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Comment by kshacker | Hacker News Reader

lol. I hate presentations. I like to run a tight ship. But that does not shine, so they made me do presentations every quarter. If you do some work, you must "take" credit. It is kinda a need when you manage people since you need to build their careers.

I finally moved on to be an IC. Same story, same pressure :) You need to present to directors not because they need to know, but because your managers have a quota of N presentations per quarter, and if you back out, someone else needs to step up.

Needless to say my productivity reduces by half and sometimes to almost zero during the week or fortnight of presentations every quarter.

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You define "productivity" as coding.

The business defines it as "meetings, presentations, support, coding, whatever".

Your productivity remains at 100% when you are doing what they want.

I get that you thought you were hired as a coder, and thus measure your productivity by that. That's what I thought too. I ended up doing a lot of support (which is good, but that's another thread). Until I recalibrated my definition of productivity that frustrated me. When I realized that support was productivity I got much less frustrated.

When did I say I code?

I have been on the industry for 35 years. I have seen my share of technology evolutions and o have seen the work from a dozen different dimensions. If after all that time, I find the process painful, just trust me -- they can't change me, and I can't change them. You take the warts with the wins and move on. 2-3 bad weeks, 10 good weeks. Life moves on to next quarter. Complete CEO mindset :)

You heavily implied presentation preparation implies zero productivity. He tried to say this prep is also productive even if you personally don't or can't appreciate it.

Last comment and I will see myself out.

I meant my other productivity drops because I am not a natural presenter so even though I am rehearsing / editing for 2 hours a day, the presentation consumes me / overwhelms me that I can't even focus for the remaining 4 hours or 2 hours. Just do the bare minimum email processing, just survive. Everyone knows it. But by being in that zone of paralysis, I can still deliver a presentation. Sometimes good sometimes ok.

I have this need for the presentation content to reside in my memory cache and other work disrupts the cache quite badly.

But that's not a way to live. The other work stalled for 3 weeks.

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