* Born in Pittsburgh, studied engineering at the University of Virginia
* Collaborated with Robert Gaskins at Forethought to create PowerPoint
* Forethought acquired by Microsoft
* By 1993, PowerPoint generating more than $100 million in sales
* Product is widely used, but controversial and target of jokes
> Mr. Austin and Gaskins acknowledged the complaints, but thought they were unfairly aimed at the software and not the people who were using it to make lazy, poor presentations.
> “It’s just like the printing press,” Mr. Austin told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”
Yeah. I’ll bet that all of the Microsoft office engineers feel this way, and it explains a lot about why the suite is such a bug ridden, shitty performing fucking mess.
The only thing keeping the office suite alive at this point is the enormity of the task to disrupt it.
I surmise that Google workspace has managed to supplant it in a very real ways.
For the last 3 places I’ve worked everything is done in Google Workspace. The only thing that Microsoft has a hold over is with Excel, that’s all anyone used from MS
Yep, I've long conjectured that Excel is what sells MS office. Every other product in the Office suite, including PowerPoint, has very viable alternatives.
Excel has a 100% a strong-hold in most finance departments. I've worked with many finance professionals who's very first instinct for any type of work is to open Excel. When interacting with any data outside of Excel, they'll demand a way to get it into Excel.
It’s JS rather than Python, but Google Apps Script is quite useful for this, IME.
I once wrote a small app to add up all shared expenses among a group of roommates and calculate how much each owed the others. It pulled together rent (recurring), various utilities (from my gmail) and one-off shared expenses (e.g. toilet paper) from a Google form/spreadsheet, added in any money owed from the prior month and generated a nice report, in what ended up being 100-200 lines of code after a few years of living together.
To be clear: I'm not bashing Excel. Agree that there isn't a viable alternative for explorative table manipulation, and the experience of "think/change/see-results" is second to none. I myself use it for low-stakes tasks such as personal budgeting and quick analysis to validate my assumptions on tabular data.
Key word there is low-stakes. I think Excel gets a lot of heat because it's often found used in contexts where it's wholly inappropriate to use (eg driving critical production decisions from SalesAnalysis_JimVersion_v1.8_FINAL.xlsx). That's not really Excel's fault.
They just announced this, but it runs python in an azure container - not sure how it hooks into excel unless excel is also running in the cloud, but a lot of people would want to run it locally instead.
I’m a very happy (and I believe competent) Apple Numbers user. The only thing I miss from Excel is recursive evaluation (which is necessary for evaluating certain financial models).
I worked at a place that used Lotus Notes in the late '00s. Used to say that, when Notes launched in 1989, it was 10 years ahead of its time; and even today it's still 10 years ahead of 1989.
Microsoft are doing their best to alienate their established userbase however, the next versions are just going to be the garbage webmail version wrapped as an app.
I’ll never forget the grade 9 science class Powerpoint presentation I did in 1998. I had each letter of every headline flying in one by one with a laser sound (pew pew pew). That was my first moment of magic with Powerpoint.
Dennis and I overlapped at Tandem Computers in the early 1980s, but we didn't meet until 2003, when we were both members of a small private club of computer geezers. In addition to being a great software designer he was one of the nicest and most thoughtful people I've ever met.
My dad worked at Tandem in the 1980s. I remember going and visiting him at work and the huge tape memory. And the swimming pool at the office in Cupertino.
"Sweating Bullets", "Almost Perfect" (http://www.wordplace.com/ap/), "The Autodesk File" (https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/) and "Show Stopper!" were a few books that I think pair very well, and as a developer who wasn't around in the time really gave interesting and comparable insights into the development of a few really important companies and pieces of software.
Joking aside, I worked for a big corporation once where our project manager's emails were literally blank, with the actual message in an attached powerpoint.
OMG I had a manager do this... I asked him to email me a bug report and he sent me a PPT.
Honestly he could have written a 2-line email. He probably thought he was giving me Important Information. But as I got to know the guy I realised he was just an idiot.
