I hate this. It’s basically just a lecture with slides as the cue cards, which the audience can read for themselves.
It’s like having subtitles in real life.
Ugh. Give me some data, graphs, or pictures of cats to look at for the slideshow or something. Something other than what you’re saying. If you add nothing to what we’re seeing, then… I have eyes. I don’t need you to read it for me.
PowerPoint, at least, has a notes section and a presenter view, so you can hook your computer up with the projector or TV or whatever as a second monitor and PowerPoint can be set up to use the TV/projector/whatever, as the slide show, and give you a presenter view on your screen which shows the current slide, and all your notes.
So if you can’t get relevant pictures, at least put up something interesting to look at, and leave the cue cards notes in the notes section, so the audience doesn’t have to stare at the exact words you’re saying, as you’re saying them, because I guarantee you that if you do, I’ll be judging you on your spelling and grammar.
So if you can’t get relevant pictures, at least put up something interesting to look at
Got it. Filling my PowerPoint Deck with porn, and pictures of Battlemechs
I approve of this.
It’s pretty bad practice to just read what’s on the slide. Presentations would be prepared in such a way, and known to a degree where the slides act as refreshers for the presenter with something visual to give context. There are specific cases where you can’t get away from it, but those are incredibly specific and not very common. Like, safety meetings with specific things that need to be read verbatim to every employee, and even those still need something to break it up. I can’t think of another example.
I do like subtites almost everywhere, but hate these slides.
Maybe I also want adjustable playback speed, fast forward and readable high contrast subtites in my real live playback.
Yes. A good slide show contains a lot of visually pleasing elements that are easy to read and understand but they still hold a lot of information. Like graphs or statistics or just bulletin points with some keywords or single short paragraohs that tell how it is in a nutshell. Then the one who makes the presentation should tell the rest
A good way would be to write an essay with all the information you need. Then you would strip just the most important main elements and add those to the slide show.
That way I got the best grade from one course even though I submitted it late and lacked a lot of other tasks in the course. The teacher was actually impressed by how much information I packed in so simple powerpoint. I also had like 20 sources, did it all in on afternoon the day before deadline lol. Adhd is interesting. You procastinate something for weeks and then do multiple days work in one crunch. Medication would be neat but I live in a country where you can’t get medication even if you smoke weed.
Anyways. I don’t know why I wrote all this. I should be programming
Damn. Are you me? I’m not a programmer so I guess not.
I was hounded by one of my HS teachers to put in a little more effort, constantly.
I got annoyed by this and basically rage-wrote an essay that was due in the span of a few hours the night before it was due. Despite my lack of sources (I couldn’t be bothered to look up the information), I still got an A on the paper. She stopped telling me to try harder. IDK if that’s because she realized I didn’t do poorly because I couldn’t understand, because I clearly did, or she was just satisfied that she got me to do something and didn’t bother pestering me about it, but regardless, I felt like I won.
I never did that well on anything else in her class. I just couldn’t be bothered.
20+ years later, it turns out I have ADHD. So yeah. That explains a lot.
School before realizing I have concentration problems was mysterious time. I juat didn’t feel like doing stuff and I didn’t know why.
Also yeah your teacher propably just thought that you would need extra work to understand the course. I had a teacher who actually told me that when he first started teaching me he thought I’m a bit dumb, a below average student. But then he came to realize that I’m actually really smart but I just don’t do anything. It felt weird because at the same time I wad proud that a teacher actually said to me that I am smart. But at the same time I started wondering that why I indeed didn’t do anything.
I’m going to finally get my meds though, I just have to piss in a jar to prove I’m not smoking weed for like half a year lol. But I have gotten to the point where I don’t feel like it’s going to be an issue. I’m about to turn 24, weed used to be my coping mechanism to a lot of stuff but I have matured now and I feel like a long break would just do really good. Also I want those meds cuz my school isn’t going that well and I want to graduate and get a job already :D the courses aren’t hard but I usually lose the motivation one montv in and after that trying to finish the course is insanely hard
I was diagnosed a few years ago. I was 39. I’ve been on meds since.
