>the onus is on you to supply the reasoning why intrinsically hard problems requires documents over slides.
I think I've provided sufficient examples on why this is the case, and I have almost a $2 trillion dollar company that agrees with me and has made this our policy. You can try to pick whatever logical fallacy, but the actual company and its leadership believes the document culture gives us a strong competitive advantage over PowerPoint or slide deck driven organizations. You're more than welcome to compete us and try to beat us.
>the onus is on you
I honestly have nothing to prove to you. This is turning more into your ego and your refusal to consider that others may be working on problems that require document writing whereas maybe the complexity of your work requires a few bullet points. Not to disparage any of your work, but it's narrow thinking at best.
Furthermore, you're repeating your previous posts, and each of your comments now all ending with a ":-)" is deliberate trolling. It's clear you're posting here in bad faith.
Feel free to respond again, but I won't engage with you any further.
If you want to troll or flash ego, you certainly can. But your personal information and even a profile URL are attached or linked from your HN profile. Maybe that's intentional and the shtick of "I'm right, and I'll condescend with smiley faces to show I'm superior" – that's how you try to sell yourself?
> I am however saying that the true reasons when and why it works better are misunderstood. There is no irony here.
You provided a deeply dense document arguing in favor of slides. You're now stating it was more about "oversimplifications" in my post – and honestly, that's not my take away from your document.
You did write in favor of slides and communicated they're as, or even more effective of a medium, than written documents. And the document that you provided did not provide evidence or substantial points to back that claim. The document you did provide has unnecessary context and excessive, distracting sentence structure. The same argument you made could be provided in 1/4th of the text.
Doc writing is a "tool". If you're not able to use it effectively, it won't be any more helpful than slides or no written material at all. It just becomes a distraction. To restate my point, you offered a document with a different point of view, but the quality of your document, and your statements on expectations of a document (e.g. expectations of using more words) only prove that your definition of a document and its expectations are widely different than Amazons. They're not apples to apples.
>There are flaws and oversimplifications in your previous arguments that I am pointing out.
>Problems being intrinsically hard does not mandate requiring of a document vs. slides. The reasoning in the middle is important to cover, which is what I am trying to do.
You are "trying to do" but you didn't, nor did you outline what those flaws or oversimplifications are. The only reasoning provided was that slides have worked as well or even better for you (anecdotal evidence).
What I'm saying is that the necessary information – the amount of information that you must provide for the reader to truly grasp the issue and your thinking around it in 45-60 minutes – cannot be captured in a PowerPoint deck. And nor does the slide deck provide sections like appendices with varying levels of details. And finally, it doesn't facilitate readers leaving comments and questions directly inline.
And no matter how you try to twist the slide medium into being more like a document by forcing an appendices section or recording notes manually – it doesn't replace the document writing process.
As the author writes a document, they will get stumped on certain topics or struggle to find words to articulate a problem succinctly. This exercise helps the author discover gaps in their thinking and know immediately what areas still need to be disambiguated.
>Deep dive is also one of the leadership principles at Amazon. :-)
This comment comes off as trolling, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume it was meant in good faith.
To force your PowerPoint audience or document reader to actively "work hard" to understand YOU is not an example of having them dive deep. If anything, it comes off as being lazy – you the author didn't care to clean up your document so the reader can focus on the problem itself. Instead, they have to focus on the puzzle you've concocted. If I have to "dive deep" just to understand your ideas, then you haven't adequately prepared your ideas. The mere act of being able to follow your idea shouldn't require a deep dive. Once I read your document and form my questions, the deep dive comes in the discussion when the reader wants to dive deeper into specific parts of your thesis.
>Your own arguments are not only non-evidential but also often oversimplified, incomplete or wrong.
I'm sure my arguments come off as being "anecdotal". And that's fine. No disagreement there.
I think we can end the discussion here –
This is in no way a debate. Amazon has the secret weapon, and I'm literally giving you the blueprints. You can choose to use it or not use it.
Amazon, an almost $2 trillion company operating across retail sales and logistics, cloud services, entertainment, streaming, consumer electronics, and myriad other industries, has decided that 1 pager and 5 pager documents are critical to its success. And so much so that slide decks are banned for any substantial discussion. Slide decks are only acceptable at "presentations", and "presentations" =/= business or tech reviews.
What more evidence would you like? (Yes, this is a rhetorical question).