I once had a client become nervous about sending me a screenshot of (slightly) sensitive data. Despite explaining the NDAs, I could only get her to send a redacted version, which was fine given none of the sensitive parts of data was relevant to what I wanted to know. She took a screenshot, pasted the screenshot in to an XLSX, and put a "Shape" over the top of the part of the screenshot that she wanted to redact. Then sent me the XLSX in an email.
If you ran a carpentry shop, you wouldn't retain employees who lacked a basic understanding of their woodworking tools and how to use them. Yet we tolerate this of "information workers" the world over. Why is that? Is it because the image got to you after all, so it doesn't really matter how inefficient the process was?
I am genuinely curious. But then again, I ask the question as a computer enthusiast using a computer to talk to other computer enthusiasts about computers.
If you sell B2C software you are going to end up with customers with a very wide range of computer skills, from professional IT person to someone who can barely find the computer 'on' button. You just have to deal with it.
As a web developer, we sometimes got bug reports submitted that way. I think some people take a screenshot and paste it into Word, and don't know how to save it as an image.
When I "worked" at a public access TV channel, we used a big PowerPoint deck for most of the unprogrammed roll. It was pretty simple too. A G4 cube would just have a ppt on loop, and output it's video into the switcher. When you needed to update the roll, you just replaced the file over the network, and reloaded the application. You were supposed to do this when the switcher was showing some other program, but occasionally someone would forget, and a video of the OS X 10.1 desktop would go out on the air.
Apparently they used hypercard before PowerPoint, but when Apple pulled the plug, they had to move over
The geometry available and the frankly very subtly good alignment-snapping that it has makes it very useful. Posters, ERDs, I'm sure there are other applications too.
I had to make an academic poster in PowerPoint and it was the single worst experience of my academic career. The program just didn't work. I got a ways into it, saved and closed my work, and opened it the next day. Upon opening, no longer could i zoom or scroll or really do anything without the view freezing. I could see the scrollwheel on the side moving but nothing on screen would change. It would stay permanently in this state until i closed it out or (thank God) entered and exited presentation mode, which took seconds to load every time.
Eventually it's crass refusal to do anything even mildly useful taught me the exact set of eggshells to walk on to have a somewhat usable program but the damn thing just wouldn't work. I tried everything, including uninstalling and reinstalling the entire office suite. Nothing changed. My poster was not complicated and my laptop was school issued and more than capable of running a single PowerPoint slide.
I know this is a post of a man's passing. The PowerPoint he built worked. I remember PowerPoint as a usable and fun slide making tool that was usually the highlight of relatively tedious school projects. To see the bug ridden landfill of "BI" "features" it is now is sad. I genuinely spent a day trying to download an old version that wasn't running 3 "ai" processes in the background. It was a simply disgusting experience and i will never use it again.
For exactly this reason we use it even to create Factsheets and other printable reports. Using selection pane the objects in the template can be named. We then replace the dummy content in an AWS lambda running python-pptx using these references. PowerPoints‘ charts and tables are quite powerful overall. Still not bug-free but way way more stable than Word, and every bug I‘ve seen can be worked around relatively simply.
I remember being a bit taken aback when a colleague of mine at a large company where design is a pretty big deal showed me some really good wireframes and told me that he made them in PowerPoint. It’s actually quite a good tool for wireframing
the ability to drag and drop rearrange, and the ability to have a header and then just body text is really useful for lots of mockups. I think at this point, I've used powerpoint (or equivalent) in place of at least:
* word processing software
* CAD software
* pretty much everything adobe
* Xcode
* photo software
PowerPoint is an impressively mixed bag. Something of an extreme example, in my mind, of the "amorality" of tools and, yet, the strongly "good" / "bad" that can come of them.
PowerPoint, for all its putative and/or quite real flaws and bad ... points ... is, in some sense, one of the most powerful tools in the modern world. How many decisions have hinged on PowerPoint presentations? How many decisions might have been subtly affected by aspects of the design and implementation of PowerPoint (over versions / time)? ...
It's absolutely been hugely useful at times, and, also, seemingly a preview for some Dante-style "ring of hell".
