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Comment by AndrewOMartin | Hacker News Reader

I always start a technical presentation with "spoilers", for anyone who is busy or is happy to just trust me, they can leave almost immediately with the most important bit of information. Anyone else who wants disagree, or wants proof any claims can get involved.

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Similar to BLUF -- Bottom Line Up Front.

Hear that one used more for memos or emails, but same concept. Give people a sense of what's at the end so they see where the background is going. Use the story-spine if you want, but show a trailer to convince the audience there's some juicy explosion-ladden scenes at the end of the rainbow.

Depends on the audience. I've seen presentations to Director-and-VP types that wouldn't progress past the first (fact summary) slide. You'll present a nice summary of your results with the high level conclusions, and someone will open their mouth and say "Well, what about Detail X that I heard about? How did you account for that?" and you say "We'll get to that, it's actually explained on slide 6." "Well, I heard through Dave that..." now you have to either discuss it immediately without the slide's context, or awkwardly scroll to slide 6 for the guy. Then some other exec pipes in with "But, my team's component Y was not included here at all!" and you say, "That's slide 3. I was planning on that being my first topic, but we got side tracked with Detail X..." Then the original exec "Speaking of Detail X, what about SubDetail Z, which I notice you left off [the summary slide]..." Uggghhhhh kill me now.

Those execs sound like terrible communicators. It’s hard for me to imagine a colleague acting this way in real life.

Oh, it’s real, and goes down exactly as GP describes.

If you've never had a co-worker or manager interrupt you mid-sentence to breathlessly ask you a question that is literally answered by the second half of the sentence you were GOING to finish, then my friend you should go buy a lottery ticket because this happens to me daily, in every job I have ever had in the last 20 years in tech.

> If you've never had a co-worker or manager interrupt you mid-sentence

I've had plenty of people interrupt me to ask questions while I'm presenting - which I think is generally something to be encouraged.

When I've replied with "That's a very insightful question, we'll get to the answer in a few slides time" I've never had someone insist on continuing the interruption.

Exactly, this is how you do it.

I have been in some meetings where the "big boss" cannot follow any structure and will constantly throw out ideas and enquiries and demand we had ready answers for questions we are hearing for the first time or topic that was not on the agenda and pontificate about how some things should be better etc.

Thankfully they only attended our meetings once a quarter and never involved in matters beyond pontification.

I’ve run into this a few times. At first I think it must be me, that I’m not communicating correctly. But then I see everyone else run into the buzzsaw, despite differences in style and approach, and I realize the “exec” is simply an interrupt-driven dopamine fiend. Inevitably they get rotated along, because having the attention span of a coke-addled squirrel is not actually good for business.

If you can’t wait them out, or if they’re the CEO, find a different job.

As a presenter in that situation you should tell them to shut it or leave, and take notes so they remember the questions they have for after the presentation.

If they refuse to comply, leave.

This seems like a great way to speedrun losing your job.

Yea, I'm gonna tell my boss's boss's boss's boss to "shut it or leave." That's a bold strategy, Cotton, lets see if it pays off...

It's not a loss if management consists of a bag of dicks.

No, I'm pretty sure that it's a loss to not have income coming in while you scramble to find a new job.

This is about a person that gets invited to hold presentations to upper management, and thus unlikely to have to "scramble".

In a previous life where I did a lot of presentations to Bill Gates, I had the opposite problem. He insisted on having the presentation printed out for him ahead of time, and he would usually have read and understood them (no idea when he would have time to do that). So you’d be on slide 2 going through your careful introduction, and he would ask an uncomfortable question about something on slide 12!

The Amazon method of starting with quiet reading may be the only solution…

This tracks with the product demo idea of ‘do the last thing first’. No need to make the audience ‘earn’ the payoff - just skip right to the good stuff and then go over the rest for the folks that care. (This and much more from reviews of a whole bunch of demos here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220126051034/https://www.secon...)

I do that with all the blog articles I write: start with a summary, with full reusable code you can copy/paste when appropriate.

That's what I want from others, so that's what I do.

Let the ego aside, be useful.

Yeah, the inverted pyramid[1] is almost always a good pattern when conveying important information. Not only do you end up telling people why they should care first, the less interesting stuff ends up at the end, so if you run over time (or someone zones out), they aren't missing much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

In practice, this ends up with attendees interrupting with pointless questions that are covered in the next slides

I think that is an invariant of presentations

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