IPC used is fairly common for desktop programmers. IPC just communicating with another process, and technically web developers are doing it as well. What most

IPC used is fairly common for desktop programmers. IPC just communicating with another process, and technically web developers are doing it as well. What most people mean is something like COM(Windows), Named pipes, memory mapped files, etc that allows processes on the same machine to communicate with each other. If I was hiring for desktop software or pure server software, I would expect someone to know some IPC mechanisms.