In any case, I salute Mr. Austin, offer my condolences to friends and family*, and ... well, I was going to point to a comedic take on PowerPoint that I love but it doesn't fit w/ this news, so, simply: R.I.P. Mr. Austin.
* Seriously, not just as a matter of form - I have used it for years through good and bad. I definitely feel some connection, though marginal comparatively.
I work in a Corporate where we have lots of "strategy" teams and PPTs flying around.
What I learned is that PPT are more than a presentation format in this culture, they are a signaling tool:
• something that is "just" an email, or "just" something somebody said in a meeting doesn't carry much weight in Corporates
• .. but if you put it in a PPT with some graphics, it signals you've thought about it, and probably had some lesser minions also think about it and prepare a PPT
• .. further, if you put it in a PPT, that means you're serious about your position --- it signals commitment
• .. and finally, a PPT shows that you know how to play the game, you're not some tech weirdo that thinks PPTs are irrelevant
As a tech weirdo I still think PPTs are the best way to convey concepts. You can mix bullet points with images and video and have everything be progressively revealed exactly when you explain it. I can‘t even think of an alternative to this other than adhoc whiteboard drawings which can‘t match PPTs on any axis except if you‘re just (collaboratively) developing an idea/concept
On the other hand, there's a good reason that bullet points aren't how formal communication is actually done, which is that they're terrible for actually doing the job of conveying information. For that, you need sentences in paragraphs, and PPT can't really do that.
The best option is probably just an html doc — mix text (real text, not bullet points) with whatever media you want. Can be viewed on every device in the world.
I think what the GP comment is conveying is the cultural factor of a PPT. It’s not good for information communication when not paired with a human being giving the presentation that would say those sentences shown in bullet form. If you have the human, writing full sentences on a slide deck that they just read out is the worst.
But the cultural factor is you signalling “I want to PRESENT something to you”. It implies this is a pitch, and you’re only seeing the notes. It’s a way to say “come talk to me”.
The information density being so low is kind of a feature.
Bullet-points deliver facts and concepts. Paragraphs deliver narrative.
Both have their place, and you could trace each to far earlier forms, such as religious iconography or clan shields, and sagas or mythic poems.
Iconography encapsulates an existing notion, or expresses an identity or affinity.
Sagas and mythic poems contain stories with characters, events, themes, morals, and other teachings, and are structured mnemonically through verse, meter, rhyme, allusion, and often musical intonation or accompaniment, to facilitate recollection both for the teller and the audience.
I'm not much of a fan of slide decks myself, largely, though as a storytelling aid they can be quite useful. That takes skill however, and instruction. Edward Tufte's suggestions for how to use slides to accompany a talk (but not substitute for it) are excellent.
There's really no need to limit yourself to bulletpoints in PPT. Powerpoint offers so many other ways of illustrating information. I really like powerpoint as it's one of the simplest tools to do visual animated story telling.
Video is usually more effective for asynchronous presentations. Powerpoint is great for spoken presentations where everyone is in the same room. But they generally suck as summary reports. For thinking and analysis word docs are superior. For asynchronous presentation video is superior. Video allows you to control the timing and framing in a way that a slide deck cannot. The main downside to videos is that they are harder to make. But there is a reason people prefer science documentaries over recorded lectures or lecture slides.
Most good video presentations include a ppt or the equivalent. A video is just a spoken presentation that’s recorded, like a live spoken presentation it can include visual aids or not, it’s still a spoken presentation. You may confusing categories of things, or maybe I’m too used to seeing ppt with slides containing embedded video.
Just as a movie can go far beyond being a recording of a theatrical play, a video presentation can offer far more possibilities than simply being a recording of a slide presentation. It can allude to possibilities that are closer to experience and convey a sense of reality that a slide deck can’t achieve.
You do know that you can just record your PowerPoint slide with all the spoken world and mouse movement and timing and slide transitions and whatever else, right?
At least in Corporates, the point is not the content usually, or at least not 95% of the content. Usually there are 1-2 key slides per PPT that the audience actually cares about, something like the "Roadmap" slide, where you commit to a timeline on the project (even though nobody understands what the project actually is), or the "Costs" slide, where you commit to a budget (even though it's way too early to say).
