It's a term of art in certain circles, and sometimes I forget not everyone knows it.

When I go out on a project, usually there's some bullet-pointed set of goals that you can provably reach or not reach. The software functionality is fairly defined, there's a date by which it needs to be available, and the people and machines that are going to get used to make that happen are known. My job consists, to some extent greater or smaller, of wiggling around with those three sides, features/time/resources, until they make a triangle.

Ideally I won't have to be the one to say anything needs lengthened or shortened, because that's tantamount to saying the people who are paying me were wrong, and people with money hate hearing that. (Usually they weren't 100% sure they were right in the beginning, but while they're writing checks, they don't plan to be wrong.)

In the end, though, there's a way to tell it's over: there are features available, and you can look at the calendar to see if the date got hit. Or vice versa.

Sometimes, though, projects are less well defined. It's too early in the game to say what features or timeframes or resources are needed to get where people want to go, but nonetheless the money people know they need to bring on help. At the time that these start, the objectives can best be stated as some variant of "Come have a look at this for a while and tell us what you think."

I myself don't like this much, although there are people who make it their bread and butter. The less-well-defined projects tend to just end at some point when the wind shifts, since it's rare to have people who will not only pay you to define the needed triangle bits, but also give you free rein to site the vertices, and bend the angles until everything has a chance to come together.

Usually you're there as an expendable third party, to prove that it can't be done unless somebody stops being stubborn. You have to consider your job to be the best possible delivery of provably bad news, and there's no objective way to tell whether you're doing that well enough.

I usually refer to these latter gigs as "doing something fuzzy." Sometimes colleagues wind up in those situations, and of course we all try to keep up with what we're all doing these days.

So when I hear what an old acquaintance's newest project described, and I say "ah, she's doing something fuzzy", I don't expect the odd reaction I get sometimes.

For the record: it doesn't mean I think anybody has switched teams on a personal level. Or that I had any particular personal insight into what sort of fuzz they personally preferred when off duty.

Jeez, people, let's be pros, OK?