Due to the nature of my work, I have been in different places over the world, building websites for different causes, usually community projects with a tech angle. Most of the funding proposals I have laid my eyes on are rife with buzzwords.
Even when (either me or other devs) clean up proposals to get rid of all superfluous hype, I have noticed that middle management tends to puts those back in, or worse, they chastise us for taking them out in the first place. The argument they make is that the committees that will evaluate the proposal will need to see the buzzwords. Few things are as disheartening as seeing people having prepared a robust life cycle for a tech or outreach project, and middle management chiming in, to literally say “Great now we need to beef this up with as many buzzwords as possible”.
I don’t know if this is supposed to mean “we will fool them with the buzzwords” or “they are fools that only understand buzzwords”. If anything, I believe that the buzzword salad would make us come down as less-than-credible windbags. I just think is wrong, and if this is happening at scale, then I think lots of funding goes to crap projects, that end up being an abandoned website somewhere on the internet, just to commemorate that this project was once funded.
What is your experience? What projects would you rather see be funded, be it community empowerment open-source tech or other domain?
There is a not insignificant portion of the population who hates buzzwords like you or me. But I am not management and I assume neither are you. So we can only surmise that we too would embrace buzzwords if we are put in a position to pitch our ideas to project managment/VPs.
The reason is Venture Capital: Buzzwords might be the only thing that tethers the money people to reality.
A while back there was the Keurig mania and VCs were unwilling to fund ideas unless they could create subscriptions even if the idea doesn’t work for the product they want to sell as a service. Your chances of getting funded grew exponentially if you tacked on “Keurig, but for <service we offer>”. This sometimes created paradoxes like Juicero, whose subscription based juice packs could be crushed without their expensive and over-engineered juicing machine. It’s function was to just put pressure on a juice sachet that many people began simply rolling tightly to get more juice than the machine itself.
2 years back, the buzzword was blockchain, now it’s LLM and AI. 4 years back I think it was “Big Data” (or was it 2015?)
Anyway… Buzzwords exist to make money people feel smart about themselves. They are simply a tool of flattery.
Only exception to this is Academia or Finance I think.