This is the point, supported by the signaling of the PPT itself.
The remaining 95% are slides that the audience doesn't care about and/or doesn't understand anyway.
Yep. I think things like Jupiter are really just imitating ppt. It’s generally the same concept, a linear series of information chunks, mixing text and graphics, the formality of written prose stripped away, just enough for one sitting. PPT are great, it’s the people who only use PowerPoint, often for nefarious ends, that I am distrustful of, not the modality itself.
> I can‘t even think of an alternative to this other than adhoc whiteboard drawings which can‘t match PPTs on any axis except if you‘re just (collaboratively) developing an idea/concept
I think this is a major part of the problem. Powerpoint is so commonplace now that we cannot even conceive of different ways of presenting information to groups. If you cannot figure out how to express an idea in the medium of Powerpoint or slideware in general, then that idea is difficult to express nowadays. That limits the kind of information you can share, especially complex information that is not so easily conveyed in bullet points or in sparse infographics. "The medium is the message", in other words.
Maybe I'm old, but I remember going over a lot of information in group settings without the use of Powerpoint. Here's a few examples of alternatives:
- overhead projectors (common when I was in elementary school)
- slide projectors
- lectures and speeches
- live demonstrations
- field and laboratory work (can be very hands-on learning)
- panel discussions and debates
- group discussions (after everyone reads a book or report)
- displaying a written report on a screen rather than distinct slides (I do this myself sometimes)
Some of these aren't going to work that well if you need to convey Q3 sales figures, for example, but my point is that there are other options out there even though Powerpoint has flooded the arena. Note that you can even combine these with Powerpoint or slideware and get the best of both worlds too for that matter. I'm not against Powerpoint as much as I dislike how it is conventionally used.
(I must also note that many people, myself included, hate the "slow crawl" of having information revealed progressively. It might work sparingly for dramatic effect but having been in so many meetings with bad speakers, it is far too easily abused and always makes me ask myself "When will the speaker get to the point?").
The classic corporate PPT slide is a disaster of over-information! I try hard to keep my slides short, with text that is a jumping off point for my actual presentation, but my effort to teach this method has mostly fallen on deaf ears.
When the information density is high, or there is a just a lot of text, then the audience reads the slide instead of listening to the speaker (that is, they're reading the slide instead of listening to me).
When I gave a colleague this feedback, he just told me that the information density is a positive thing, and then showed me a 100 page PPT from a previous job that amounted to the spec for a contract.
So, different strokes? I guess if the PPT is meant to be standalone, to not accompany a speaker, then the high information density works. I still try to convey only one major idea per slide, and I leave specs to written documents.
A final comment: the only thing for me that is personally more distracting than a high density slide is looped animation in the slide. My ADHD brain just locks onto that visual cue, and it takes serious conscious effort to keep focused on the presenter.
The classic corporate PPT slide is a disaster of over-information!
There are two kinds of slidedeck. One that's behind you when you're presenting, and one that's shared to be viewed without the presenter. Using either in the wrong situation results in people thinking it's a 'bad powerpoint' that has either too little information because the presenter isn't there to fill in the blanks, or too much because the presenter is just reading it out.
Yeah, you're a tech weirdo. Don't out yourself this easily. Don't talk about "your brain" and ADHD and "information density" and all that. It's better to conceal your power level in the corporate world. If you want to play with the corporate chads, you need to play by the rules, however awful those rules may be.
This is on the money, especially "commitment" to playing the game. In my industry, the supplicant presenter is acknowledging that the audience is busy, important, and only needs the "smart points" that s/he's slaved to provide on the corporate template and color scheme.
Of course, Tufte pointed out that this can kill people.
I think it's as simple as, if you put it in a PPT, you can rest assured that it will be readable and usable by the recipient, which includes passing them along to other people, presenting it, using the slides in other presentations, and so forth. If you choose some "weird" format, then the burden is on you when someone can't use it for some reason.
