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Are you saying NASA decision makers graduated from India?
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Oh I thought you were talking about NASA and the Columbia disaster. The PowerPoint slide was poorly designed, as it says in the story. The problem was not PowerPoint though. You could summarize it using a PDF, and it will still have the problem if key issues don't grab attention.
This isn't a failure of PowerPoint. I work for NASA and we still use it all the time, and I'll assure anyone that the communication errors are rife regardless of what medium we're working in. The issue is differences in the way that in-the-weeds engineers and managers interpret technical information, which is alluded to in the article but the author still focuses on the bullets and the PowerPoint, as if rewriting sim…
But using "uncertain" language seems unconvincing to people outside of these types of cultures.
Also of course the power dynamics.
The first time I came across this blog post a few years ago, I found it enraging, and I still do. As I said I said in my personal notes at the time, "The choice to use this fabricated material for this article and the false claims in it—claims not actually confirmed by the sources that it cites—amounts to what would be considered serious misconduct elsewhere." But there's no real accountability here, of course, because at the end of the day it's just some jerk with a blog serving up distorted pop science insights to aspiring entrepreneurs.
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Oh I thought you were talking about NASA and the Columbia disaster. The PowerPoint slide was poorly designed, as it says in the story. The problem was not PowerPoint though. You could summarize it using a PDF, and it will still have the problem if key issues don't grab attention.
The point that seems lost on HN, who evidently are incapable of consuming information that isn't presented in a format designed by Jony Ive himself, is that there's nothing wrong with the format of the slide to the kind of skilled subject matter expert in the aerospace industry that should have been reviewing it on NASA's behalf.
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There’s a famous speech someone related from their civil engineering professor, where the professor basically said, if I pass you in this class I am effectively giving you a license to kill. So some of you will not be passing.
My CS undergrad was in the engineering college and so I had a mandatory engineering seminar that was basically "don't get people killed with your work." We covered Challenger, Hyatt Regency, and some other classic failures. I've mostly avoided working on life-critical software so it's not an immediate concern, but that sense of responsibility still stuck with me.
I can be kind of a pain in the ass when it comes to details so I’ve worked on a couple such projects. It’s sobering, but also I think, “better me than” half a dozen corner cutters at my last two jobs. They could do much worse.
That said, I stayed on a commercial aerospace project about 14 months after I didn’t really want to be there because people kept saying the wrong things in meetings and thinking they sounded right.
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The point that seems lost on HN, who evidently are incapable of consuming information that isn't presented in a format designed by Jony Ive himself, is that there's nothing wrong with the format of the slide to the kind of skilled subject matter expert in the aerospace industry that should have been reviewing it on NASA's behalf.
But that's not how it works in most large organizations. The person who has the authority to make the decision is not necessarily an SME in all of the areas they have to make decisions. Rather, they rely on SMEs to do the investigation and then... communicate properly .
This isn't a failure of PowerPoint. I work for NASA and we still use it all the time, and I'll assure anyone that the communication errors are rife regardless of what medium we're working in. The issue is differences in the way that in-the-weeds engineers and managers interpret technical information, which is alluded to in the article but the author still focuses on the bullets and the PowerPoint, as if rewriting sim…
I don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint. There wasn't clear communication; the medium was completely incidental to that. They could have been writing on a chalkboard and had a communication failure, does that mean that chalkboards should be blamed in that case?
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Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article, > “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint b…
Would it be better if you sent them a PDF document instead? There seems to be an assumption here that if you send the stakeholders a larger volume of information they will take the time to read it. Is that a valid assumption?
Jeff bezos iirc speaks at length about this.