It’s even more fun when your manager makes you do a presentation. And he schedules it at 10pm, so that all the people 12 timezones away can attend at their “morning time.”
But they don’t even bother to join the zoom. The only people attending are also in your timezone up way later than they want to be. And he’s like “it’s ok, we’ll record it for them.” Like wtf.
And then they go and do stupidass incorrect shit anyway, whether they watched the recording or not.
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
Here is my opinion: Slide should have images, diagrams or charts to illustrate what I say, almost never any text. What I say is written in advance in the notes of the presentation that is only visible to me while presenting, but will be readable by anyone who look at the file afterwards. I prepare the duration and delivery of the speech at least three times in full before presenting.
Have you ever been to an office meeting that turned out to be a CEO circlejerk that dragged on for hours?
But a friend of mine went to the grandaddy of them all, something about state politics, some ambitious asshole making a power play and filibustering for an entire day, he had come prepared specifically to wear everyone down, I think he was trying to approve a new set of rules and conditions that benefitted his position, something along those lines.
People who aren't good at presentation making think that they are supposed to convey absolutely everything they are saying and be crammed full of information. I was doing a group presentation sometime ago where my group members insisted I put paragraphs of info in my slides and were worried we would fail for not enough information. Even after explaining that they were meant to guide the audience in what I was going to say, they insisted that it was wrong
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.
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.
Good old PowerPoint karaoke
In university I had a prof that used an overhead projector and a marker to slowly follow the lines drawn on the sheets.
I'd have given anything for a few PowerPoint slides.
Wow! What a quick reader!!
One of my side projects at work is to record training presentations and I try to be so conscious about this--both trying to avoid the word salad slides, and also trying to make my lecture not just reading the slide word-for-word but actually explaining and expanding on the slide content (with my verbal lecture transcribed as a note in the slide and handed out for anybody who might be hard of hearing/doesn't want to sit through a 30-minute video)
Wow! It has numbered slides. Impressive!
Rather than simply give you a piece of text to read, they do it like this so that you can't scan it to figure out what is actually important and focus on that. Every moment and detail must be indulged to the full.
Proper dickhead move.
Lets hope they forgot to run spellcheck
