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Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
- crinkly 1y agoHaving sat thriugh an AWS team PowerPoint I’m not sure I believe this.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoBezos hasn't been there for years and AWS was always given pretty wide latitude to differ from retail Amazon under jassy even when he CEO
- laidoffamazon 1y ago3.5 years at Amazon the only PowerPoints I saw were intern presentations
- crinkly 1y agoI work for a big enterprise customer. We get them. Usually a good time to get some work done.
- jmclnx 1y agoI have to agree, the most painful and uninformative meetings I have been at all have one thing in common, powerpoint. Best meetings, no presentations and they get into details. His rule/method interests me.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- grues-dinner 1y agoSame for schools. We only had one teacher use the shiny new digital projector regularly and his lessons were a complete waste of time. Now it's the default lesson format, it seems. Good for teachers, as you can just recycle the same slides forever, good for admins as you can see the teacher's lessons via email, good for schools because it looks high tech, so it must be good, but on average, crap for learning. Not least, everyone is watching the screen, not the teacher. Even acetate-based overhead projectors and premade transparencies are better than just clicking though slides. If you worry about facing the class while teaching, and OHPs the modern solution is ones that have a camera facing down and you draw on paper are quite neat and a lot less bulky. I'm not talking about the occasional video or animation or detailed drawing, obviously there are good things you can put up on a high-res digital screen. But most slideshows are just "click, narrate, click, narrate".
- bediger4000 1y ago> you can just recycle the same slides forever, This has been true since overhead projectors were invented.
- grues-dinner 1y agoTrue, but OHP lessons are somehow still a lot more interactive than clicking through bullet points one at a time (not that all PowerPoint lessons are like that, but lots are). Maybe it's simply the physical act of changing the sheet, but my memory of the lessons was that they played a much smaller part in the lesson than a PowerPoint usually does in a PowerPoint lesson (and later lecture).
- bediger4000 1y agoMy sister, 5 years younger than me, got high school geometry with a set of overheads that were used by a different, older, teacher when I was a sophomore. My memory of those lessons was that Mrs White only did things on the overhead slides, with wax pencils. A PowerPoint would have been lively compared to euclidean geometry on overhead slides.
- dudeinjapan 1y agoSite getting the HN hug of death?
- ivape 1y agoI actually worked at a company where someone’s job was to just make nice Power Point presentations. I’m not being facetious, that’s how the guys actually described his role as.
- sys_64738 1y agoThere were three of them at my last company. That was their role.
- perching_aix 1y agoWhen I watch conference recordings from CCC, Defcon, Black Hat, GDC, etc., "powerpoints" (slidedecks) work just fine for me, I'm highly engaged for hours on end. Maybe it's not the format that's the issue but the content, and PPT is just being scapegoated? In a way, even most high quality YouTube content is little more than a presentation. FYI, site is down, so this is only in reaction to the title. Likely the only valid excuse for ever doing so.
- mytailorisrich 1y agoI think your point and examples are addressed by this quote from the article: ""PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool," Bezos explained. "Internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You want to be truth-seeking. You're trying to find truth.""
- bluGill 1y agoGood slides are hard to create. It is much easier to write you presentation out in slide format, which makes for bad presentations (but if someone misses you can send them the slides - which won't help for good slides)
- rs186 1y agoIn many ways they are showcases or demos. They are meant to convey author's viewpoints. There is a set narrative. Unlike the memos mentioned here, they are not drafts that need to be reviewed closely or discussed in meetings.
- al_borland 1y agoA lot of people are really bad at making slide decks, and PowerPoint often is the lazy presenters tool of choice, so it falls on the sword. When I was last leading a team we prepared extensively for our demos. We used PowerPoint, as everyone did, but we reviewed the deck several times as a team, moving things 1 pixel this way or that way to make sure everything was lined up perfectly. If someone was getting into the weeds, we’d pull them out. If someone was talking about what they did instead of how it related to the user, we’d redirect their focus to make sure the presentation would be meaningful to the audience. If we were handing off between people, we’d practice that so it was smooth without and fumbling or people not knowing how to share a screen. We would spread this out over 3 separate meetings with time between for people to tweak and tune their parts. We’d also be thinking about the demo at the end of the sprint during sprint planning to make sure it was something we could show, and we collected what we needed along the way to show the value. The end result was really positive feedback from everyone and even after a year our demos were very well attended. One manager with 30 years in the company showed up to one of our demos and said it was the best presentation he had ever seen at the company. The little things really matter to give a good impression at the end of the day. When most people make a slide deck, they are doing it as an obligation to check a box, and it sucks. In my view, if we couldn’t properly explain to our stakeholders what it is we did and why it mattered, we might as well not do anything at all. Those demos were our public image to the organization and that was how people would see and judge us. In many ways, the demos mattered more than the work itself, and needed the same care (or more). Much like people judging the cleanliness of a restaurant’s kitchen by how clean the bathrooms are, the quality and inner workings of the team are judged by the demos. Lazy PowerPoints are indicative of issues throughout the team. My current team (I’m an individual contributor on it) has garbage presentations put together by a lazy person, and it shows. I hate it. No one really knows what we do, and someone just got laid off for failing to properly explain the value of what he was working on to leadership. Poor presentations, and direct leadership not making this a priority, cost him his job as far as I can tell. Prior to the layoffs, he was very outspoken about our lack of quality demo and tried to champion making things better, as did I to some degree, but we got zero support, and I was explicitly told not to step in and help. So yeah, it’s not PowerPoint, it’s the people who are being tasked with making most of them and their mental framework behind what they’re doing.
