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C.Q. Ritty

The Glamorous Life of a Systems Engineer (SE)

 

Hello World!

Congratulations, you have been voluntold to give another presentation. All because you know things! It will be your job to sound like a technical genius, a therapist, and a motivational speaker all while explaining the latest cybersecurity breakthroughs to highly skeptical customers. I can empathize (although empathy is not really my strong suit). I’ve done this hundreds of times, with widely varied outcomes. So, I am here to share some hard-earned field-tested nuggets of wisdom that may help save your sanity along with your reputation.

Step 1 – Know the Room: If you’re presenting to execs, they want shiny slides, not syslog dumps. If you’re talking to fellow engineers, they want the truth, not marketing fairy tales. The techies will fact check everything you say, while the non-techies will only remember the pretty pictures and whether your voice sounded confident. Be prepared to nonchalantly speak both languages.

Step 2 – Death by PowerPoint: If your slide deck looks like a Wikipedia page mated with an Excel spreadsheet, start over. You’re not writing a dissertation, you’re telling a story. A technical one, but still a story.

      Golden Rules:

  1. Clean, simple, and aligned slides
  2. Only one idea per slide
  3. If you need to shrink your font below 18pt, you have too much gibberish
  4. Use pictures to tell a story
  5. No screen shots of CLI commands or syslogs

Step 3 – Metrics that Matter: Avoid superlatives and generalities. Don’t say: “Evil hackers outnumber us, and that’s really terrible.” Vague statements such as “threats are evolving” mean absolutely nothing. Instead, show real-world empirical data. Use scary-but-true statistics, not clickbait. Try this:

“We saw a 40% increase in credential stuffing attempts coming from Russia in Q1. Here’s how we spotted this in under a minute.”

Now that means something! Bonus points for graphical dashboards with threat actors’ names that sound like heavy metal bands (DarkSide, Lazarus Group, Cobalt Strike, etc.).

Step 4 – Speaking Voice: You don’t need to sound like a game show host – but you also don’t want to mumble like you’re stuck in a debugging session at 2:00 a.m. Speak clearly and with confidence. You’re not just explaining tech, you’re selling trust. If your slide says “99.999% uptime”, you had better say it like you’ve personally validated each and every one of those nines in the trenches.

Step 5 – Handle Questions Like a Pro: The only thing worse than dumb questions is getting no questions. Encourage questions and dialogue. Some of them will even be intelligent. Others will be from people who are trying to prove that they know more than you (they probably don’t). And some others will be so off-topic that you will wonder if they wandered into the wrong conference room.

      Pro Tip: Smile. Nod. Use phrases like:

  • “That’s a great question. Let’s take it offline.”
  • “Interesting angle. Not quite the scope of today’s topic, but I’m happy to dig into that when I get back to the office.”
  • “Yes, but it depends.” (Because it always does.)

Step 6 – End with a Bang: Finish strong. Summarize the key points. Reiterate the value your solution brings. Your final slide should reassure them:

  • We’ve got this.
  • We’ve done this before.
  • And if the bad guys show up, we’ll be on them before they finish scanning port 445.

No fearmongering – just credible urgency and a plan that makes you sound like the expert in the room. And then, stop talking.

Now go forth and present.

Stay tuned for more nerdy columns about my experiences as an SE. Next month I will share some suggestions for surviving live demos.

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