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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I gave a talk at PyCon a few weeks ago where I was really struggling to fit my content into the time slot.

I ended up editing out the first couple of minutes of the talk - the bit where I ramped up to the topic, gave a little bit of background about why I was qualified to talk about it, that kind of thing.

Instead I launched straight into my first point (which included a good joke)... and it worked.

A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough you can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material, and if you combine that with a joke you can capture the audience's attention just fine.

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> A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough you can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material, and if you combine that with a joke you can capture the audience's attention just fine.

This is important in sales as well.

I hate getting a sales pitch where they tell me the history of the company. Big Japanese companies are the worst in this regard for some reason.

For each slide, imagine the audience is going to get up and leave unless you give them a reason to read the next slide. You don't need to justify your existence if I don't really know what you have to offer.

Plus it's all about me (the listener) not you (the presenter).

> I hate getting a sales pitch where they tell me the history of the company. [...] Plus it's all about me (the listener) not you (the presenter).

Excellent point. Many presenters probably see the talk as an opportunity to give their organization some publicity/marketing[0] in addition to the content of the talk. But... no, no one wants to sit through an ad about you and your company's background in order to get to the interesting stuff.

I think a reasonable compromise there is that your last slide can have a blurb about your company on it, and maybe you just leave it there for attendees to read themselves (or not) as you wrap up, without reading it to them.

[0] I imagine this is a component of why companies encourage their employees to go give talks at conferences. I remember one company I worked at would completely reimburse employees for conference attendance, no questions asked, if they were also giving a talk there. But if they just wanted to attend the conference, they had to justify what they and the company would be getting out of it, and write up and present something useful they learned when they got back. I wouldn't be surprised if they booked some of the cost as a marketing expense in the first case.

> For each slide, imagine the audience is going to get up and leave unless you give them a reason to read the next slide.

This is great advice, and I’ve been trying to apply it to my writing in general. Each sentence, and even each word, should give your reader a reason to stick around. Fluff has its place in fiction and long-form writing, but most day-to-day writing should be information-dense.

Just to share a perspective. Doing business in Japan often requires a certain level of trust. Showing that you (the presenter) have something to count on is thus important.

I should have written that I hate such presentations when the history is up front. Tell me what you’re gonna do for me, tell me how so I believe you, tell me that you’ve been doing it a while for others so I believe you, then, if you want, tell me that you’ve been around for a while so I can depend on you.

But all that should be provided my my interests in mind, not your own ego stroking.

That said, different countries have different cultures in this regard. But peoples’ attention isn’t different and it’s a shame to waste the period of maximum attention on the thing that helps the least in sales.

I agree, but one good thing about starting with the soft and boring parts (like your name and credentials), is that it's easy to do when you're nervous in the beginning. Can't really stumble that too much, and then you're warmed up for the real talk. But of course, the shorter you can keep it the better. Instead I often try to memorize my first lines, word by word. Then I know I will nail them when at my most anxious, and then the rest can be talking more freely.

I also assumed that part of the first few minutes was filler while butts are still trying to find seats, still chatting amongst themselves, or haven't quite closed whichever social media app as well as letting the presenter shake off any butterflies

That's a good point.

A presentation isn't really a written story or even a film. You don't want the people who missed the first few minutes to be "dazed and confused." :-) You don't want to do too much throat clearing (to use the metaphor a former boss used with respect to writing research pieces). But you probably don't want the first few minutes to be too essential to be jumping into the rest of the talk either.

I always have the title and my name and organisation on the first slide, which is just shown while everybody comes in. That lets everyone know if they're in the right place.

And I do usually have a bio slide right after as well. But I spend about 15 seconds on it. I also (usually) have basic contact info on my slide masters so people know how to contact me without snapping a shot of the right slide.

I like to put my name, contact info, and reference link on the last slide. This is when they’ll actually need it (if they want to follow up with you), latecomers won’t miss it, and it’s usually on the screen for a long time during q&a so people have time to jot it down or snap a picture.

Nothing makes me more nervous than talking about myself… I pretty much always skip the intro slides (other than having my name on the title).

People appreciate it. Seriously.

A big pet peeve of mine is long intros. 30 seconds is probably fine but minutes is way too long. This goes for talks, youtube videos, etc.

I get why people do it, they want to reduce risk by addressing things that could go wrong (is this person qualified? I don’t understand the context. Etc) but man be a little brave and get to the point.

Unfortunately, I think YouTube rewards you for this. At least it feels that way based on how long YouTube video’s take to get to the point

This might be caused by mid-roll ads. Videos need to be 8 minutes long to qualify for those, and you want people to actually reach the ad.

"hi, I'm x, I work at y, and have had an interest in/experience with z" is ussally good enough.

It's a bit of an audience thing, but for a talk at a technical conference I tend to roll my eyes at introduction slides. I already chose to attend your talk, telling me why it's interesting is preaching to the choir. And typical hacker ethic involves judging people by their skills, not their credentials. You can slip in a "btw I invented the thing we are talking about". But don't read me your CV, impress me with your insights.