My HS experience was fairly typical for an ADHD kid before ADHD was a thing… I was called lazy, I was told I needed to apply myself (whatever that means), etc. I believed it. I just thought I was a lazy ass little shit. I didn’t know why, but the evidence was clear. I understood the information, I just didn’t do any of the work.
Oh well. Live and learn. I eventually made it through college, and into a career, all without meds. It was a painful struggle, especially when dealing with the more monotonous tasks associated with having a job… I was chronically late, I slept in a lot… I was just all over the place.
Now, with the meds, I still have my hair share of bad days, but when I’m faced with the horrendous burden of monotonous tasks, instead of having to force myself to do it, I usually have more of an attitude of “whelp, I better get this done so I can move on”. It’s no longer an impossible task to simply get myself started on something that’s not very stimulating.
It’s nice.
That does sound reallu peaceful compared to this. I bet it was even harder at you time of youth when people didn’t understand the condition.
It’s honestly really super weird nobody noticed that I might be a bit odd. Like I had alll the signs now that I recall. Even some stuff related to asperger. But I just went straight trough the filters
Well, my parents weren’t the greatest. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all that they did for me, but I rarely ever saw my doctor outside of getting shots or whatever… Typical stuff.
Basically, unless I had an obvious and physical problem, like a not insignificant injury or infection, we dealt with it ourselves. So I’m not surprised that I fell through the cracks, so to speak.
I did ok in school. I could have done way better, but I at least passed pretty much every class I took. There were some exceptions in college due to extenuating circumstances, but I got it done.
The change happened when I started researching ADHD because my SO has a solid diagnosis for it, so I wanted to understand them a little bit better, and a lot of the symptoms just resonated with me. So I took action, got assessed and now I’m medicated for it and I couldn’t be happier about it. My brain works differently. I’m different. That’s not a bad thing (could you imagine how boring it would be if we were all the same?). I’m proud of myself.
I’m not really shy about telling people about it, though I tend to keep it to myself until it’s relevant… I don’t go into a room full of new people and blurt out that I’m on meds for ADHD. But if someone asks, I don’t have any hesitation in telling them. There’s so shame in it, there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. My brain works counterintuitively, and I’ve done my job as a human, and gotten treatment so I can function normally. I’m not responsible for my brain chemistry being all screwed up.
Anyways. I feel like I’m talking in circles now. I hope you have a good day.
People who do this shouldn’t be in management.
As Dilbert laid out
Even the most intelligent worker will become an idiot once they are put into management
Being in management is surprisingly more difficult than it appears to be when you’re not in management.
You deal with the employees’ problems and higher management problems while not being able to influence the company or fully protect your employees.
This is a terrible position I hope to never be in again.
If you are good enough at your job and good enough with people, then you’ll get pushed into management again. Realistically it’s a compliment, but I understand the desire to weasel your way out of it, since that has been me too at multiple different times.
I believe so. Middle management is probably one of the worst positions to be in. No real power to change anything but people do expect it from you.
A good middle manager will change what they can, and hold the line against the things that they can’t. They will be a bulwark of protection and understanding for those below them.
Also, if you can’t fucking type properly (ie touch type) you’re not competent to manage others.
There are non-labor people alive today who can’t touch type?
Unbelievably, yes.
Death by a hundred slides.
This is the waterpark I want to go to this summer.
death by a hundred slides water park you say?
CDR time!
(except I’ve had CDRs that were scheduled for a full work week, 40 hours)
You had a 40-hour Colonoscopy Debris Removal procedure? Big ups to you!
What is this CDR you speak of? Like blank CDs?
Canada’s Drag Race? Corel DRaw? Climate Data Record? Carbon Dioxide Removal??
Man, Carbon Dioxide Removal for a full week…
Critical Design Review?
That’s the one I’m familiar with. But the slides themselves are super useful a few years later when you can’t remember what in the world you were thinking.
I looked it up. Commission on Dietetic Registration. Or possibly Colorado Department of Revenue. Or Chadron Municipal Airport (airport designation CDR) in Chadron, Nebraska.
Definitely one of those.
Ahhhhh, makes sense. Duh!
Critical Design Review. In aerospace engineering, it happens when drawings and software are substantially complete, but before starting to cut metal. The goal is to provide some assurance that the design will actually comply with the system requirements.
