[emptysea]

We have something similar at my current place where every week or two someone presents.

It ends up being the same people presenting and I don’t think it is because people are afraid of public speaking, but instead people don’t care about the talks.

At most 1-2 people (~20 person eng team) will ask a question, engage with the speaker, say thanks, etc. but most people either don’t attend the video call, or do so with video and microphone off for the entire time.

I long for a group of engineers who care about honing their tools, finding better solutions, making things reliable and efficient, etc.

It becomes draining to have the same people present over and over again.

/end rant

[godelski]

When talks are given through video I actually attend a lot more than when they are in person. I put them on, turn off my music, and listen while working. I've actually learned a lot of stuff this way. Of course I'm not putting 100% effort into work, but that's fine. And if it is a talk I'm not interested in that percentage of focus on work is much higher.

Just because people are lurking doesn't mean they don't find value in your talks.

[jodrellblank]

> but instead people don’t care about the talks.

Are you taking into account this kind of comment by Dan Luu[1]:

"Most people consider doing 30 practice runs for a talk to be absurd, a totally obsessive amount of practice, but I think Gary Bernhardt has it right when he says that, if you're giving a 30-minute talk to a 300 person audience, that's 150 person-hours watching your talk, so it's not obviously unreasonable to spend 15 hours practicing (and 30 practice runs will probably be less than 15 hours since you can cut a number of the runs short and/or repeatedly practice problem sections). One thing to note that this level of practice, considered obessive when giving a talk, still pales in comparison to the amount of time a middling table tennis club player will spend practicing."

From that, you might ask your presenters to do 2-4 hours of rehearsal, and for the talk to generate $2,000 of value before it's worth running / worth attending.

I feel many talks are "what the presenter wants to talk about" not "what the audience wants to hear". At least at a tech conference or on YouTube you can self-select so those two overlap. Inside a company, less so, so it's more important that they are done well, actionable, preferably short. They can't solely be mandatory. or solely fun for the presenter. And they certainly can't be spinning a tale of a utopian future for the company which is worse for me personally, or teasing me with a future tool or process or change which is better for me personally but which the company won't permit or won't get behind or actively opposes.

[1] https://danluu.com/p95-skill/