Comment by ndm000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndm000 | Hacker News Reader

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I think the sentiment here (and in many comments) is interesting - I've been a consultant for over a decade and felt the same thing in the early parts of my career. Those are really expensive Powerpoints!

In the last few years I've created some of those Powerpoints, and have realized the value in them (not saying that all are valuable). I've been asked questions like:

- We're a year in to a data warehouse migration and have nothing to show for it. What happened, where do we go from here, and how much will it cost? - We'd like to outsource a call center, but don't know where to start both on the tech and process sides. Can you help? - We have a business idea, but know little about technology. Can you put together a plan, so that we know how much we'll need to invest? Oh, and can you design the architecture and tell us which cloud to use?

There's tons of rigorous analysis, interviews, and research that goes into answering these questions well enough that they can be trusted. Since it's primarily an exercise in critical thinking, mileage probably varies depending on who is doing the work. There are plenty of bad Powerpoints I've seen out there that don't move the needle or add anything new.

Powerpoint gets derided by developers, because they think it's a deliverable.

It's not.

It's tool used to communicate a deliverable.

The actual deliverable is knowledge of the processes, infrastructure, market, industry, options, etc. And an answer to an original question posed that required that knowledge.

A good Powerpoint seems obvious -- because that's literally the definition of a good presentation of the above deliverable.

If I clearly communicate my summarized facts to you, and then draw an obvious conclusion, does that not seem obvious? But that's forgetting that before the presentation, and before the research behind the presentation, none of those facts were known!

It seems ridiculous that PowerPoint should be the vehicle for in-depth knowledge and research about anything. There is a medium for that, it's many pages of text with a few illustrations.

The parent's point (and one which I agree with) is that the PowerPoint is not the vehicle for details. It's the vehicle for strategy and framing.

Let's take an example. A customer wants to expose my employer's application to external partners / customers / whatever and they need guidance on how to do this. There are a few models on how to do this with positives and negatives:

1. Place a server in a DMZ 2. Reverse Proxy traffic in 3. Have a separate site in a DMZ and programmatically push content there

Sure, I could get on a call and verbally describe those options. But it's infinitely easier to put up a few architecture diagrams which visually depict the options with call outs to considerations with each.

It's fair to ask why can't this be documented in a technical brief / whitepaper / documentation. Well, it is, at least mostly. It's out there. We send links to plenty of documentation. What documentation is extraordinarily bad at is explaining nuance. Best practices are fine, but best practices have a set of assumptions. Those assumptions may be generally true but are entirely simplistic at the margins.

Back to my example. Should we document how the interaction between the DoD's various network segments (think NIPR and SIPR)? Would it shock you that various groups inside of individual branches of the DoD interpret things differently? What about an organization where this use case is the first external exposure of internally deployed software?

Ultimately a good use of the PowerPoint medium is to reduce complexity to the essentials, allow for framing of the underlying issues, and to be used as a pivot to discuss broader strategy. No argument from me that many uses of PowerPoint are laughable. But there's a whole sphere of the technology realm which involve sales, sales adjacent, or strategic discussions where PowerPoint or similar techniques are essential when more formal documentation has not settled things.

Perhaps one could flippantly say that, from a certain management level on, "it's sales all the way up" ;)

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