CDRs are usually presented as a single PowerPoint deck that can run to thousands of slides, with many presenters and dozens of review panel members.
Interesting! I operate fully outside of the realm of aerospace engineering, so this is news to me. I take it this is an opportunity for anyone to speak up if they have any concerns with any aspect of the design before it moves to the production phase?
Exactly so.
You scheduled 15 min for this presentation and I have another meeting after this. So cliff notes only please.
Just email me the script. I’ll have an LLM summarize it.
It really baffles me when people make presentations like this. It’s such an easy thing to correct as well but it just keeps happening.
I assume it’s passive aggressive when they’re forced to present instead of email.
Oh no my kid’s school just texted me he got a fever I have to go. Hate to miss the presentation, can you post the slides in chat after? Thx!
can you post the slides in chat after?
Can you post the highlights in chat after?
Someone who gives a presentation like this is incapable of summarizing - you will be getting the full presentation.
Fuck you. Nothing to do with your comment. just because of good etiquette
Select all.
Copy.
Open ChatGPT.
"Please sum up the following in a tweet: "
Paste.
Submit.
Sure! Here’s what I got: Innovation and synergy are good. We should do them.
Oh thats fine. We’ll have a make up presentation on thursday, i’ll schedule you for that one.
I always feel obligated to reword so it doesn’t seem like I’m reading off the slide. But then people are reading the slide and listening at the same time and I’m not sure it’s better.
Just…don’t then? If you have no further info than what’s in the slide, why are you up there talking? Just send an email.
Each slide should have a max of 4 dot points, with each dot point roughly representing one spoken paragraph. Each dot point should have only the 3-4 most important words next to it. Speak the rest, but imagine that the dot point is what you want them to remember.
For example
Slide says:
- Sales up 15%
What you say:
Due to the added bump from Christmas sales, we moved an additional 2500 units this quarter, which is about 15% of our year to date revenue. This is bigger than our Christmas sales last year, by about 7%. We think the increase is due to our new SKUs.
[Click, next dot point appears]
It’s better to have lots of slides with less info per slide.
If you have a small number of slides but they are too dense, the audience will read it in a couple of seconds then get bored, and will stop paying attention while waiting for you to finish reading.
If the slide has all the information, then it’s a poor slide deck.
The slides are supposed to be an outline. The rule of thumb is max seven lines and max seven words per line.
Here’s a couple examples.
Good slide:
- Revenue: -10% vs Estimate
- Industry trends
- Low demand for new products
- Strong demand for XYZ
Also good slide, depending on who you’re presenting to:
- Revenue: -10% vs Estimate
- Industry: -3%
- New products: -30%
- XYZ: +4%
Bad slide:
- Revenue is 10% below estimate
- Industry has seen a 3% drop in sales
- New products ABC and MNO have had a 30% lower demand than we expected
- Product XYZ has higher demand than anticipated with sales 4% higher than estimate
All the extra information on the bad slide can be delivered by the presenter. It’s not necessary on the slide. The slide is for people to glance at to assist them during and after the presentation and to help them anchor themselves in the discussion.
I like your examples, you really capture how the definition of a “good” slide is context and audience dependent, and yet despite this, a “bad” slide is something that can be understood fairly objectively.
Ugh, I always tell students to avoid this.
That said it reminds me of Larry David on Conan podcast of how he got out of a movie test screening. “I’ve got one question and then I’ve gotta go…”.
Ah, treasures, both of them.
I remember back in high school my teachers would always warn students for doing presentations like that, yet all of them did exactly the same thing. And it was even worse in university, when we had to listen to 2 hours presentation read word by word with monotone voice.
Yup! I even tell them to experiment a little because they get full points either way (my logic is, the social pressure alone is enough to get a good effort, and usually that’s true lol).
It’s because they didn’t trust their ability to remember stuff. But when I lecture, I’m often elaborating beyond the bulletpoints, engaging my audience with questions, making eye contact, etc, so it’s not like I’m not setting a good example. I guess my university it’s just too late to teach?
Ugh the monotone voice is the worst. A colleague of mine does that. If you are making a presentation and you sound bored all the way through, guess how your audience is going to feel?