- netsharc 1y agoJeff Bezos doesn't belive in toilet breaks or healthy working environments either... when is the next clickbait "Billionaire c*t does this, maybe you should too?" article?
- rs186 1y agoSurprise, this article is not a clickbait, but full of good arguments that people agree with.
- bobek 1y agoThe site appears to be down. HM hug of death, maybe? Writing isn't just communication—it's a thinking tool that forces clarity and precision. Yet I still get pushback when advocating for written narratives over slide decks in technical decision-making. Writing is frequently considered "extra work" :( I was even so frustrated that I've put together https://www.bobek.cz/written-narratives/ https://www.bobek.cz/written-narratives/
- xandrius 1y agoBlaming the tool for poor/lazy use of it is a cheap and easy attack. At the end of the day PowerPoint is nothing special, it's just that many people start preparing a topic/subject by making bullet lists. If you're lazy, your job is done: you copy 1to1 that list into a sequence of slides and call it a day. If you're slightly less lazy, you might look for images/graphs/content from somewhere else to support your presentation. Everything changes when you regard the slides as being 100% for the audience and not for you, the speaker. That's when you start thinking about the UX of that, putting yourself into the shoe of who's forced to sit through what you're trying to deliver. But again, blaming the tool is easy and doesn't address the root cause: many people who give presentations, either don't want to give them (someone might have told them that they must) or they do it purely for themselves (or don't really care about the audience).
- sh_tomer 1y agoI think Jeff Bezos is not blaming the tool, but rather the concept of Powerpoint/slides and how people usually communicate when they are using that tool. As an example, Powerpoint is really a tool for selling, and internally in the company the last thing you want is to sell, as you want to hear opinions, open a discussion, encourage questions, and wonder your way as a team to a solution.
- supriyo-biswas 1y agoIt's not a "lazy attack" on the tool, but rather the fact that presentations are mostly used for a unidirectional storytelling and thus most typically suited for all-hands or sales meetings with a specific agenda that is meant to be accepted without discussion or argumentation. For design documents, strategy discussions and the like, it is very useful for both the author/presenter to be able to think through the entire thing and present it as a consistent, interconnected document that does not lend itself to a list of bullet points; bullet points typically imply that there is a cutoff between the individual concepts being addressed, whereas things often occupy some position in the latent space and it is helpful to be able for authors to find inconsistencies in their reasoning, discovering new ways of doing things, and for other reviewers to be able to validate the presented reasoning and data points and reach the same conclusion as a way of ensuring that the document is in fact, correct, and thus arrive at an agreement regarding the topic at hand. There are many organizations which mostly see document writing as a way to satisfy the bureaucratic machine, and therefore reasoning often turns out to be not as important. These places love presentations; and in an ironic twist, the very blog we're discussing offers such a product that is mostly aimed at said bureaucracies.
- oceansky 1y agoWhile the site is down: What are the alternatives?
- swinglock 1y agoWord.
- malthaus 1y agonothing grinds my gears more than "management wisdom" like this and people who then attribute success to small details like that. amazon could have thrived the same way had they used powerpoint, maybe even more. we will never know. also, different people communicate differently. dictating 6-pagers makes you select for people who prefer that, therefore having less diversity in thinking.
- flappyeagle 1y agoNot hiring morons also reduces diversity in thinking
- bryanrasmussen 1y agocan you show that intelligent people think alike?
- Quarrel 1y agoThis is a damn good point. I suspect you're (implied, perhaps) correct, that not hiring morons increases diversity of thought. I certainly hope so.
- flappyeagle 1y agothere are many more ways to be wrong than there are to be right
- ordu 1y agoIntelligent people are much more creative at finding new ways to be wrong.
- Kinrany 1y agoThat's not the kind of diversity we want
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
- Upvoter33 1y agoThere will be many negative comments here so let me add a positive: writing helps you think. More so than making ppt. My guess that it is helpful in some cases to force this level of detailed thought.
- politelemon 1y agoThe purpose of presenting isn't for you, it's for audiences. The thought process or lack of it will happen either way, and can be accomplished either way.
- JoBrad 1y agoNot really a counterpoint, but a “yes, and”: I’ve often made an “internal” presentation that is mostly for myself and maybe a few others, which distills the key concepts of something into a coherent narrative. While it can help others, I also have found the process of creating a presentation, outline, or summary helps me to properly organize (and sometimes change) my thoughts at least as much as it helps convey those thoughts to others.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dewey 1y agoThis looks like low quality ChatGPT based content marketing.
