I mean, yeah, 99% of candidates should know what that means because it is an extremely common initialism. Although, I could see some engineer who worked on networking drivers for 10 years might not be up to date on the design patterns of frontend engineering.

That's exactly what happened to me. I was stuck in embedded systems world right out of college and then one day took interview with Google, they were asking me questions clearly looking to hear "MVC" in my answer but I just didn't know it back then...

Not all programming/engineering circles use the same buzzwords. For five years my mobile development groups used the concept without the acronym.

Agreed. I interviewed a few QA candidates at a previous company that used a term completely differently than we did. When I rephrased the question from defining the term to "what kind of test would you run in this situation" I got the kind of answers I would expect. It's far more important that a candidate understands the concepts needed to solve a problem, than that they have memorized a term.

Hell, someone could be able to define MVC and explain how you would use it, but have no idea how to actually implement something using it for a given programming language.

Even then it's worth remembering not every MVC is the same. Fat/slim models. Intelligent/simple views. There's lots of approaches to even a well known paradigm.

Knowing proper terminology is necessary in order to stay up to date with developments in your professional subject area. If concept X is an established concept in your professional area of expertise, and you don't even know that its name is concept X, then you likely have not read much about concept X, and consequently, are likely not up to date with current developments related to concept X. This isn't just semantics, it's about professional literacy.

I'm sure a lot of people know what MVC stands for. I don't think there's anyone on the planet who can be sure they know what it really means.

Right. Everyone and their mum know what M and V stands for, right? Now .. C? C is tricky. Please don't ask any further questions about C, will you?

I'm not sure if this is a joke. Model and View are really clear. Controller I usually find munged in with the View and it's not always profitable or clarifying to separate it.