Spoiler alert: yes. But not for the reasons you might think…

Why did we become software engineers? Naturally, to have a great career, make lots of money, get free pizza and beer all day every day and retire early. Right? Well, that’s what the cynics would say. In reality, software engineering is one of those professions many of us got into less for the love of money — there are plenty of jobs that pay better — and a lot more for the love of coding and problem-solving.

I remember when I first caught the bug. I was just 21, and I somehow got it into my head that I wanted to understand this thing called HTML, and wanted my own website out on the internet. Thought followed action and as I was literally immigrating to the UK, I read a 300-page book on how to write HTML. In an airport.

My first thought was: “people get paid for knowing this?!? This is pretty simple stuff.”

And sure enough, as I settled in my new adoptive home, within the week I built a website the good ol’ fashioned way with just HTML. Using tables, no less. If you think debugging nested div tags today is annoying, trust me, dealing with tables two decades ago was far more fiddly. But it didn’t matter because I genuinely enjoyed it. HTML was followed by CSS, Javascript, PHP, C, Python, Ruby, and the rest is history.

Making sense of it all, gaining expertise

I don’t know how everyone else learnt software engineering, but my journey was a hot mess of self-taught courses piled on top of each other. Not because I’m disorganised, but rather because I wanted to learn everything. Not because I wanted to know everything, but rather because I wanted to understand what part of software engineering was interesting to me.

C felt hard-core, but having to think of memory management all day every day, wasn’t something I felt overly attracted to. Pure backend development felt dry and joyless, mobile development was far from where it’s at today, and game development, for someone who was never a real gamer, didn’t make much sense. So full-stack development it was. A little bit of PHP, some HTML, some CSS, and some JS to round it off with. Oh, and some SQL because… databases are a thing when you build a website.

However, that was just the baseline. It took another couple of years to truly understand where my true passion lied. The more I spent time on the front-end, the more obvious it became — I loved working in the browser. I didn’t mind the browser wars, they were but a fun challenge. I didn’t mind the pixel-perfect styling requirements, I looked at them as useful guide wires. I didn’t mind having to make sure the page worked just as well with keyboards and screen readers, accessibility felt like the right thing to do. So I grew in those areas exponentially, I became the engineer other teams sought out. I finally had expertise to share.

Sharing passion

But as I quickly found out, I wasn’t just sharing expertise. In fact, half the time, I passed on more than knowledge: I managed to get others excited about the things I was passionate about like frontend development, accessibility, microfrontends, AI tools for developers and increasingly software architecture and documentation.

The vast majority of engineers shy away from the opportunity to present. And honestly, very often they have a right to be because far too often it’s presented as a career-climbing strategy. Few things in software engineering convey visibility more than hosting a Zoom meeting for 100 people, walking onto a stage at a company all-hands or at a tech conference. And many engineers aren’t ladder-climbers. They want to solve problems. That’s why most of us got into engineering. Need a good example? Have a chat with Steve Wozniak or Linus Torvalds. But they did present on various occasions, and every single time they inspired people in the audience. Why? Because they shared the things they’re passionate about.

Good presentations aren’t an information transfer mechanism. Their goal is to express passion, to inspire, to trigger conversations. They must have a multiplier effect. Otherwise, it’s a boring monologue.

Go to any tech meetup, and you’ll find that everyone is passionate about something. Sure, there’s the odd showoff who really is just there to grow their network without having much of a clue about anything in engineering, but chances are you’ll find many who will inspire you with their passion. Whatever they just inspired you with could have been a presentation.

I see this often on LinkedIn as well. Engineers write lengthy, passionate posts and comments on all sorts of engineering topics they genuinely care about. My thoughts are always: “this could have been a Medium article or a presentation.” Why is it not? God only knows. Fantastic engineers spend hours and days every month creating valuable, inspiring content that gets lost in a Reddit or StackOverflow thread. Such a waste.

Presentations aren’t boring

Contrary to general belief, presentations aren’t really boring. I blame PowerPoints for making everyone think they are. But you do have options. While tools don’t make a pro, good tools can help you get there faster and make a bigger impact when delivering your presentation. Creating a Prezi presentation is one way to achieve that, but I have also seen engineers create dedicated, jaw-dropping websites — I mean, we always like building new things, right?

I have sat through incredibly boring presentations, though, regardless of what tool has been used. If I pick up on the speaker’s lack of passion, you lost me within 2 minutes. If you’re not passionate about the topic, do not present, do not write about it. Nothing good will come of it.

In the Prezi Engineering organisation, we do these events called Pragma. It’s usually a 1-hour affair where an engineer presents on a topic they care about. It’s entirely voluntary, they have full control over it, myself and another colleague of mine, we just help organise it and provide pointers if they need it. This year, however, I decided it was time to host the mother of all Pragma sessions, and invited each of the four tech stacks to find someone who has something to present. The topic was simply: “Aha!” — sharing an “aha moment” of 2025.

To my surprise, we ended up not with four speakers, but 11, as essentially every team had someone with something inspiring to share. That was the main requirement, while nudging those who haven’t done a presentation this year, to contribute. It’s a 7-minute talk at most. Lightning-talks is what some would call these. But you often don’t need more to make an impact, to inspire. It also helps speakers get to the point faster.

A few minutes long presentation is long enough to start a conversation, light the spark.

You can deliver a lot of value in just a few minutes. One of my most read articles is 3-minute read I wrote while being incredibly frustrated with CocoaPods on Apple Silicon CPUs, and once I sorted the problem for myself, I decided to share it in the form of an article rather than an obscure comment or post on social media. It wasn’t about showing off, it was about sharing a small Eureka moment. And judging by the stats, 71,000 engineers needed me to do that.

Presentation skills aren’t the point

The point is ultimately to find your passion as a software engineer. Once found it, you’ll become better and better at it, and you’ll start wanting to talk about it. I’ll talk about accessibility, automated testing, frontend architecture, and of course LEGO as well to anyone who’ll listen. And every so often I’ll pour that passion-led expertise into an article or a presentation. And I’m not even going to pretend I am a great presenter because that was never the goal, or at the very least it was always secondary, and it’s something that I keep refining over time, organically.

So next time someone asks you to deliver a presentation on something, don’t tell them to shove it, tell them what you’re passionate about, tell them what you want to share, the thing you would like to inspire with, and trust me — and yourself — it will be a killer presentation. Not because you have presentation skills, but because you’re sharing something you’re deeply passionate about, and that makes all the difference.

P.S. This could have (also) been a presentation…

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes, blogs and books. Author. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.

Should Software Engineers Have Good Presentation Skills? was originally published in Prezi Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.