- xandrius 1y agoThey should hire you to be an AI-spotter.
- rs186 1y agoWhile disliking most of Jeff Bezo's philosophy including "leadership principles" nonsense, I agree with this hard. Docs/memos are just better. Too bad it's all PowerPoint at my company, and in some cases, we would already have internal document as "formal specs", then create a separate PowerPoint file for review discussions. Any modification is done twice. This is just ridiculous. One thing I don't see mentioned: in internal technical presentations, I often find myself working hard to make something fit into one PowerPoint slide or manage the layout, and think about whether something should be on slide A or slide B. All of that is just time wasted, and a problem that does not exist with docs (mostly).
- bsenftner 1y agoI hate Powerpoint, it's pointless. It forces linear flow, when in a meeting presenting ideas, linear flow works against being clear, presenting new ideas to people with the authority to stop and ask clarifying questions from earlier. Far too often, a presenter interrupted and asked to reverse their presentation gets discombobulated and the presentation goes south. For this reason, almost 30 years ago, I abandoned PowerPoint and I only use web browsers and web pages, with links on the pages providing non-linear flow through the material. I can be as verbose or high level as the audience desires, and the presentation material works regardless. I really don't understand why this perspective is not more widespread. Anytime I discuss it with someone that does presentations for a living, they act like the sun just rose for the first time.
- tester756 1y agoThe reasoning is sound and coherent
- jedimastert 1y agoI feel like this is like only reading fiction and then deciding that "books are only for lying" or only seeing Mr. Beast videos on YouTube and deciding YouTube is only brainrot
- tyleo 1y agoPeople should figure out what works in a given situation. Sometimes a PowerPoint is the right tool, sometimes not. Blanket rules, “X is bad,” just close options.
- thm 1y agoAdvertorial.
- dathinab 1y ago> PowerPoint is for selling not truth seeking so true, but they can also be good for "overviews/shallow introductions" the main issue is that some presentation programs are just way to clunky to use them for use cases like 6 times a year with low time investment create shallow introduction presentation (without needing to spend a lot of time to "learn" how to use the tool, that wouldn't be worth it for 6 times a year) so outside of "selling" (or conferences etc.) the introduction/shallow overview point kinda dies, too. As a side note how the f* did MS manage to make (web) Powerpoint in their Office360 suite so bad?
- singlewind 1y agoHow much content can you remember in 30 minutes powerpoint demo?
- wkat4242 1y agoI agree in terms to how it's mostly used. I think PowerPoint can be PowerFul when it's used as a visual tool to explain things that need complex diagrams. However those situations aren't that common. And even when they occur the person making the ppt might not have the skill to design it properly, it needs some graphical design chops and ppt is a pretty poor graphical tool with a ton of nasty quirks. But how I see it mostly used is for endless rows of standard template slides full of text. This is where the term death by PowerPoint comes from.
- flappyeagle 1y agoYou can embed diagrams in documents too. Every scientific paper does this
- wkat4242 1y agoYes but Word is also terrible for designing diagrams. Insert one line of text above it and everything gets kicked out of whack.
- skeeter2020 1y agoIt's wild to me that the use of PP and being prepared are held up as antithetical. I don't see how the practices at Amazon aren't in service of the real problem with meetings: they're too often used for information transfer vs. problem solving. You can't expect people to have anything of value to say when you do the "big reveal" (often via the PP wall of text) and then immediately ask them to solution. I see this ALL THE TIME, including a recent meeting at work where the findings of a consultant - including this fact - were shown to everyone for the first time before we immediately jumped into a brainstorming session. Saying "no PP" is the same as saying no to whiteboards, or taking notes or sync meetings, or any tool/process that can be mis-used. I went to business school so essentially have a Bachelor of PowerPoint degree, and one of the few-I-mean-great truths it left me was the hard work to make a good presentation; it's a different medium that most just phone-in with some quick copy & paste. I believe the process at Amazon is addressing the fact that everyone is very busy, and if they just start the meeting it's low-quality "advice-style" contributions, so it's better to eat the cost of waiting for everyone to read. This itself feels like a leadership trick that's actually for the executives who are too busy to consume everything async, but it seems better than the alternative for Amazon. I imagine it too is gamed, with people preparing before hand, then pretending to see memos for the first time yet having amazing, well-tought-out strategies ready to propose.
- aragilar 1y agoThis doesn't sound like anything new, see Edward Tufte on the Columbia disaster and the role powerpoint played there.
- brador 1y agoAmazon were making so much money that all non executive employees could not make a mistake that could not be trivially corrected. Every meeting decision point was either correct or a rounding error cost and quick firing for incompetence. It’s why ex-Amazon is the 2x resume line to look for even now.
- drewcoo 1y agoSee also Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" available from many places online.
- nunez 1y agoAWS, on the other hand...