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by josefresco 4756 days ago
Imagine the uproar if the NSI hired a graphic designer of sorts to make their slides more attractive. I can see the moaning now "They spent HOW much of my tax money making those slides pretty?!?"

I expect the NSA's slide to be crappy, because you know, they're spies and stuff not graphic UX experts.
4 comments
blantonl 4756 days ago
Keep in mind that those slides were almost certainly developed by a contractor. Who was paid 150K/year. Who was one of thousands of other similar contractors. With little to no real world experience.
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bazillion 4756 days ago
The average pay of contractors is between 70k-100k. The only ones making more than that are typically program managers for large contracts or other administrative folk who work on winning contracts for their company.

Contractors are typically not busy making powerpoints, but busy actually working on what they're hired to do since they have to do their hours. The busy work is left to the military folk and interns as stated in the other comment.

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blantonl 4756 days ago
Government contractors with active security clearances command far more than 70k-100K - an active TS/SCI clearance can take over a year to process - and the number of hurdles to clear is daunting for the average person.

An enlisted E-7 just coming out of the military with an active clearance and some technology experience is going to bank with the contractors out there and probably do very little real actual hard work.

That security clearance really is the willy wonka golden ticket...

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grumps 4756 days ago
As an ex military & civilian space contractor... there are people perfectly capable of developing slides similar to the ones posted. However - you'd be blasted by the (client) for the lack of the agency logo, program logo, and colors. The usage of colors can even be an issue. Depending on the audience the color red and variations of red will indicate that the line of communication is classified, as does purple depending on the system. For example - the army would hate the use of blue because it's an Air Force color and Navy color.

I use to try to make my slides and diagrams pretty and every time I did I was blasted which led to my disgruntled feelings towards my job. Hence why I'm no longer in this industry.

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danso 4756 days ago
It's not about "attractive" slides, it's about slides that are to the point and don't obfuscate information (unintentionally).

Being an analyst and being able to understand the processing of data into visual display is not an orthogonal skill set. Often, PowerPoint slides are ugly and worthless because whoever designed them thought "Oh shit, I don't understand how to best convey this...time for some clip art" and/or "Faster slide animations!"

Obligatory link to Tufte's criticism of NASA and Powerpoint: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

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bazillion 4756 days ago
There are graphic designers. I went to one to get a logo made for an internal web app I made. It's just that most powerpoints are made by interns and younger military folk.
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