“I just finished my slides”, ”I did my talk on the flight over, it's a little rough around the edges”, “I forgot all about this conference and then whipped this up in a panic two days ago”, or something of the sort said casually at the beginning of a talk, is
@xahteiwi
It is acceptable, if your presentation is a fill-in, because the actual speaker didn't show up and you were spontaneously recruited by the program committee two hours beforehand.
@xahteiwi SOP for me unless I reuse a previous slide deck. I want to be current and when I do the slides directly before the presentation, I am perfectly inside the topic upon show time.
☝️ Anyone who is prone to doing/saying this please take note: your flippant remark might irritate a significant fraction of your audience to varying degrees.
@xahteiwi the "reasons" you give are a problem .. but I've written slides hours before my talk because I only knew hours before the talk I was filling in for someone
@xahteiwi I did a form of this just yesterday. I signed up for a lightning talk recycling something that had been Covid canceled. It was based off a blog post. Turns out that I never actually wrote the deck and I had just a few rushed minutes to brain dump out some words and it really needed an apology.
Generally speaking though, I don’t get offended but it rarely comes across well.
@xahteiwi I hope that speakers come with super polished talks that they prepare in advance. Personally I'm working on my talk months in advance. Often I'm adding to my demos right up until the night before but only because I want to demo the latest and greatest stuff. So slides do get last minute love because I've been hacking. But it's never out of laziness or not caring.
@purpleidea Exactly. Like I said elsewhere, the adverb "casually" is in the question for a reason.
For example, I have no problem whatever with someone saying "folks, <other talk> by <other person> gave me this really cool idea last night that I absolutely want to share with you; let's hope the demo deities are with me today and we might want to sacrifice a chicken just to be sure to appease them".
@lufthans Oh sure, everyone makes final tweaks. Or perhaps one would add a cross-reference or back-reference to something that was mentioned in another talk that same day at the same conference. But that usually doesn't lead to the nonchalant "I just finished this" pseudobrag.
@glaist Yes, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, a "please don't hurt me" hedge would come across as apologetic, not casual — that's why I included the adverb "casually" in the question. In other words, I was indeed referring to the (attempted) flex.
@glaist Also, just to mention it, a new speaker saying something like "this is my first conference, I don't really know what I'm doing, I'm appropriately terrified, and I've been tweaking these slides up to the last moment to make sure they're relevant" is something that would win my unwavering support and sympathy.
Gotcha. Then for me if it's 'So yeah, I just knocked this up' when it's clearly something of substance and value is just a bit of an annoying tic, really. Can't say it hurts me or disrespects me, it's just mildly unnecessary. Maybe a reflection of the person's working culture...
@glaist To me, not being mindful of someone's valuable time (by not doing one's utmost for using that time wisely, and filling it with quality content) is being disrespectful. Times 400, if we're talking about a large auditorium. @lufthans
@xahteiwi It influences my overall perception of a talk. If "I just threw it together" and it's great, that shows that you're very familiar with what you're talking about, it's not all rehearsed. If "I just threw it together" and it's bad, then it just makes you look lazy and disorganized.
@jforseth210 My point is that your overall impression of the whole talk by definition cannot influence your immediate reaction to such a flippant remark made at its beginning.
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