[gregjor]

Probably about as detrimental as engineering people using business terms incorrectly, or not understanding goals and priorities outside of a narrow technical domain.

People use words incorrectly all the time, or ask questions that seem to want a quantitative answer when none exists. Doesn’t seem like a big deal.

[ssss11]

That’s what I was going to say.

And to add - I’ve dealt with business people where it was necessary to use a “wrong” term to describe something technical simply because that’s what they think of it as. In other words you need to use the words that work for your audience for the best results, and you need your business leaders to have the right understanding to make the right decisions regardless of what word is used.

[gregjor]

I may have read too much into the question, but variations of this come up fairly often in HN and other programmer-oriented forums. Sometimes management and business people don't know what they're talking about and say the wrong thing and mismanage teams. In my experience it just as often happens that programmers (or engineers if you prefer) create a bubble and isolate themselves from the rest of the business, then get upset when they aren't asked to participate or management tells them to do things they don't want to do.

Businesses pay for programming teams to add value to the business, deliver products, make money. Sometimes business decisions don't align with what programmers perceive as the best course. And sometimes programming teams make decisions on their own that have costs and consequences that they didn't foresee or explain to the rest of the company. Cuts both ways, in other words, and for most companies software development is just one of the moving parts.