This isn't true in all contexts. Some audiences care a lot about credentials. And if people don't choose to be at your talk specifically you have to give enough context. But even then you are often better off catching their attention first, and once you got it bring it back to the introduction

I think there is a lot of cargo culting in presentations. Title slide? But of course we must have a title slide, that is the way. And an introduction, and motivation... everybody else has one!

Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a presentation, and separately as a way to learn or review material outside of the presentation. Unfortunately they are at cross-purposes. For accompanying an oral presentation you don't want lots of data, you want a simple clear image that sync with what you are saying, and to change them rapidly. For learning outside the actual presentation, you want rich, detailed slides with lots of data on them, and leave them up for a while so people can absorb the information.

Ideally, we would build two different decks, each optimized for their purpose. But no one has time for that, so people try and do both in one deck, generally going with lots of information except for one or two images keyed to specific jokes. And it makes the whole thing less effective.

I think bullet points capture the worst of both worlds. You have text (which people focus on, rather than on the presenter), but you don't have enough that one could learn from them outside the presentation.

There's a saying that bullet points are called so because they 'kill' a presentation, and I think there's some truth to that.

I think short bullet points are great. That way the audience can take them in quickly (I highlight one at a time to prevent them from reading ahead/behind) without being distracted for more than a fraction of a second. It also helps people to see how many items are being discussed (e.g., "there are three reasons that language X is better than language Y"). For me at least, that makes it easier to remember the reasons, since it functions as a checksum.

Do you mean that full paragraph is better? Strong disagree if so.

Perhaps not full paragraphs, but the phrase-style nature of bullet points has never really helped me understand the material. If there must be text, I would rather see complete sentences on a presentation.

I've used the assertion-evidence framework[0] for presentations[1] before, where the idea is to have a complete sentence at the top of your slide, with images below that illustrate your point.

[0] https://www.assertion-evidence.com/ [1] While these presentations _were_ about engineering, they were more educational than technical in nature.

Ideally you'd have slides purely for presentation, and an accompanying interactive self-contained HTML document for the documentation of the talk.

And nobody wants to do both (or has the incentive to do both). I'll do sorta-both but probably in an informal way--e.g. article that grew out of a talk--or vice versa.

I've been doing annotated versions of my talks for a while, takes. Few hours of extra effort but greatly increases the impact the talk can have: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotatedtalks/

Maybe it's because I write a lot but I reached the conclusion that if it makes sense to do an article/blog, I should do so rather than speaker notes--which make sense in handing off a presentation to someone else in a company setting but I'm less sold on, in general, as a personal thing.

> Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a presentation...

Many years ago I went to a presentation on giving good presentations, focusing on making good slide decks. (It's currently annoying me that I can't remember where this was, even though I can picture the room in my head.)

The presenter had a short example slide deck, and gave a mock technical presentation using it.

The deck had a different, eye-catching background image for each slide, chosen to be noticeable, but not dominate attention, and be well-suited color-wise for any text or images to be placed on top of the background. The presenter suggested that the background image didn't need to have anything to do with the content of the slide, and that it's mainly there for its general visual impact. The slides were not uniformly designed. It wasn't like someone had used a template where the title, text, images, etc. were all in the same or similar places on each slide. The most noticeable part of this was putting the title in different places. This variety was in itself engaging.

The slides themselves were very light on text, and were mostly about presenting charts, graphs, tabular data, or images relevant to the talk. When there was text, the presenter never read the text verbatim (or sometimes even at all); the text there was a jumping-off point to discuss in detail whatever the topic of the slide was. The argument there was that people know how to read, can read in their heads faster than you can read to them out loud, and if you're just going to read slides to them, you don't need to present it and you should instead just email a document for your attendees to read, and skip the presentation entirely.

Finally, the slide deck itself did not have all that many slides. The presenter dwelled on each slide a lot longer than I've seen in most presentations. The slides were more guideposts to mark the overall topics and outline of the presentation, to provide milestones and transitions. For the most part, the presentation could have been done without the slides at all; the slides were there to add visual flair, help keep attention, and (occasionally) prevent data or images that would be easier to understand visually rather than spoken.

Ultimately I found the mock presentation given to be incredibly engaging, much more so than the vast majority of presentations I'd attended before or have attended since, and I remember that the topic wasn't even something that would usually hold my interest so tightly. I very rarely gave/give presentations, but I've tried to take all this to heart when I had the opportunity to do so. I don't think I ever really did the variety-of-background-images thing (honestly, I never enjoyed giving presentations, and treated it as a chore, and never felt motivated enough to find a bunch of suitable background images). But I at least always tried to keep text to a minimum, so the meat of my talk would be in what I was saying out loud. I wouldn't call myself a particularly good presenter or public speaker, but I think my talks were better than they otherwise would have been.

