I've heard it quite a bit from people who are exposed to technology regularly but not explicitly technical. For example, product managers that didn't come from the engineering side.
I don't even really blame them, because I'm sure they simply hear the phrase a few times from technical people without explicit explanation of meaning and then adopt it themselves to mean "any big growth" which is a fairly reasonable assumption contextually, prior to someone pointing out to them that it means something more specific.
FWIW, in my CS education (both at school and self-directed via books, system manuals and such) I was taught to worry about whatever base is relevant to my current data and level of abstraction to the machine. 2, 10, 16 and even 8 were the usual culprits, but certainly nobody tried to teach me to forget about the ones other than 2. I worry about base 2 far less than base 10 in my day to day code despite the fact that I'm old and know assembly (6502, 68k, x86, MIPS, ARM) and still do a lot of bit-twiddling.
I don't even really blame them, because I'm sure they simply hear the phrase a few times from technical people without explicit explanation of meaning and then adopt it themselves to mean "any big growth" which is a fairly reasonable assumption contextually, prior to someone pointing out to them that it means something more specific.
FWIW, in my CS education (both at school and self-directed via books, system manuals and such) I was taught to worry about whatever base is relevant to my current data and level of abstraction to the machine. 2, 10, 16 and even 8 were the usual culprits, but certainly nobody tried to teach me to forget about the ones other than 2. I worry about base 2 far less than base 10 in my day to day code despite the fact that I'm old and know assembly (6502, 68k, x86, MIPS, ARM) and still do a lot of bit-twiddling.