Is UML used at all in the industry?

I create high-level flowcharts and diagrams all the time professionally -- it's a useful way of compactly conveying information in docs or architecture design proposals. However, I don't bother using UML. I don't find its formalisms helpful (and most people I work with wouldn't recognize them anyways). Similar thing with my coworkers. I've seen plenty of diagrams, but never any that use UML. I also think stuff like class diagrams are worse then useless. If you're creating them manually, they're likely going to become out-of-date fairly quickly. If they're auto-generated, it's probably better to auto-generate reference docs instead. At least you can ctrl-f to search through the latter. They're also way too tied to OOP and inheritance. This maybe made sense ~10-20 years ago when heavily OOP languages like Java ruled the game, but make less sense now given the modern trends of using more multi-paradigmatic languages and the overall de-emphasis on inheritance. So, relying on them heavily runs the risk of constraining the design space and making you write suboptimal code. > Will it help stand me out or am I wasting my time here. Being a good communicator is an essential skill if you want to progress up the career chain. After a certain point, your career growth becomes contingent on how well you can explain and advocate for changes to the code or overall technical strategy. Being able to create clean and intuitive diagrams is one way you can improve your ability to communicate. Learning UML could be one way of developing this skill, depending on how exactly it was taught to you. It's not the only way nor sufficient by itself though. For example, if you're terrible at writing, you're probably not going to be an effective communicator no matter how clean your diagrams might be. > Also erd modeling? Personally, I think this is more useful as a tool to teach people about database design. The hard part is figuring how to split up the data and how they should relate to one another. ER diagrams are mostly a tool for exploring these concepts.