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Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

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Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#121

Post by geoduck14 »

tgflynn wrote: post #27

> There were a number of options. The astronauts could perform a spacewalk and visually inspect the hull. NASA could launch another Space Shuttle to pick the crew up. Or they could risk re-entry. That's not how I remember it being presented to the public. The official word at the time was that there were no feasible rescue options. Yes, they could have done a spacewalk to inspect the damage but if it had been bad the…

I know. Right?

Everyone here is dogging the Slide. Sure it sucks - but I DISTINCTLY remember analysis of resuce. Do a space walk and repair it; send a second shuttle (they existing crew would run out); something else.

Also, the crew had a chance to call their loved ones and "sat good bye", and the pilot was anticipating the wing melting off.

NASA knew the risk, they tried to prevent it - but the shuttle still crashed

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#122

Post by db48x »

brimble wrote: post #16
MattGaiser wrote: post #2

In general, we give people too much of a pass for not bothering to read what they are supposed to (and I myself am guilty of this as it seems like it preparedness for meetings is useless as nobody else reads even on the rare occasions I do speak). That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meetin…

> That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received. I've been told—very seriously—by multiple management consultants that public and private sector executives alike won't read a damn thing unless it shows up in powerp…

It’s not like that everywhere. Apparently at Amazon, the first 20–30 minutes of any meeting are dedicated to reading and taking notes on a memo, then the rest of the time can be spent discussing the contents of that memo. This ensures that nobody has to sit through any presentations, and also that everyone actually has time to read an in–depth document with the information that they actually need for every single meeting that they attend.

I wouldn’t want to give up engineering, but I think that sounds like something I could put up with if someone forced me to be an executive.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#123

Post by db48x »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #111
sosborn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly (to me anyway), copying large swaths of text is so much more reliable in a word doc. Copying text in a pdf (derived from PowerPoint no less) is a special hell.

Unbelievable, I've never copied text from a PDF without some error. It's baffling how broken that system is compared to say, text selection in web browsers. If you start doing fancy CSS tricks you can break that too, of course.

In a PDF, every single glyph could be independently positioned. Most aren’t quite that pathological, but frequently every text run is independent.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#124

Post by phicoh »

commandlinefan wrote: post #37
stuff4ben wrote: post #15

I've seen presentations with Powerpoint that suck the life out of you and also ones that inspire and excite. It's not the tool, it's the presenter and how they wield the tool. Reading word for word off a text-heavy deck in a monotone with no images or diagrams is a recipe for disaster. I tend to have my decks (back when I was doing presentations) be relatively text-lite and involve images/diagrams that back up my tal…

> It's not the tool, it's the presenter That's true, but it's also how much time the presenter had to put the presentation together. Was he already 6 weeks behind on a dozen (meaningless) deadlines when he found out he had to give a presentation tomorrow morning at 8 AM?

Assuming we are talking about boring slides with just a few bullet points, then 99% of work is actually creating the (text of the) presentation. Creating boring slides can be done in a few minutes.

Most time when I see a wrong and overful slide deck, people don't actually have any idea what they want to say. They just dumped some information in the slides that might be handy.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#125

Post by mirker »

bumby wrote: post #114
phicoh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the kind of slide made by someone without a lot of experience presenting work. The other issue is, some people really, really, don't want to speculate. In this case it seems that the person who made the slide probably assumed that the tile could be broken with a high enough probility. But because it was outside all available data, the slide says that we don't really know. Of course, anybody in a posi…

> It is really weird to conclude that based on absence of data, it is probably safe. Considering that's exactly what happened nearly 20 years earlier with Challenger , it seems to be more common and likely the result of a number of cognitive biases. We read these with some hindsight and are disconnected from all the other pressures (schedule, budget, peer, etc.) they are dealing with at the time.

One factor for why is that bringing bad news may poorly reflect on the organization, and therefore the person’s career.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#126

Post by phicoh »

bumby wrote: post #114
phicoh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the kind of slide made by someone without a lot of experience presenting work. The other issue is, some people really, really, don't want to speculate. In this case it seems that the person who made the slide probably assumed that the tile could be broken with a high enough probility. But because it was outside all available data, the slide says that we don't really know. Of course, anybody in a posi…

> It is really weird to conclude that based on absence of data, it is probably safe. Considering that's exactly what happened nearly 20 years earlier with Challenger , it seems to be more common and likely the result of a number of cognitive biases. We read these with some hindsight and are disconnected from all the other pressures (schedule, budget, peer, etc.) they are dealing with at the time.

That points to a far more fundamental problem. Related to information processing higher up in the organisation. Just making better slides is unlikely to solve that problem.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#127

Post by bumby »

mirker wrote: post #125
bumby wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is really weird to conclude that based on absence of data, it is probably safe. Considering that's exactly what happened nearly 20 years earlier with Challenger , it seems to be more common and likely the result of a number of cognitive biases. We read these with some hindsight and are disconnected from all the other pressures (schedule, budget, peer, etc.) they are dealing with at the time.

One factor for why is that bringing bad news may poorly reflect on the organization, and therefore the person’s career.

It takes some intestinal fortitude to be in a role that is tasked with communicating information people don't want to hear. It's part of the reason NASA created it's "Safety and Mission Assurance" organization after this incident and gave them a completely different chain of command. In theory, that mitigates some of the career threat, but in practice it may be different.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#128

Post by dang »

Related:

Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 - April 2019 (127 comments)

Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115837 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#130

Post by bumby »

phicoh wrote: post #126
bumby wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is really weird to conclude that based on absence of data, it is probably safe. Considering that's exactly what happened nearly 20 years earlier with Challenger , it seems to be more common and likely the result of a number of cognitive biases. We read these with some hindsight and are disconnected from all the other pressures (schedule, budget, peer, etc.) they are dealing with at the time.

That points to a far more fundamental problem. Related to information processing higher up in the organisation. Just making better slides is unlikely to solve that problem.

Probably correct, and I have doubts that those types of problems are easily fixed because they're rooted in human psychology. It's interesting to me that the "big" incidents seem to occur every 15-20 years, almost as if there is a new professional cohort who has to learn the hard way. I do think clear communication is a necessary, but insufficient, element of fixing that problem.
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