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by Konnstann
1084 days ago
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I'm currently finishing up working on the 2nd big DARPA grant in my career, as an engineer in one of the labs that got paid money to do the work. DARPA funds a lot of "pie in the sky" ideas where the work is super exploratory in the beginning, which is cool because we get to conduct a lot of basic research and try out weird ideas. Like someone else said, timelines are tight, budgeting is a mess, and every phase you have to continue to justify your team's existence to bureaucrats or you get cut. The updates are in presentation form as well, but you have to abandon the "show don't tell" because the presentation is sent out to a bunch of people that don't attend the meetings afterward. Overall it's a lot of money to work on cool stuff but I'm happy I'm not managing any of it. |
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I think there is a misunderstanding about what "show don't tell" means.
In a presentation like that tell means: "Our underwater robot is very stealthy." while show means "Our robot spent 2 weeks trailing a nuclear submarine of ours without the submarine being aware of our presence. Here is a picture we took of the submarine's sail, and here is the statement of the captain saying he had no idea." (Obviously this is a silly example, please don't spook people with the biggest, meanest sticks.)
Show means showing your results and tell means describing how awesome you think you are without evidence. It has nothing to do with whether or not your audience attends the presentation.
This is similar to fiction writing, where tell means that you describe what someone is like, while show is describing how that behaviour/emotion appears. For example tell would be "George was angry", while show would be "George banged on the door with two fists, his veins bulging with barely contained rage."