If you sound too enthusiastic, you might wake people up.
Wakes up
-Wait a minute… you’re full of shit!
Also:
Presenter: Can we hold all questions to the end, please? Thank you!
The end obviously never arrives.
It arrives, but by then there’s no time for questions.
Usually there aren´t any at the end. Perhaps only one or two people actually paid attention and they don´t want to put themselves in the spotlight.
I’m more prone to making the slides be my notes, possibly with data-driven visual aids. 3-5 short bullet points per slide is usually reasonable. I don’t actually give a lot of presentations these days, though.
I take this to the extreme: my slides have little to no text, or even white space. Each slide is basically a collage for pointing at while I rant about the thing. I’m a mechanical engineer, so I also imitate the sounds the machine makes.
My issue with this is that I’d like to be able to distribute the slide deck afterwards for people who can’t attend. I’ve heard people advocate for keeping separate infosheets to accompany the presentation but I can’t be bothered usually.
If my stage performance is unnecessary, then it would be better suited as an email than a presentation. If it is necessary, then they’ll need to watch the video.
I’m not going to create the same message twice in two formats. If they disrespect my time, then I might not be a good fit for their corporate culture.
I hate these kinds of slides because I’ll come across them somewhere and be like “WHAT THE FUCK IS THE CONTEXT FOR THESE NUMBERS??? WHAT DOES THIS HALF-ASS DIAGRAM REPRESENT?” and the information I extract becomes less usable as a result.
I often won’t read PowerPoints in that style unless a recording of the presentation is available, otherwise I just pretend it doesn’t exist and get my information elsewhere because certainty ain’t optional mf.
I think if you’ve chosen your bullet points well then the point should come across through them, but if you’re looking for a higher level of detail then the slide deck is probably not gonna get you there regardless. It’s standard practice to record this type of presentation, but if you’re really wanting a deep dive, you probably want to see the supporting documents, not just an executive summary. I guess it depends on what kind of presentation we’re talking about, too, because a presentation to push info up to management is pretty different from the type someone might give at a conference.
My best presentation at university was during a small seminar. It was a 45min talk about 3 papers and how they relate to each other. I procrastinate a lot, so I didn’t really do anything besides reading those papers until the day before my presentation. That day, a friend called for a spontaneous barbecue, so I had just an odd hour to actually prepare slides. I managed 8 slides in total, the rest I just impromptu recalled from memory. People liked it and it was the least effort I put in any talk I held at university.
The best presentations are about topics you know well enough to discuss at length, and aren’t constrained by paragraphs of points you need to get through. And a presentation is the best way to explain a graph or diagram.
reading those papers
Woah there Mr. Overachiever, you’re making the rest of us look lazy…
Honestly, that’s the right way to do it if you really know your stuff.
The slides are there as a visual aid or backdrop. The “presenter notes” is where all your bulleted items and prompts for recollection go.
Also, and this is where a lot of people get it wrong, the slide deck is NOT a useful document for distribution. It is specific to both the subject matter and speaker; it’s analogous to sheet music. A video of the presentation (e.g. TED) is far more useful as we’re really talking about a performance. At worst, there should be “references” page in some appendix, with hyperlinks to actual media that folks can digest on their own time.
what’s a slide deck?
The slides in the presentation. Old people term
More like an industry colloquialism.
i see, thank you
I’ll never forget the one professor who put up a side of code… And had no idea what the class was about. We spent most of the class reading together with him to try to figure out what the lesson was supposed to be about
Apparently the guy was one of those crazy low-level guys who can do things I don’t understand but build on top of. Guy just constantly looked bewildered by reality, he belonged in the code world
So what was the lesson supposed to be about?
“sometimes it’s okay to skip class”
Semaphores. It was obviously C++ code with a bunch of threads, but as it was a standalone C++ program it wasn’t really clear why it was lol
Oh no, synchronization primitives!
Well, you can end up implementing synchronization primitive if you are writing game. Sometimes game engine is kernel in userspace.
