code is code that has been tested and is relatively bug-free. You want code to be “stable” so it A) works and B) does not break any old code. It’s not a term you would put on a resume, but it is an important part of a developers job.

It’s good that you are trying to understand the terms. A lot of users can come across sounding like imbeciles when they say things like “can we just create a button that does that?” or “why isn’t that ready yet?”. I imagine a lot of it has to do with hacker movies where some geek just sits down, starts typing and all of a sudden you have a new program. You wouldn’t expect a mechanic to just start banging peices of metal with a hammer and create a car in a day, would you?

12

If we had an IT department, I’d do that (and believe me, I’m no stranger to the idea of befriending geeks; some of my best friends are geeks!)…we are a relatively small law firm (about 50 people total), and we basically have 2 IT guys. One of them is a completely useless moron; basically, I can fix about 90% of the problems he knows how to handle by rebooting.

The other one is a very knowledgeable guy; he’s working on developing some really cutting-edge stuff (cutting-edge for the legal field, anyway) that will make our lives, and the clients’ lives, a whole lot easier. In cases of desperation, I’ve been known to corner him; however, I try not to distract him too much from his own work. If I bothered him about every unknown term, neither one of us would ever get anything done. That’s why I was looking for something I could refer to myself (and big thanks to all of you who posted responses, especially the Web links; I’ll check them out from work, where I have a faster connection.)

And unfortunately, calling up the geek in question who wrote the incomprehensible resume isn’t generally an option, as a) it’s generally not good client relations practice to clue the client in to the fact that you don’t know what the hell they’re talking about; b) many of them are currently located overseas, which is why they’re having my office do work visas for them in the first place, and calling, say, Indonesia tends to be expensive and impractical, what with the time differences and all; and c) if I called them, they would tend to keep me on the phone for ages asking all sorts of questions, and once again, I’d never get any work done.

Thanks again to all of you who posted specific term definitions; those were just meant as samples, as there are billions and billions more where those came from…

Anyway, back to surfing the SDMB, which is as close as I care to come to geekdom on my much-needed day off!