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.
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.
This person points that power
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
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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.
stupidass incorrect shit
like scheduling a meeting at 10pm
If you seriously wanted to communicate something, you wouldn’t do a presentation.
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.
Add to that going back 2-3 slides every 5mins and you get my professor at uni. Watching his classes was actual torture
One of my teachers at uni used a Word document instead of a presentation. And yes, he still read it word for word. It was like a very shitty audiobook
Alternatively, the best live audio textbook performance ever
Or Bob the boomer goes can you go back 3 slides?
There was a guy, I shit you not, that would ask him to go back to the previous slide cause he wasn’t done writing it down
Like bro, i’m almost sure the professor will post the pp online. You dont have to copy the presentation… take shorthand notes…
Nah, he didnt post the presentation online. Still, the slides were worthless and had nothing of value on them, the entire class was really a waste of time, no reason to copy anything
Bob The Boomer may have been passive-aggressively trolling the presenter. “I’m not in here with you, you’re in here with me” kind of thing.
At university, I had a lecturer who took this one step further. Instead of a power point, he used a word document that he read word by word.
legere (lat) to read => lectura (lat) the reading event => lecture (en) => lecturer (en) a person giving/hosting a reading event.
A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.
Books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive, and this new thing they established in Bologna in 1088 – the so called “universities” offering lectures will be a major breakthrough in the history of mankind to distribute knowledge!
Good to know some professors still honour the only true way of teaching.
Pfff this generation is wasting good expensive sheets of paper when good old oral tradition has worked for thousands of years. Writing was invented only 4000 years ago and still haven’t caught on.
it’s a fad, like medicine
books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive
some things haven’t changed …
A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.
Does this still happen, with digital and all?
If the lecturer hasn’t got the notice books can be cheaply printed and purchased nowadays, probably yes. What is this digital your speeking of?
Bruder …
We had one who pulled up the pdf of the textbook to read it word by word
You sure they weren’t just sharing the wrong screen?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good old PowerPoint karaoke
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.
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
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.
Just send the powerpoint and an audiobook at this point and add a comments section
Better yet, just send me a transcript, or just the PowerPoint. I don’t need someone to read to me. I can read faster than they can talk.
just the transcript please – PowerPoint is a horribly bloated file format if you’re doing nothing more than transmitting text …
The powerpoint has a logo I made in Paint and a meme at the beginning and a meme at the end. Also the animations are bliss.
I also added sound to the transitions. These are absolutely necessary to understand the Content of the Presentation.
And we’ll take at least ten minutes of the presentation time to try, fail, and retry to get the audio working.
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.
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?
![Death by PowerPoint [Work Chronicles]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4f415e52-28ad-4ac6-86ca-2947f664acb8.jpeg){kind=link}