> "well-presented talks" You are answering the question for us. If it's well-presented, of course we will think it's well-presented. The thing is, a well-pre

> "well-presented talks" You are answering the question for us. If it's well-presented, of course we will think it's well-presented. The thing is, a well-presented talk is usually always well-prepared. Very few people can present well without preparation. The thing is, PowerPoint gets a bad rap because their are a lot of ill-prepared speakers out there. And the reason there is a lot of ill-prepared speakers is because preparing a good presentation is hard and time consuming. Just practicing the talk takes as long as the talk. And then reviewing the talk takes an equal amount of time. So, for you to practice one 30 minute talk, you have multiple 1-hour sessions at a minimum (assuming you can stick that 30 minute limit the first time, which rarely happens). How many people do you know spend that much time just practicing and reviewing their talks? The other thing is, tech talks are usually talking about something specific involving code or architecture, and while a talk doesn't always need slides, in the tech world, it usually does. This is because without slides, you need to rely on the concept that you are trying to get across, and you can't focus on specifics. Sure, you can provide a reference slide at the end, but it's hard. And it's hard on the audience as well. And chances are, you aren't good enough to pull it off. So slides are there to help the audience as well. Not everyone learns the same way (Side note: this is why people who complain about video-based tutorials being worse than pure text piss me off, people learn better in different ways, and the reason text was used for so long was because creating video was much more costly), so using pictures and images can really help hammer the point home. But it's hard. And a lot of speakers don't speak frequently enough to get good at it, because like anything, it takes practice. In the end, if someone thinks not using slides will make them a better speaker, they probably aren't good enough to not use slides.