Mastodawn

Mike Spooner Jun 30

friends, I am in a six hour call that’s supposed to be a high level overview of a certain embedded software runtime. The current slide contains a discussion of the garbage collection subsystem and heap management, and also a diagram of how an individual cell of static ram works with the electrons shuffling around between the 0 and 1 states. There are several hundred words in a tiny font talking about voltage and whatnot.

engineers please learn to value soft skills like “expressing your expertise clearly and concisely” a little more 😭 this is like trying to share your grandma’s cake recipe through the medium of a textbook on organic chemistry

Ewen McNeill Jun 30

@0xabad1dea that feels more “hours per slide” than “slides per hour” 😬

(And since you say “current slide” I’m assuming this isn’t a one slide presentation 😭)

abadidea Jun 30

@ewenmcneill yes and almost every slide is like this.

Ewen McNeill Jun 30

@0xabad1dea 😱

Claudius Link Jun 30

@0xabad1dea @ewenmcneill
I'm a bit in awe 😱
If this is the high level overview, how deep down into details will this go?
Subatomic 🤪?

abadidea Jun 30

@realn2s @ewenmcneill there are four more six-hour calls scheduled this week.

Claudius Link Jun 30

@0xabad1dea @ewenmcneill
😱

Alesandro Ortiz 🇵🇷🏳️‍🌈Jun 30

@0xabad1dea @realn2s @ewenmcneill excuse me, what?! Will you take a 2 week vacation immediately after?

abadidea Jun 30

@AlesandroOrtiz @realn2s @ewenmcneill I do already have the last two weeks of July scheduled off, but that's to go to summer school. f

... this is the second week of six hours per day in calls.

Alesandro Ortiz 🇵🇷🏳️‍🌈Jun 30

@0xabad1dea @realn2s @ewenmcneill 💀 You really deserve 2 weeks of vacation per 1 week of full-day meetings. That is brutal. Hope you enjoy summer school more!

abadidea Jun 30

@AlesandroOrtiz @realn2s @ewenmcneill thank you, kind soul that I briefly mistake for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in my mentions every time

Sophie Schmieg Jun 30

@0xabad1dea @realn2s @ewenmcneill that would be an automatic "decline meeting" for me. If employers want a conference, they can pay for the travel.

abadidea Jun 30

@sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill it's the customer who's insisting and giving the presentations, f.

@0xabad1dea @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill A good use case for AI note taking and AI avatar nodding its fake head.

@rrb @0xabad1dea @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill

I've contemplated seeing if TEAMS will accept a gif as a background & just screenshot me sitting there, blinking periodically. (Turns out if you block the camera, it'll still display the background with no foreground.)

@cavyherd @0xabad1dea @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill I set my zoom background to a still photo of me looking at the zoom screen from my office.

When I am there, I cover over my image in the picture. When I stand up to leave, it is an interesting visual like a soul leaving the body in many movies.

Should not be hard to do an animated gif from a few pictures of you sitting there and blinking. I don't see why that would not be accepted as a background image.

Even better, do an animated gif of you nodding off.

@rrb @0xabad1dea @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill

"Even better, do an animated gif of you nodding off." 😂 👍

@cavyherd @0xabad1dea @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill
Copy cats:
https://archive.is/2RbLf

@0xabad1dea @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill

I hope they're paying your company a whole f'n lot of money. Whatever they're paying, it's not enough. (& wtf? what are these meetings even supposed to accomplish?)

@cavyherd @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill we're an independent security reviewer (software, hardware and cryptography). so our job is to find any problems with the product before it goes to market. this particular customer and this particular product, they are going ALL out on wanting an absolute bonanza of review and shipping something flawless.

@0xabad1dea @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill

Okay, that all actually kinda makes sense. I mean, except for the "shipping something flawless" part. Are they asking for rainbows & unicorns also?

@cavyherd @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill usually the problem is that businesses don't care *enough* about security 😂 I can't say who this is or what the product is, but they make components of things you definitely interact with in daily life, so sleep a little easier that someone, at least, is on the ball

@0xabad1dea @sophieschmieg @realn2s @ewenmcneill

From the sound of it, it sounds like they're doing their God's honest best to squash the ball flat.

Which, I mean, props to them for intent. I'd just want to see more awareness that this is (innevitably) a process.

But everybody's gotta be somewhere, I guess, right?

@0xabad1dea @realn2s @ewenmcneill

wtf? & management didn't stuff those who sent the invites into a barrel? 🤦 (Spoiler: presenters •are• management?)

Do they have any remote fantasy that anybody is going to retain any actual content from these things? (I would have checked & be surfing YouTube in the 1st five minutes.)

Do they at least make the slide decks available for later reference?

Advanced Persistent Teapot Jun 30

@ewenmcneill @0xabad1dea I was once required to attend a 6-hour training consisting of well over 200 slides

That was a hideous day

Ignas Kiela Jun 30

@0xabad1dea "high level" as in you can only bear to listen to it while high

@0xabad1dea if I was the only person in the audience and could ask questions I would love this presentation. Alas, then it wouldn't have to be a presentation.

abadidea Jun 30

@robryk yeah it’s not that I don’t think “how this ram chip works” is interesting, it’s just that my job, that I’m getting paid for and graded on with a deadline, is to bake the damn cake

C++ Wage Slave Jun 30

I'm surprised it's that bad. As you already know (but others may not), an engineer should be able to decompose a complex system into layers and only think about one or two of them at once. A discussion of garbage collection should possibly care about virtual memory (in order to achieve optimal access patterns), but memory chips, at this level, should just be a black box.

