A strange legacy. Most of the management in my company cannot digest even simple information if it’s not on PowerPoint slides.
Even when it is on preparing PowerPoint slides, text heavy slides are a big no no.
Some days, more time is spent on PowerPoint slides than writing code, or actually engineering. We jokingly call presentation prep work as getting ready to push the PowerPoint to prod.
I don’t see an issue with this. I had a very technical CTO at my n-2 job who was in his 50s and would often write POCs himself in C# or Python as research.
When he wanted to see if data that we got had the information we needed he would upload it to S3 and run some Athena queries.
But I still know when he asks me some questions he just wants a very high level overview and doesn’t want the details. I’m working with him now on a side contract.
He now has graduated to using Athena, AWS glue with Python and Quicksite reports. He does that when he is “tired of dealing with product managers and all of this scrum shit”.
Sounds like a really good leader. Looking back at my response, I realize I was somewhat unclear. I meant that most individual contributors are expected to do prepare a lot of slides so management can understand what’s going on and it very much cuts into actual time to build the thing.
Then when things aren’t going expected, we make more slides on why it’s not going as expected instead of allocating time to do the engineering work that’s needed to course correct.
The rest of the story was that he was hired at a startup that was founded by two non technical brothers. The brothers got funding and hired a consulting company to build the MVP and find product market fit.
They brought him in to build out an internal team to remove their dependence on the consulting company. I was his second technical hire. He wanted to make everything “cloud native” for HA and scalability reasons. We sold access to micro services to large health care providers.
We just talked during the interview. No leetCode, no techno trivia and I came up with my proposals and even though he knew I had no practical experience with AWS, later on he told me he thought I was a smart guy and could figure it out.
Two years later when a little worldwide pandemic hit and people were hammering our services, they didn’t miss a beat.
After I basically “put myself out of a job” and had done everything I was initially hired to do, I got bored and got a job at AWS in the Professional Services Department.
Three years later, the company we worked for had had an exit, he moved on to another company and I got Amazoned. I called him up and we talked about some problem he was having with an Amazon Connect (call center) implementation. It was a service I knew well and he offered me a consulting contract on my last day at AWS.
FWIW: I also got another full time job two weeks later.
I don’t see anyone else giving me the opportunity that he originally gave me to lead his “transformation” vision. He knew I had never opened the AWS console when he hired me.
I also got my start in tech with an irrationally benevolent technical manager. He was a PhD research scientist who has built this incredible system and was quickly building a team out to scale it.
I was just getting out of the military, and trying to find what was next. I had no internships or previous engineering experience. The most I could speak to was some comp sci classes I was currently taking for my MS, and a background in excel. He didn’t grill me with leetcode. There wasn’t really even an interview. We just talked about big picture ideas for 45 minutes. And then he told me he wanted me on board. Keep in mind this was at a large, well known unicorn - hiring didn’t normally work like that was but somehow he just sort of made it happen.
The code base was in Java. I had never written Java, but he knew that and told me I’d probably figure it out. The team also didn’t have the bandwidth to upskill someone as junior as I was. I appreciated the opportunity to sink or swim and prove myself.
I would usually just upvote you. But I love the term “irrationally benevolent”.
Unlike Amazon that is “irrationally malevolent”. But I knew that going in. I made my money. Learned what I could. Put it on my resume and let it open some doors.
I don’t mean to come off bitter. It was a completely transactional decision to go to AWS and it served its purpose.
This is literally their job. Implying that they “cannot digest even simple information” is almost certainly a misrepresentation. ICs will naively paint ideal management as simply “master craftspeople that get usually paid more than me”, and when management doesn’t meet those expectations, they’re dunked on because they’re fish that can’t climb trees. Management are often there to contextualise and decide. It’s not that the information is in PowerPoint form, it’s that (aside from the weird “slides full of text” people) things in PowerPoint form are often well summarised in a way that they typically aren’t in an email or whatever else. Quite often their job is not to go deep on something. It’s often detrimental. Sometimes it’s detrimental to not go deep on something in particular, or to not have the right people in place to do that leg work for you. Overall though, management having PowerPoints is a good thing. Easily.
I’ve heard multiple folks at a big 3 management consulting firm—and not the green recent-grad meat, I wasn’t interacting with a team on an engagement—state the same thing, in terms that implied even less intellectual capacity or ability on the part of the average C-suiter than that post did.
You aren’t the only one. :) I always find it fascinating and terrifying thinking about how PowerPoint may be crippling people in charge of things like nuclear weapons.
Even when it is on preparing PowerPoint slides, text heavy slides are a big no no.
Some days, more time is spent on PowerPoint slides than writing code, or actually engineering. We jokingly call presentation prep work as getting ready to push the PowerPoint to prod.