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Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

I tend to interpret this as a sure sign of a manager who secretly knows they're useless.

If you're the manager, your job isn't to do my work. Your job is to optimize my (and the rest of the team's) ability to do our own work. If I've missed something that should be part of a procedure, that should be in a checklist I should have reviewed before submitting my work. You shouldn't have to tell me to tweak it.

If I'm handing the work off to a team that is responsible for small stylistic choices, they too should have a set of standards, but at least if they change their minds about something, that's their role and their job.

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Things change all the time. People, including managers, are human and specs aren't something that always can be "carved in stone" in advance and carried out to perfection.

There certainly are pathological situations where people really do need to leave a mark and that's why "the duck" technique that Rachel described works.

This pops up in presentations too. Sometimes you know in advance that your presentation is going to have an audience with one or more "well, actually..." types who will try to poke holes a little too aggressively in your argument.

One technique for handling this is to deliberately leave out some persnickety detail in your deck, but cover it exhaustively in an auxiliary slide that you don't show unless someone points out the omission. It works great. Every. Time.

A tip for presentations: in presentation mode in both Powerpoint and Slides, if you type the slide number and press enter, the presentation will jump to that slide.

If you have notes about which auxiliary slide is relevant to which persnickety comment/topic, you can seamlessly warp to it and it hits harder/makes you look more prepared/polished than a bunch of page up/down and "I know it's here somewhere" filler speech.

I didn't know PowerPoint allows you to navigate that way. I've always used either hyperlinked text or little navigation icons in a corner of the slide to quickly navigate to the relevant back up slides.

Sometimes the purpose of those decks is really just to get stakeholders to think out loud and express what they actually want. A lot of these execs seem incapable of doing so without being shown something they don't want first.

So often theres no reason for a deck to be more than 3 slides because it will immediately derail and turn into an airing of actual needs.

Yes, I've worked for a couple guys in my career like this. Typically they would bet absolutely unhinged about things like grammar in emails, code style, PR nitpicks, or how the teams wiki looked.. while having no actual input on the teams user facing work product .

It's a good way to demotivate the team into slowing down the trains.

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