There was quite the profusion of office productivity software at one point, some of which had approaches that I preferred (at least for some purposes) to those that ended up being enshrined in the Microsoft suite.
One of the things I like about Google Workplace is it ended up stripping out a lot of the sort of cruft that Microsoft added over the years and ended up with components that are more streamlined for my generally fairly simple needs.
Not sure which of those had vector graphics in the same style as modern PowerPoint (Storyboard was bitmapped), and whether old PowerPoint already had vector graphics.
One aspect of Amazon culture I’ve enjoyed is that meetings are document driven, and PPTs are rare, even non existent. Meetings start with dedicated reading time. It feels like PPT engendered this false sense of communication by making it easier to bullet-ize and visualize. PPT in practice lowers the critical thinking required of presenters and presentees.
Why do meetings start with dedicated reading time? Did people always come unprepared? How can I imagine this? Is it like: "Hey folks, thanks for showing up. This is the document we'll be discussing in 20min. Please read it now?".
I don't think it's bad. I like written, long form content. It just is very far from what I know.
If there's a meeting and most, but not all, of the folks read the document, then there's the potential they'll have to wait while the others read the document. To avoid that eventuality, the convention is that no one reads the document until the meeting, and then there's no wasted time.
source: worked at Amazon and was told this by my boss
That's a pretty good idea, because reading the preparatory material for a decision is almost always valuable but often not explicitly valued. An employee might think they could be 'doing something better' with the time, but even the meekest worker can confidentially feel justified in reading a document if it has scheduled time in the published agenda. This levels the playing field between the overburdened and the lazy on one side and the well-prepared on the other.
From a personal point of view, however, I instinctively dislike the idea: trying to process and evaluate material in public is stressful, chiefly because it is so often in my experience presented in bad faith. The slightest expression of positivity is immediately twisted into unwavering enthusiasm and complete consent, and a hint of misunderstanding is used as justification to discard any further criticism! You have to really trust your colleagues to allow yourself to learn, be confused and risk making mistakes in their company. But if the workplace really does have that non-competitive culture, it is surely the most efficient way of conducting meetings, possibly the best combination of written preparation and live collaboration.
People are busy and often times will be aware of the broad strokes of the topic at hand, but not necessarily the latest details. A well written narrative will bring everyone back to the salient choices.
I've asked some friends at Amazon this and never quite got a satisfactory answer.
It feels really disrespectful to waste my time, when I've bothered reading the preparatory material, because X number of other attendees haven't. And, presumably, for Amazon to do this for every single meeting, it must have been commonplace for folks to not manage their time effectively to get prepared for the meetings they attend? Quite a bizarre approach.
Or a pragmatic one. Also I imagine there are other positive side effects like preparing a focus for the topic at hand. And 5 minutes, or even shorter might be enough for most topics I think. Better than people pretending they know what is going on.
The optimal is for everyone not to do the reading, there’s time for it in the meeting. And in terms of time management, managers can be in back to back meetings for a large portion of the day and this provides focus time to not just wing it.
Wouldn't it be optimal to have read, understood and thought about it before the meeting? Although this probably never happens, except maybe if you go full async and request a thoughtful response from everybody before a meeting might happen.
I've never worked at Amazon, but this is something I really envy about my friends who do. I love a well-written, concise document, but the large enterprise I work at now is in love with Google Slides. I can't stand them.
powerpoint is one of those things that most people don’t think about nowadays, but before presentation software, people had to carry printouts, or slide decks for projectors, maybe laminated sheets for overhead projectors. PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.
Right. People didn’t assemble a presentation deck back then, just to mail it to someone for them to look at on their own.
It’s also taken the place of the business letter and some other formerly-common office document formats. I’m not convinced it’s saving time, just creating more junk. Which is how I feel about a lot of application of tech, actually—I suspect huge productivity gains in some narrow cases mask that most tech use is somewhere between a lot worse and only slightly better than whatever it replaced.
Going back many many decades my experience is that people were at least almost as bad about reading documents as they are today. The fact that people used overhead projectors and transparencies didn't change the fact that I spent a great deal of my time in meetings with slides.