> Slides have two distinct purposes: [...] as a way to learn or review material outside of the presentation

I've come to think that slides aren't very good for this second purpose, and probably shouldn't be. The information density is never going to be high enough, and if it is, that's going to make for a terrible slide during the presentation. I would much rather read a transcript of the talk later, or, better, a detailed summary. If the slides have charts or other data, then sure, it's useful to have those outside of the talk, but those can also be inserted in-line into the transcript or summary.

I get that it's more work to write up a transcript or summary (and I know I myself would probably balk at having to do this), but if you've prepared properly for the presentation, you probably already more or less have something approaching a transcript in your talk notes. Cleaning them up for publication isn't zero effort, of course, but it should be much less work than writing something from scratch.

Handouts and speaker notes are a thing, although people rarely use them both when building presentations and when reviewing them later.

In many contexts, the title slide is there to let people know they are in the right place or to let people know what a presentation is about while they wait for things to begin. It is not necessarily a part of the talk itself.

If it is up and the subject of discussion for the first five minute (or more!), I will agree that something has gone wrong.

A motivation slide can be useful if you are giving a presentation to people who are more experienced than you (which, for any given audience, there ought to be some). It tells them what built in assumptions you made without being aware of.

The presentation may eventually be viewed by people who aren't in the room to hear you speak. In that instance, a title/intro slide makes perfect sense.

You don’t need to present from the same copy of the slides you distribute.

What you're saying makes sense, though "cargo culting" is not the right term here

Counterpoint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

> Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.

> Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle.

Arguably, designing a presentation in a particular way out of habit or convention would fall under one or both of these definitions.

It's a common vernacular usage.

> As awareness of cargo cults spread in the West, they became a metaphor for empty promises and rituals, used most prominently by physicist Richard Feynman. The term "cargo-cult programming" appeared in version 2.5.1 of the Jargon File, a glossary of computing slang, released in January 1991.

Kind of a long-winded way of saying "I agree"

You originally said:

> "cargo culting" is not the right term here

I don’t agree, and I explained why, because I believe that it is the right term here.

I guess I convinced you?

Despite saying you don't agree, your copy-paste definition that followed actually said otherwise

I never said I don’t agree that it was the right word to use? Just so we’re clear, you agree that it’s the right word to use?

If habit and convention == cargo cult, then the term is mostly useless; apart for its insult potential.

To make it more useful we can move the goalpost back to the roots, to include clear cluelessness and uselesness.

(General slide advice is at same level as code indentation; almost everybody does it mostly same way; familiar == comfortable)

This is the original grandparent post context that I was responding to:

> I think there is a lot of cargo culting in presentations. Title slide? But of course we must have a title slide, that is the way. And an introduction, and motivation... everybody else has one!

The implied lack of justification, or doing something because that is simply how everyone else does it is consistent with the definition I posted from Wikipedia. It’s not mere habit or convention, but habit or convention without knowing the meaning or context.

> To make it more useful we can move the goalpost back to the roots, to include clear cluelessness and uselesness.

Again, I didn’t make this argument, so there’s no goalpost to move. You’re responding to things I didn’t say, and/or reading what I did say out of context. This is a misreading of my post, the GP post and wider context I placed my post in, and/or a straw man, or we actually are in agreement.

My original post:

>> Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.

>> Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle.

> Arguably, designing a presentation in a particular way out of habit or convention

(and without knowing why that is conventional, or if that way of doing things has no known or stated justification, but is observed because that is the way things are done out of institutional momentum, and so on)

> would fall under one or both of these definitions.

Right, that's just the normal way people learn to do something they haven't been trained or educated to do. Look at how other people successfully do it. You don't just discard every feature you don't immediately see the value of or you might jettison the important bits. Once you're more confident you understand the skill, you can drop the rituals you don't find useful.

something something chesterton's fence

So true.

Some people are just allergic to accepting advise from others.

(On the other hand best way to learn not to play with fire is to get burned)

Knowing your audience is a big thing in general.

If the talk isn't to some large degree about your journey, that probably shouldn't be the focus. But also, face it, your talk isn't going to work for everyone. When I was doing a lot of keynotes, I'd get feedback on the same talk to the effect of "That was great. It really helped me understand $X" and "I was totally lost." Even given technical difficulty ratings, no one pays any attention.

I think the main value of the first two slides is: if you’ve done a lot of presentations it can be difficult to keep them straight.

The first slide is really for you, to make sure you opened the right file.

The title slide I see more for the audience: You are in the right room (and there was no schedule change you missed) that's also why I try to keep the title on that slide as announced.

Something I noticed while writing is that the intro is necessary... for me, to write the rest of the document. But after it's all written then the intro material becomes unnecessary boilerplate.

An alternative is to do the first couple minutes of your talk at 2x speed and then suddenly slow down to a normal pace when you reach the interesting part. That should get their attention.

Unless people show up late for the talk.

I once had the first morning time slot at a conference. Despite the breakfast break before (or rather because of it...), the room filled like a progress bar.

It's the Wadsworth Constant for talks! https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-const...

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