As a high tech marketer, I interact with a variety of different types of people. These can range from the very big-picture salesperson, to the most detail oriented engineer. There are also interesting hybrids such as the CEO or VP who was promoted up from an engineering position.
Many salespeople and outbound marketers think almost exclusively in generalities. These folks seem to be very comfortable with slides like this in a presentation:


The point of this slide is that the conventional approach of using more clock speed, memory, cache, and CPU cores to solve a problem cannot be sustained. Simple, huh? Many engineers I know have a mental breakdown when they see a slide like this. They ask "is that a bridge or a rollercoaster? is it already built or unfinished? why does it end?" The more abstract the relationship is between the image and the topic at hand, the more difficulty they seem to have. I have noticed this most among hardware engineers. Embedded software engineers seems to have slightly less of a problem, and PC/web programmers have the least problem with analogies.

Engineers have a tendency to be very concrete in their thinking.  Metaphors, analogies, sarcasm, and exageration are all abstract ideoms that are not comfortable for a concrete audience.  It may be more useful to take an approach of "just the facts".  Present concrete facts and ideas first, then extend the facts to conclusions and applications.  Try to avoid communicating ideas simply through abstract ideoms.

I think that the simplified, Zen approach to giving presentations is very effective. However, for an audience of engineers, I might modify the slide in the following manner:



I think that regular Powerpoint presentations can also cause cognitive impairments!
The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, Edward Tufte