Indeed. Apparently even Powerpoint started out there. From Wikipedia: “The first PowerPoint version (Macintosh 1987) was used to produce overhead transparencies, the second (Macintosh 1988, Windows 1990) could also produce color 35 mm slides.”
Apple invested in the company (Forethought, Inc) before Microsoft aquired it in 1987.
I don't think I'm particularly old (only in my 40s) but I'm old enough to have made presentations with transparent sheets on an overhead projector. I don't quite remember how I prepared those sheets (I want to say a printing tracer?).
In my school, there was a copier that’s could copy onto a transparency. Also, early laser printer ads would promote that they could print onto transparencies.
My HS teacher had elaborate combinations of transparencies that he would layer on top of each other. The upper layers containing hand-drawn marker annotations.
> old enough to have made presentations with transparent sheets on an overhead projector
I’m in my early thirties and we sometimes used transparent sheets on overhead projector too when I was in school. Although in our case we made the sheets with the computer (Microsoft Word, Paint, etc) and they gave us transparent sheets that we put in the printer. I remember that the ink on the transparent sheets would smudge if we touched it, which sometimes accidentally happened when we handled our transparent sheets.
Even in high school I sometimes saw teachers use overhead projection with transparent sheets.
One of my math teachers in high school brought a special device with him one day. This one https://www.calculatorsource.com/ti-89titanium-vs.html (or some other model by TI). It’s an external screen that you connect to a TI graphing calculator and then put it on top of the glass plate of an overhead projector so that you can project what the calculator is showing for everyone to see :)
They were often just typed/handwritten and copied onto transparencies for internal/academic stuff. It was also pretty common to use HP pen plotters for quite a while when I was working in the late 80s/90s.
We had 35mm slides for customers but that was frequently an exercise in: "Here's our roadmap but this has changed and this isn't correct" because it took effort and time to get changes made once the slide was created.
Bit older. For my first presentations, I drew on them with markers. I've still got one where I inserted a Snoopy cartoon by hand. But later, you could photocopy them, or put them in a laser printer (assuming you had one).
...And created a lot of revenue for storage companies and headaches for email admins. When MS Exchange rolled out, people discovered that email database size was higher than typical for just email messages.
A little bit of investigation revealed that PowerPoint slide decks and other multimedia was consuming the increased storage since Exchange made it much easier to send large attachments to others.
A strange legacy. Most of the management in my company cannot digest even simple information if it’s not on PowerPoint slides.
Even when it is on preparing PowerPoint slides, text heavy slides are a big no no.
Some days, more time is spent on PowerPoint slides than writing code, or actually engineering. We jokingly call presentation prep work as getting ready to push the PowerPoint to prod.
I don’t see an issue with this. I had a very technical CTO at my n-2 job who was in his 50s and would often write POCs himself in C# or Python as research.
When he wanted to see if data that we got had the information we needed he would upload it to S3 and run some Athena queries.
But I still know when he asks me some questions he just wants a very high level overview and doesn’t want the details. I’m working with him now on a side contract.
He now has graduated to using Athena, AWS glue with Python and Quicksite reports. He does that when he is “tired of dealing with product managers and all of this scrum shit”.
Sounds like a really good leader. Looking back at my response, I realize I was somewhat unclear. I meant that most individual contributors are expected to do prepare a lot of slides so management can understand what’s going on and it very much cuts into actual time to build the thing.
Then when things aren’t going expected, we make more slides on why it’s not going as expected instead of allocating time to do the engineering work that’s needed to course correct.
The rest of the story was that he was hired at a startup that was founded by two non technical brothers. The brothers got funding and hired a consulting company to build the MVP and find product market fit.
They brought him in to build out an internal team to remove their dependence on the consulting company. I was his second technical hire. He wanted to make everything “cloud native” for HA and scalability reasons. We sold access to micro services to large health care providers.
We just talked during the interview. No leetCode, no techno trivia and I came up with my proposals and even though he knew I had no practical experience with AWS, later on he told me he thought I was a smart guy and could figure it out.
