Google Ops Presentation and Meeting Formats

Fri Jan 27 14:02:09 PST 2006

At 9:53 AM -0800 1/27/06, Danny Howard wrote:
>It seemed ... well, it seemed that every slide had a 90% overhead of
>SysAdmins asking, sometimes insightful, and often pointless questions.
>My favorites were the ones where ... okay, I'm not flaming.  But ... I
>mean, a lot of the questions were "I have an extremely short attention
>span so I'm going to ask you now a question which you would ordinarily
>have answered on the next slide were I not interrupting you."
>
>My question, is, do BayLISA presentations normally go like this?  Or was
>there something in the Google water?

Speaking as someone who has presented at BayLISA many times: yes, 
they usually go like that if the speaker doesn't take (and keep) firm 
control.

>It would seem very sane to "save
>your questions for the end" ... because, while I found the presentation
>engaging, I had this growing desire to jump up on the desk and yell at
>everyone to just shut up for half an hour and let the guy present ...

No...  But the speaker needs to limit the number of questions they 
take after each slide, forcefully if necessary, and then Move On.  I 
try to draw the line at 3-5 questions, myself, but that's going to 
vary by speaker and topic.

On the other hand, I think it would have been very appropriate (and, 
indeed, quite welcome by both the speakers and most of the audience) 
for one of the BayLISA organizers to stand up and make that statement 
to get things back on track.

-Brent
-- 
Brent Chapman <brent at greatcircle.com> -- Great Circle Associates, Inc.
Specializing in network infrastructure for Silicon Valley since 1989
For info about us and our services, please see http://www.greatcircle.com/
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