SomeVeganCheeseIsOk Jun 30

@CppGuy @0xabad1dea @robryk the engineer thinks how the chips work is neat and interesting and they want to share when everyone because it's tangentially related and everyone having a deep understanding will assist in them seeing why the engineer wants to do the thing.

I guarantee.

@CppGuy @0xabad1dea

Unless the GC somehow takes into account memory refresh cycle? (Though I'd expect that to be unlikely.)

Sin Vega Jun 30

@0xabad1dea this is a big part of why people in several jobs I've worked perceived me as super super smart. I actually had very limited technical knowledge but a very strong working knowledge, and I knew how to reframe things for people who didn't 🤷‍♀️

Sin Vega Jun 30

@0xabad1dea I still get caught up on details and tangents in general, mind. But truncating that with a "(there's more to it than that but ask me about it later if you want more)" or whatever can be practiced!

@0xabad1dea
It sounds like what would happen if someone misunderstood the concept of "high level overview". They got the part of "oh pretend you're flying overhead to see the bigger concepts" and missed the "abstract the concepts because you don't get to zoom in for this segment"

CatSalad🐈🥗 (D.Burch)

@h3mmy @0xabad1dea Highl level means HIGH details, right?

@catsalad @0xabad1dea Are your details tiny and small enough? If not, you might want to try our new presenters jetpack! Make sure you can see how everyone squints and easily filter out birds of prey in human suits.

Am I getting these high details right?

@0xabad1dea slide six: string theory, as it pertains to charge carriers residing inside a memory cell 👈 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒

…

Slide 238: (timecube?)

Slide 239: fin; presenter's contact info

@0xabad1dea the most important takeaway from all of this is that Vivi and Goofy were the twin souls of the True Keymaster, as revealed in an OOB texture in Ursula's Water Temple dungeon. (slide 173)

SomeVeganCheeseIsOk Jun 30

@0xabad1dea that's not something engineers can do. This is why you have specific translator positions as a firewall between your engineering team and your normal people.

rastilin Jun 30

I'm not going to lie, this presentation sounds awesome. Boring, but also incredibly informative at the same time.

YourShadowDani Jun 30

@0xabad1dea but if you don't understand the underlying voltage data how will you understand the ramifications of running a space heater under your desk and why the software has a bug every once in a while when the voltage dips?

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial Jun 30

@0xabad1dea this feels like how pre-diagnosis me would do things lol

Peter Jakobs ⛵Jun 30

@0xabad1dea life as an engineer is an endless string of rabbit holes. Come along for the ride!

@pjakobs @0xabad1dea

I mean, that can be a hell of a lot of fun—if the presenter is aware, & has a good sense of humor.

Getting the sense that's not the case, here....

Emelia/Emi Jun 30

@0xabad1dea For an embedded thing I could see a slide on the garbage collector, if only because there's so many different types of GC (relocating vs not, concurrent vs stop-the-world, cycle collection, etc.) and that can potentially impact design architecture or suitability for certain tasks. But anything deeper than "provides a non-relocating GC that supports cycle collection" is too much information for a high-level thing.

Discussing the construction of SRAM cells in the context of a software runtime? Yeah no. That's far too deep in the stack to matter for that type of discussion.

@0xabad1dea random guess, does this system originate from east asia? this problem (*especially* the poor slide design) is something i personally have associated with that region

James Wood Jul 1

@r @0xabad1dea Yeah, in Huawei this is considered good style, and I've been asked to pack my slides full with (even) more text several times at work.

@0xabad1dea I’m so sorry, that sounds like hell

SellaTheChemist Jun 30

@0xabad1dea You are being deeply deeply unfair to organic chemists!!😂

Administrator Jun 30

@0xabad1dea But then how am I going to confuse my management with a bunch of tech-speak so they'll think I'm really smart?

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Jun 30

@0xabad1dea Is it bad that my first reaction was 'Ooo, neat, can they share their deck?'

@0xabad1dea That *is* them trying. I mean, they made it into a slide show for you!

(Full disclosure: I'm a recovering software developer)

A wizard did it

@0xabad1dea I've been guilty of doing this exact thing before and I assure you it is not for trying to sound smart (although that is often how it comes across). It is from not knowing the expertise level in the room so trying to make a complex idea as simple as possible, and failing.

The problem I've always had is that I'll go "ok so I have to explain how a firewall works in simple terms. Easy. Although, in order to explain that I should first explain what a packet is. But to explain that I should explain how a frame traverses a wire, but to explain what a frame is I should first explain the OSI model..." and so on until I'm giving a math lesson on how binary works.

It is the curse of people who are both very passionate about their subject and want everyone else to be excited about it as well.

Michael Helm Jun 30

@0xabad1dea What an idiot!
I've probably been that idiot - more times than I want to admit

Robert Dresden Jun 30

@0xabad1dea
Since I clarified with management that it is totally ok for them that I use fallout guy illustrations for internal power points we are on good terms and I actually have fun giving high level overviews.

Kris Hardy Jun 30

@0xabad1dea That sounds painful, but at the same time, this may be the first time they've ever been able to have an audience for this and they're so excited that they've cornered you at the party and are giving you the dissertation on their whole life's work. (I've been on both sides of this, many times)

Cassander Jul 2

@0xabad1dea "Six hour call" and "high level overview" seem fundamentally incompatible...

@drsbaitso it's the high-level overview compared to the other four six-hour calls that come after it about the individual subsystems.