Two years later when a little worldwide pandemic hit and people were hammering our services, they didn’t miss a beat.
After I basically “put myself out of a job” and had done everything I was initially hired to do, I got bored and got a job at AWS in the Professional Services Department.
Three years later, the company we worked for had had an exit, he moved on to another company and I got Amazoned. I called him up and we talked about some problem he was having with an Amazon Connect (call center) implementation. It was a service I knew well and he offered me a consulting contract on my last day at AWS.
FWIW: I also got another full time job two weeks later.
I don’t see anyone else giving me the opportunity that he originally gave me to lead his “transformation” vision. He knew I had never opened the AWS console when he hired me.
I also got my start in tech with an irrationally benevolent technical manager. He was a PhD research scientist who has built this incredible system and was quickly building a team out to scale it.
I was just getting out of the military, and trying to find what was next. I had no internships or previous engineering experience. The most I could speak to was some comp sci classes I was currently taking for my MS, and a background in excel. He didn’t grill me with leetcode. There wasn’t really even an interview. We just talked about big picture ideas for 45 minutes. And then he told me he wanted me on board. Keep in mind this was at a large, well known unicorn - hiring didn’t normally work like that was but somehow he just sort of made it happen.
The code base was in Java. I had never written Java, but he knew that and told me I’d probably figure it out. The team also didn’t have the bandwidth to upskill someone as junior as I was. I appreciated the opportunity to sink or swim and prove myself.
I would usually just upvote you. But I love the term “irrationally benevolent”.
Unlike Amazon that is “irrationally malevolent”. But I knew that going in. I made my money. Learned what I could. Put it on my resume and let it open some doors.
I don’t mean to come off bitter. It was a completely transactional decision to go to AWS and it served its purpose.
This is literally their job. Implying that they “cannot digest even simple information” is almost certainly a misrepresentation. ICs will naively paint ideal management as simply “master craftspeople that get usually paid more than me”, and when management doesn’t meet those expectations, they’re dunked on because they’re fish that can’t climb trees. Management are often there to contextualise and decide. It’s not that the information is in PowerPoint form, it’s that (aside from the weird “slides full of text” people) things in PowerPoint form are often well summarised in a way that they typically aren’t in an email or whatever else. Quite often their job is not to go deep on something. It’s often detrimental. Sometimes it’s detrimental to not go deep on something in particular, or to not have the right people in place to do that leg work for you. Overall though, management having PowerPoints is a good thing. Easily.
I’ve heard multiple folks at a big 3 management consulting firm—and not the green recent-grad meat, I wasn’t interacting with a team on an engagement—state the same thing, in terms that implied even less intellectual capacity or ability on the part of the average C-suiter than that post did.
You aren’t the only one. :) I always find it fascinating and terrifying thinking about how PowerPoint may be crippling people in charge of things like nuclear weapons.
I use Google Slides as a lightweight notetaking format at work. This works great for me because it's super flexible, and has the added benefit that I can easily convert my notes to actual presentable slides during standups or other meetings. Usually these aren't actual polished slides such that you'd see in a corporate presentation, but talking points to keep meetings more focused and productive.
> The Rolling Stones told The New York Times: "the surprise opening act by Severe Tire Damage was a good reminder of the democratic nature of the Internet."
God, I miss the old internet, when you could say something like that and actually mean it.
PowerPoint is where I first understood the concept of image editing as a kid - dragging and dropping. And clip art was before it’s time - imagine how much people would love that exact same thing copypasted onto a reel or a TikTok. RIP Dennis.
When I got a job in academia and was faced with creating my first conference poster, I was amazed to discover PowerPoint is the customary software for creating them. It does a pretty good job, too.
EDIT: i'm not roasting a dead person you guys. anyway i feel like if people hate a tool it's sometimes because the tool is so good that it gets abused for every other purpose and some of those purposes aren't a good fit, it's not because the tool was bad it's the opposite.
Everyone is using Google Slides though now, no? So much so that my boss always says "Prepare some slides for the meeting" and not "Prepare a power point".
