July 7th, 2004

Differences between managers and programmers, part 2

If you are attending a presentation, you can tell whether the person at the lectern is a manager or a programmer by looking at their PowerPoint presentation. If it’s black-and-white, all-text, multimedia-free, and rarely has more than ten bullet points on a page, then the presenter is probably a programmer. If it’s colorful, with graphics, animation, and pages crammed with information bordering on illegibility, then the presenter is probably a manager.

It’s fun watching a manager try to rewind their presentation to a particular page. As you step over pages, you still have to sit through the animations, which means that instead of “hit space five times” to go forward five pages, you have to “hit space fifteen times, waiting three seconds between each press of the spacebar” because each page has three animations which you must sit through and experience again.

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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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