I want to point out the irony that you wrote a lengthy, dense document, despite your argument in favor of slides. And you’re asking for a debate (or saying you’re open to one). Im certainly not in the mood to write a document after what I previously explained, especially since your anecdotal evidence is that for you, slides have worked as well or better than documents. So having said, I don’t think this would be a productive “debate”. Instead, I’ll take this as an opportunity to provide feedback on your document. :)
I think it’s completely possible that for the scale your organization operates at and types of problems you solve, slides are as good as or even more efficient than documents.
That simply just isn’t true at Amazon, for the kinds of problems we solve. Now not every problem requires a document. But many problems are intrinsically hard, and they absolutely do.
Your document above is super dense, and the main points are ambiguous, even after seriously reading a couple times.
> Whereas a document also should ideally be crisp, however, expectations of use of a larger number of words and fuller sentences makes it easier.
There is no expectation that you use more words than necessary in a document. You should use the number of words required to unambiguously convey the idea to the reader. Help THEM understand what’s in your head. You’re looking at it almost as an act of vanity, and that completely misses the point.
That statement is difficult to decipher, and if you shared a complex topic with me using this writing style, I would actually prefer slides or ask you to explain it to me like I’m 5. Why? Because your document isn’t conducive to a productive debate. The conclusion isn’t immediately clear, and I don’t know what the supporting evidence is. Instead, you have a lengthy introductory text trying to break down the problem across several dimensions, but which of these are particularly relevant here? Unclear.
At Amazon, you would get dinged and the reader would question why you’re using complex sentence structure - is it because you’re compensating for not having done enough research? And passive voice is actively discouraged. I would probably ask you bluntly, “how much of this context is actually relevant?”
> If we do not conflate various above points, we'll find that it's not about document vs. slides. The real problem are 'A' above (bad guidance on how to make/present slides) and 'C(b)' above (cited variability in the audience).
Why such a lengthy write up if this is the summary of your argument? And “lengthy” is an understatement. There’s so much dense information here that you, the author, are not able to refer back to your own writing without having to simplify it down to an abbreviation! This is criminal, my friend.
The thesis is hidden at the end of a complex jungle of different points, with lists that are broken down into more lists. “lists” and bullet points, even if you try to weasel them in without newline separated bullet points, dont help the reader. Now The reader has to go back and put all this complexity in context, creating a tree of all this information and each node in their head. You’re actively making the reader work hard to understand your idea. At Amazon, we often dismiss this document writing as the author doesn’t know how to write well (and we need to help them), or they’re intentionally bullshitting us.
Going back to your doc — Why make the reader work hard to decipher everything else, which merely ended up being tangential? And your fundamental argument is a begging the question fallacy. The take away from your post is that slides are as effective or perhaps more so than a document, but you provided nothing to actually back up THAT statement. Your presenting what you are arguing for as being the truth in the first place.
Btw if this was an actual document review, my comments would be attached directly to your document and left as feedback that you or anyone else can revisit later on. We wouldn’t need to record the meeting or have someone separately take notes of the discussion.
Overall, this was more work to read than it ought to be. With so much unnecessary jargon and tangential points, it’s no surprise than you feel something other than a document would be more productive.
I’m convinced if you are able to write with clarity and conciseness, your opinion would change. You certainly produced a document in your post, but it’s as if you have preconceived notion that a document had to include jargon, lengthy sentence structure, and “officialese”.
I read the link you shared. There is something to be said about expressing an idea with sufficient clarity in fewer words, without jargon or “officialise” or more information that’s necessary.
And Amazon doesn’t disagree with that principle. If anything, being clear, crisp, and succinct are the hallmarks of a great document.
>Whatever can be presented using documents can be presented using slides too.
For the kinds of problems that require document writing at Amazon, this statement simply just isn’t true.
And the document review is NOT a presentation. Let me say that again - It is not a presentation. Presentations are about the presenter, often presenting as if they are the authority figure on a topic. Written document reviews are about the reader — giving the reader the opportunity to understand how a problem has or hasn’t been evaluated. The document reader is not the authority. As a matter of fact, they share documents to get feedback and find gaps in their thinking, or seek feedback on how they evaluated alternatives, and so on.
Presentations and Amazon document reviews are fundamentally two different things. There is absolutely zero similarity between the two.
