You're exactly right. In the end, the customer is worried about solving their problem and they're asking if you're aware of <latest thing they've heard>. It's like when you go to the doctor and say "I've read of an experimental new treatment for X, can't we do that?". The doctor has probably already heard about it.

Yup. An experimental treatment is probably not even available to be prescribed, besides it's ethically questionable to use a treatment when the risks (or benefits) haven't been clearly delineated. Even if it could be used, a responsible prescriber would want to try all "standard" remedies before attempting an experimental method.

That's called practicing conservatively, minimizing chances of bad outcomes. It's a matter of astute clinical judgement to glean optimum risk/benefit ratio in a particular case. Since no two cases are ever exactly the same, good judgement is a constant necessity.

I see that the process of developing software has many parallels and not surprising that everyone experiences so much brokenness. When people complain to me about some mysterious program misbehavior (stuff I had nothing to do with) I empathize with them, and try to help them think logically about the problem they're having.

Only rarely can I offer any real insight, but given the insane proliferation of the alphabet soup of identifiers attached to all the "new things" out there, no one I know in the industry feels they have a handle on what's happening.

Seems like the pace of "innovations" will lead to even greater levels of incomplete and dysfunctional systems and can only lead, sooner or later, to truly catastrophic failures.

I think the buzzword abuse exists because of people who don't want to take the time to learn to real skill, and just want shortcuts to sound smart and relevant.

I am very skeptical of people who are "BizDev" or "Project Managers" or "Managers" or "Scrum Master" they generally don't know what they're talking about and rely on buzzwords.

Not necessarily. I suspect that people that have overlap in hist job positions but still need to use a "shared vocabulary" will diverge in their understanding of each word, not by laziness but because simply is another job.

For example, if a DBA and a JS Developer say "We need to use a scalable database", they probably don't have the same thing in mind about what "scalable" or "database" exactly is, however, both are concerned about provide data at performance.

So, if a naive web developer wanna "a scalable document stored!" you can just give to it postgres and presto! ::troll:: ;)

I'm wondering why you have managers in scare quotes. Are you suggestion that they aren't really managers or that managers as a position is just some sort of fraud?

Also Project Manager and Scrum Master are just positions that describe roles and responsibilities an organization / on a team. The people filling those roles needn't be clueless.

I feel people in those positions are just people who want a job in tech / startup and have gotten there not because they deserve those positions but because, they've given up on learning the skills and resorted to becoming a "manager". At least from my experience this is what I've seen. They generally don't really add any value because they don't have any skills, don't know how to do anything.

The positions I mentioned above are usually the position people who failed at picking up any valuable skill seem to resort to.

Elegant summary and recommendation. If NumPeopleWhoUnderstandBuzzwords < NumPeopleWhoUseBuzzwords, then don't assume your answer has to accurately capture the nuances to satisfy them.

If they don't accept your answer and ask a followup, then they're probably a person worth actually having a conversation about the pro's and con's with.

I totally agree with this and have done it myself. I've also been on the receiving end of this when I actually do know the market / tools better than the consultant and I actually do know exactly what I want, and the consultant has tried to brush me off. That does not end well for them. Just a word of caution to take extra care to know the background of the person you're talking to before starting down this path :)