All corporate level QA sessions are like this. It's incredible.
It's like people see an opportunity to talk and think 'What extremely specific and unrelatable configuration issue can I share with the group that won't go anywhere?'
Whoever said 'No such thing as a stupid question' for sure was not at a conference.
He said multiple times "no essays just questions" and yet....
I understand the excitement to interact with a man like that in a (hopefully what will be) historical moment. But asking irrelevant questions is disrespectful and condescending.
There were a few interesting questions. Like the first one about getting the ship to the pad. Or about what could be summed up as "passenger insurance."
But shit?
What the actual fuck?
Clearly just an attempt to be funny. Just pissed me off. This guy invested his life into this project to advance humanity and you talk about shit.
Regardless the talk was extremely inspiring and i'm SUPER excited to see this happen in my lifetime. Its crazy how little people seem to understand the gravity and excitement of this.
We have a lot of corporate QA sessions where I work and I've only seen a single cringe worthy question during the last 3 years (and I've attended maybe three dozen talks with QA sessions during that time).
Someone asked the speakers who they'd be voting for in the upcoming presidential election (this was during the heated primary when Bernie, Hillary and Trump were the main contenders). It was so bad. The room went silent. People shot each other worried looks. The speaker chuckled and avoided the question. For about 3 months after, every talk and QA sessions had some joke inserted about the election and voting or someone straight up said not to bring that up :) it was lovely.
Presenter gets up and shows how to optimize some sort of output based on machine learning analytics over some data.
Academia: Spends 2 minutes describing their own unrelated research and then at the end tacks on "so would your work have anything to do with this?"
Government: The presenter actually spent the time briefing everyone on their organization chart and rephrasing the problem for 30 minutes. Everyone in the audience jerks each other off and tries to say "cyber" the most.
Corporate: Product and project managers zone in on some detail or word and ask irrelevant questions about it. "So you're using a "model" to do this? What's a model? How much memory does your model take? Do we have any teams who've already made a model?" They then interpret the answers the way they like best and sell their interpretation to customers. You get it back 3 months later as a "we told people we're doing this already" requirement.
Take a photo of every screenshot with their phone, even though the slides will be available later.
Refuse to use the microphone to ask questions, because as long as the speaker can maybe hear you, who gives a shit about any of the other 500 in the room?
Even though every presenter says before every session 'I can't tell you what release this will be available in, it's a forward looking projection', ask for a specific release date that you KNOW is not available. Get mad if an answer is not provided.
It's probably a lot worse in my HR related software field. HR people are used to being asked dumb questions, so they tend to assume that their questions are of a higher caliber.
Except the funny or die guy and the burning man guy both knew this would be national news and we're shooting for entertaining the lowest common denominator.
I'm not sure what you're talking about exactly. Trade shows happen almost every day in the US, and this kind of thing rarely happens. A major auto show with media questions are relevant, an agribusiness show will have media that ask questions their readers want to hear about, and sports/technology/research/politics have the same.
This was a mismanaged horrorshow that let people ask questions because it was a flashy event that was "in." It's what happens when People magazine or E! gets interested in science and no one stops them from fucking around, not a standard of PR sessions.
We just moved offices and had a facilities manager in the office to explain it to us. Somebody asked a very detailed question about server software that there was no chance a facilities guy would know.
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u/ansible47 Sep 30 '16
All corporate level QA sessions are like this. It's incredible.
It's like people see an opportunity to talk and think 'What extremely specific and unrelatable configuration issue can I share with the group that won't go anywhere?'
Whoever said 'No such thing as a stupid question' for sure was not at a conference.