I’ve done it in a Python system at work before. We used a mutex?(The int, not the lockout) to track worker threads
It’s a hell of a lot easier these days… It’s amazing how quickly programming advances when you look back
I’m interested in how this came up in a game engine though, and how recent it was
By low level guys, you mean he knew about circuits and EE? But he got stuck teaching a C++ class but he couldn’t code?
By low level, I mean like kernel work. I’m told he worked on one of the 'nixes way back when.
It was a data structures class, we did Java or Python in the into classes, php & js for Web + db basics and C++ for theory classes. Then you pick your path
Anyways, the guy taught OS, language design, and data structures. He could code fine, he was just a terrible lecturer - extremely disorganized, no lesson plans. He only wasted the one full class forgetting why we were there, but reading his code (labeled by week) then scribbling on the whiteboard was his lecture
I guess I ended up understanding data structures and I never fell asleep, so maybe he wasn’t a bad teacher. It was just mostly just assignments, he didn’t really do quizzes and the final wasn’t much of the grade
I was thinking that you meant like, machine code, by “low level” and yeah. C wouldn’t make a lot of sense to someone who handles machine code.
I’d call that hardware - if you’re code enough to the metal to be writing machine code (or even assembly), the physical architecture of the hardware is part of your code
Low level generally is one step up - manual access to memory, compiling to an architecture rather than a virtualization layer, etc
Strangely, the guy that taught OO theory did our hardware class, we built bit shifters and wrote programs in risc assembly… And ONE program in machine code with the promise we’d never have to do it again
I could understand someone who writes in assembly, but machine code is a nightmare…I think I got it without any mistakes, but my butthole was clenched for 4 hours, terrified I’d have to debug it
Right. That’s my bad. I’m not a programmer or developer, so I conflate machine code and assembly far too frequently.
Why data structures weren’t in C/C++? It would make sense to care about structures, cache locality, SoA/AoS, indirections and stuff in some language that compiles in native code.
Ah, I phrased that ambiguously - it was in C++, all of our computing theory type classes were.
I just got distracted realizing I graduated proficient in 9 languages and reasonably comfortable in another 3. 2 were from internships, but the rest were all from coursework. The last couple years, I was juggling 2-4 at all times, plus the odd scripts
I always thought I was really good at picking up and switching languages, but I just realized my program was designed that way.
That feels like a lot, do other colleges do something similar?
(I guess you could knock off 3 because we ended up switching every semester in software engineering because cross platform apps were pretty bad at the time)
Once you are in the industry long enough, you won’t even remember how many different languages you have worked with.
A good education and experience should get you to the point where you are comfortable picking up and using any language, even if it is new to you.
My undergrad officially required Pascal, C, C++, Java, PHP, Prolog, Lisp, x86 and MIPS assembly. You couldn’t work around those. There was also Tiger, VHDL, and Bash that were required, but you would probably not count as languages. (I’m certainly forgetting some stuff too.)
There was a virtual certainty you’d need some more languages, but not everybody would need the same ones.
the slides will be in our corporate colors: yellow text on a pink background …
And the presenter will regularly quiz attendees on the content
Not quiz as such. More like “any questions so far?” at the end of each slide, but will not give you time to ask anything “no? Ok, moving on”
Or the awkward 5 minutes of silence when no one has a question at all.
Why even have words in the power point if you’re just going to read them aloud word for word?
IRL subtitles for deaf attendees feels like the only valid reason for this.
Honestly, a deaf audience would overwhelmingly prefer to read the document themselves. Otherwise, you’re just sitting there spending seconds reading the slide, then minutes of lip-flapping while they wait for the hearing world to catch up. For each slide.
Isn’t there stuff you can get for lots of different phones, tablets and laptops for that?
Yes and no, live captioning software is common on phones and tablets, but we call them “craptions” for a reason.
If the speaker has a thick accent, isn’t always facing the same direction when speaking, uses lots of slang terms, industry terms, or numerical data, it can really trip up the captions and sometimes it leads to a more confusion than having nothing at all.
Where as if you were basically just using the PowerPoint to display your speech so others could read along, the written words will match the spoken words.
Live captions are definitely better than nothing if you rely on subtitles, I’m only HoH so I prefer just straight up lipreading, compared to trying to lip read in order to retroactively process inaccurate live captions that make no sense.
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