The document should focus on the immediate topic, trade offs, solutions while supporting evidence or technical details, design artifacts, and FAQs etc are provided in appendices. This manner of information sharing is simply not possible in any PowerPoint or presentation slide format. And the simple proof to back my statements — Amazon and everything it has accomplished at what people now call “Amazon scale”. This is literally the secret sauce.
Amazonion here. The purpose of doc writing is for the author to dump their ideas and convey the critical pieces of information. It lets the reader consume the information at their pace, and re-read even after the meeting. The document starts the conversation and let’s the reader understand the problem, why it’s important, what things we have or have not considered, what trade offs have been made, and how we arrived at the conclusion or solution.
There are many, many things Amazon does not get right. The document writing culture is probably one of our not so secret, “secret weapons”.
At many companies I worked at, we had a PowerPoint or presentation driven culture. And the purpose of those meetings is to listen to the presenter, at the presenters pace. The meeting becomes about the presenter and what they think is important, as opposed to being about the reader. In presentation driven meetings, the presenter talks and questions actually distract from the presentation - often times presenters will bluntly ask for questions to be saved to the end.
My own team has a strong culture of getting engineers to write, and help them write well. It’s not about perfect English, but it is about touching on the key points and letting readers comment and ask questions.
Meetings without documents often go completely off the rails - especially because if the kinds of problems we’re solving. Without focus, meetings delve into tangents and branches off of those tangents. To be fair - this still happens if the document hasn’t been adequately prepared, but often because you find the document owner hasn’t fully thought through the problem or fully did their homework.
I’m at a company where we have tons of Java services. Services scale out horizontally, are fronted with load balancers, and there’s some minimal JVM tuning. Some services have thread pools dedicated to making calls to other services. Aside from that, there isn’t that much multi threaded code that we’ve had to write. Throttling is in use as well.
I see a big Rust benefit when you’re writing systems level code or you’re writing once and use the code as a library on Android and iOS.
But what type of logic are you writing in your services that requires Rust’s safety guarantees? Or is it that you’ve found you can respond to the same performance metrics (total requests per second) with fewer hosts because there’s no JVM or garbage collection overhead?
I’m a Principal SDE at Amazon. Amazons weakest link are its managers, especially at the L6 and L7 levels. Competent L6 SDMs are far and few. I’m now working with the nth L6 SDM as a direct ask from an L7 peer. Like the other SDMs I was asked to work with, this guy can’t write, lacks technical depth, but he’s able to wow other managers in interviews.
And the person who hired him is too proud to admit his failure and won’t do anything about it. It’s the same damn thing on repeat every damn year.
The problem with L7 managers is many of them are just sales people. Many of them are brilliant individuals, but they can’t hold themselves from trying to shadow architect what their teams are developing. Okay you wanted to be a manager. Now trust your damn people to do their job and get the hell out of the way.
For an L6 SDM, eventually this person will get encouraged to move to another org to go be incompetent somewhere else and become someone else’s problem. It’s unlikely he gets let go, unless it’s an engineer. An engineer is put on a performance improvement plan and removed.
Does it really bother me? I’m helping him write a coherent road map document. His senior engineers are getting flak for the managers poor management abilities. The engineers manage themselves and TPM themselves. Why are he and so many like him here? It makes no god damn sense.
And good, hard working, very capable engineers are thrown under the bus because of incompetent managers. They screw up peoples careers.
I’m just bitching at this point. I know. But nothing will change until it hits our bottom line.
I think I've provided sufficient examples on why this is the case, and I have almost a $2 trillion dollar company that agrees with me and has made this our policy. You can try to pick whatever logical fallacy, but the actual company and its leadership believes the document culture gives us a strong competitive advantage over PowerPoint or slide deck driven organizations. You're more than welcome to compete us and try to beat us.
>the onus is on you
I honestly have nothing to prove to you. This is turning more into your ego and your refusal to consider that others may be working on problems that require document writing whereas maybe the complexity of your work requires a few bullet points. Not to disparage any of your work, but it's narrow thinking at best.
Furthermore, you're repeating your previous posts, and each of your comments now all ending with a ":-)" is deliberate trolling. It's clear you're posting here in bad faith.
Feel free to respond again, but I won't engage with you any further.
If you want to troll or flash ego, you certainly can. But your personal information and even a profile URL are attached or linked from your HN profile. Maybe that's intentional and the shtick of "I'm right, and I'll condescend with smiley faces to show I'm superior" – that's how you try to sell yourself?
I hope it works out for you. Good luck!