4 ms·

You can’t really cheat your way to a better presentation. If the “spitballed” version is good enough for the situation, why expend a lot of effort on preparatio

by pavlov 4y ago

You can’t really cheat your way to a better presentation. If the “spitballed” version is good enough for the situation, why expend a lot of effort on preparation? Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all these presentations?” instead of “why do you all put so little effort in your presentations.”

peteradio 4y ago
If the presentation misrepresents a projects state through vagueness I might call that cheating.
twic 4y ago
It probably isn't good enough. But it's hard for the audience to tell. "Any questions?" "How are we going to scale the data storage?" "Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance." "Great." It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten the presentation.
- pfannkuchen 4y ago
  This is less spitballed presentation and more spitballed design. The latter is much much much worse.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- somsak2 4y ago
  If all you need to answer that question is "we're confident that X" then that's still a problem with the asker. Why are they confident? Have we modeled the data needs over time? What data are we even storing? Basic probing questions should either uncover the lack of preparation or show that things will indeed be fine. Just like cheating is a problem for a teacher to solve, a lack of preparation is a problem for the audience to solve.
  - boondoggle16 4y ago
    This is only true in a low-trust society. In a high-trust society, it's absolutely on the presenter to make their claims not only true, but realistically true, and acceptable by the average person. When people defect from that norm, they are shamed, or worse.
    - somsak2 4y ago
      Aren't we talking about an environment where there are rampant cheaters? My perception was that this is by definition a low-trust company. Of course, it is always going to be easier to remove yourself from that situation and go to a company that has more rigorous interviews that would catch cheating in the first place.
      - mannykannot 4y ago
        The corollary of your argument is that hiring rampant cheaters produces (by definition, as you say) a low-trust company. Putting aside everything else, low-trust organizations are intrinsically dysfunctional (though it may take a while for the consequences to play out.) In them, asking more questions will not get you useful information, and you had better watch your back. See, for example, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Hoxha's Albania, the Taliban's Afghanistan...

by pavlov 4y ago

peteradio 4y ago

If the presentation misrepresents a projects state through vagueness I might call that cheating.

twic 4y ago

It probably isn't good enough. But it's hard for the audience to tell. "Any questions?" "How are we going to scale the data storage?" "Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance." "Great." It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten the presentation.

pfannkuchen 4y ago
This is less spitballed presentation and more spitballed design. The latter is much much much worse.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
somsak2 4y ago
If all you need to answer that question is "we're confident that X" then that's still a problem with the asker. Why are they confident? Have we modeled the data needs over time? What data are we even storing? Basic probing questions should either uncover the lack of preparation or show that things will indeed be fine. Just like cheating is a problem for a teacher to solve, a lack of preparation is a problem for the audience to solve.
- boondoggle16 4y ago
  This is only true in a low-trust society. In a high-trust society, it's absolutely on the presenter to make their claims not only true, but realistically true, and acceptable by the average person. When people defect from that norm, they are shamed, or worse.
  - somsak2 4y ago
    Aren't we talking about an environment where there are rampant cheaters? My perception was that this is by definition a low-trust company. Of course, it is always going to be easier to remove yourself from that situation and go to a company that has more rigorous interviews that would catch cheating in the first place.
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      The corollary of your argument is that hiring rampant cheaters produces (by definition, as you say) a low-trust company. Putting aside everything else, low-trust organizations are intrinsically dysfunctional (though it may take a while for the consequences to play out.) In them, asking more questions will not get you useful information, and you had better watch your back. See, for example, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Hoxha's Albania, the Taliban's Afghanistan...