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Comment by jjkaczor | Hacker News Reader

For awhile I did the public speaking circuit - my focus was on infrastructure engineering, governance and supportability.

So - I would pepper my talks with real-life scenarios and anecdotes - and alot of humour - because my audiences where in the "same trenches" as me.

Then, I gave a talk to an audience of ALL corporate developers (Windows world, so .NET) - it was such a weird vibe, I have never had such a stony-faced, unresponsive crowd of attendees. (But their written feedback/reviews were great, so...)

(It also didn't start well, because the venue hosts attempted to eject an attendee because of the way he was dressed (motorcycle leathers, jeans - honestly nothing offensive) - and "didn't look like he was supposed to be there" - I intervened - it turned out that he was a tech user-group leader in the local community, and was just "different/quirky".)

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> the venue hosts attempted to eject an attendee because of the way he was dressed (motorcycle leathers, jeans - honestly nothing offensive) - and "didn't look like he was supposed to be there"

How were they to know he belonged at the infrastructure engineering governance talk when the guy wasn't even wearing a fursuit?

Lack of response to anecdotes and humor, which I use a lot too, is really off-putting. You have no idea whether they've all just switched off / they're only there because they have to be, or whether they're actually listening. It's particularly bad in some cultures like Japan where the attendees are often there as a reward and so use the time to catch up on news, sleep, or just generally not listen, so you can get zero audience reaction, and that's before getting into the translation problems with jokes and metaphors, or the very different sentence structure where you have to say a complete sentence, then pause and wait for the translator to rearrange the words into the Japanese order, then say them, and then you can start the next sentence. Another bad one is where the stage is lit but the audience isn't and/or is well below the level of the stage so you're just talking into a blank void if there's no audience reaction.

Lack of response and direct human interaction is why I never pivoted to doing "online" sessions, podcasting or even online-first training sessions.

As well - the fact that technical writing (in publishing at least) has been homogenized and steered-clear of the use of humour, metaphors, idioms and analogies has also moved me away from writing/technical editing - I miss the days of "quirky" books - things like Jeff Duntemman's "Delphi Programming Explorer", which IIRC was told as a hardboiled detective mystery. Or "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. Sure - I understand the driving commercial underlying reasons for this: profit + globalization - but I still miss those. Of course, with technical blogs available, there are still plenty of unique voices out there.

And don't forget the Mr.Bunny programming books by Carlton Egremont III, like "Mr. Bunny's Big Cup O' Java" and "Mr. Bunny's Guide to Activex".

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