Edit: Or if you create a conference that will largely be attended by tech employees you can make bank with a few months of after-work grinding. (Also odd how the op slips in shibari reference in a tech paper.)
Professional Development budgets can be hard to spend. Spluring everything on a conference gets you some half-decent benefits - something to put on your self-assessment for your review cycle; a couple of days out-of-the-office; some half-decent food, snacks, and corporate gifts; and finally the chance to travel to an interesting new city on your company's money.
The first CES was held in June 1967 in New York City. It was a spinoff from the Chicago Music Show, which, until then, had served as the main event for exhibiting consumer electronics.
Have a free t-shirt why dontcha, you look like a person of good taste who also needs something to wear. Don't even have to pay you like the guy in the chicken suit spinning a sign outside the venue.
From your perspective, if your employer is sending you on a fact finding mission, it is a free vacation away from the office and the ol' ball and chain. So that is what it is for also.
If you go to a tech conference with expensive tickets and pay out of pocket and aren't buying or selling anything contemplate what you are doing with your life. This article opens like so:
New Orleanians are just as likely as not to offer you a drink within sixty seconds of greeting you. Eighteen hours after leaving there, I walked into the Salt Palace Convention Center and made a joke about still needing my caffeine to almost-certainly-a-mormon.
I agree with most of the basic points. I find a lot of breakouts are more useful for letting me know about something that might be worth following up on than teaching me in depth. I zone out on a lot of demos pretty quickly; they have to be really compelling which is rare. One reason I'm generally a fan of shorter breakouts and keynotes.
The author also says that submittals are judged blindly (as in the name of the submitter isn't known). This isn't anything like universal practice though it may be more common with community events in the interests of supposed fairness. But IMO the reality is that the identity of the speaker should often factor in so long as the committee doesn't just pick "the usual suspects."
Lots of little ways to push harder too, like giving out organizational or individual awards like "CISO of the year" to stroke egos. Or "free training" that's really pushing more sales.
If you can get a free pass as a speaker or otherwise and the conference is somewhere you'd like to spend some time anyway, it can make sense to spend a day or two at an event if it's something you're really interested in. But I agree in general that I'm not going to spend $1K+ out of my own pocket to attend a big commercial conference for fun.
David Heinemeier-Hansson wasn't the "original committer to Rails". He built the first version of Rails entirely on his own. As he's known to be quite opinionated and harsh in his tone, I read the "melt down" that was mentioned here and I really don't think it reads in that tone at all[2]. While I did find the article here quite interesting and do share some of the sentiment regarding tech conferences, I find this paragraph quite disingenuous.
[1] Misspelling by author
As an employee:
If you are in the position to spend money, hire people, buy services, you also meet people you work with and it helps.
If you're junior in general or in some technology, it can be a way to be exposed to it and learn some unknown unknown.
Anything in between, maybe it's just a nice day off, paid by the company.
I remember I went to an Adobe conference in Chicago years and years ago, and they were giving away free iPad v1's to all participants. We were just in awe of these, and Adobe pretty much sabotaged the whole conference because no one was listening to the speakers, we were all just heads down playing with these new tablet thingies (not all of us even had smartphones at the time).
Sometimes I would take two days off and book my return trip for later. You are already there and your flight is covered - just pay extra for the stay and do touristy things.
Also - you can learn things.
Then a friend pointed out that the primary purpose of a panel was to get companies to pay to send those five people to Austin, TX so you could hang out with them and have conversations.
That really clicked for me: the goal was to get a large number of (hopefully) interesting people in one place. It wasn't really about the content at all.
Most the people I know who organize conferences or are a part of organizing conferences don't make much "bank" to brag about and it's mostly about getting contacts, having fun and giving back to the community somewhat for them. But these people are all based in Europe, maybe elsewhere it looks differently.
How you put going to a conference on your self assessment?
> Personal improvements this year
> Went to a conference, learned a bunch of stuff on company time
> Business value added this year
> Went to a conference and got better!
Or what?
The European Lisp Symposium is a premier forum for the discussion and dissemination of all aspects of design, implementation and application of any of the Lisp dialects, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Clojure, Racket, ACL2, AutoLisp, ISLISP, Dylan, SKILL, Hy, Shen, Carp, Janet, uLisp, Picolisp, Gamelisp, TXR, and so on. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate.
The European Lisp Symposium invites high quality papers about novel research results, insights and lessons learned from practical applications and educational perspectives. We also encourage submissions about known ideas as long as they are presented in a new setting and/or in a highly elegant way.
As someone who's been involved with the program and technicalities of some ELS editions: it's also certainly an occasion for Lisp programmers and enthusiasts and companies to see each other in person and network a little bit in addition to talking about their research and work.
At least that’s what I’m hoping for since I took over conference planning for the first time for the Carolina Code Conference in August.
Call for Speakers is open til May 25 btw.
https://blog.carolina.codes/p/call-for-speakers-is-now-open-...
The organiser and I are good friends and we've talked about his virtual offerings over the past few years. The f2f conference is way, way harder to put together, more expensive, more inconvenient for everyone concerned, expense and time for travel, etc. His profit margins are much reduced, too.
And yet - it was absolutely and obviously a better conference when he did it again in "the real world". Seeing old friends, being dedicated to actually turning up and listening to talks rather than being 80% distracted and only sort-of listening while juggling other work, going to the pub for a pint, meeting new people.
As ever - it's not (just) the talks that make for a great conference, it's the bits in-between the talks.
Long live (real world) conferences!
It is this session that can be pivoted into what one has done to help the team skill up during the current year.
Guildhalls and mason lodges have been meeting for 100s of years for essentially the same reasons.
Ask not what the conference can do for you, but what you can do for the conference.
sales: we need you to give a talk at yaddayadda conference.
me: aw, noah!
you had to create a load of foils (this was pre powerpoint) for whatever bullshit idea the conference organisers had. then go to the conference (i hate traveling) and then be accosted by friendly people who i had taught and could not at all remember (worst memory in the world for faces). and then find that the office staff had not separated the foils from their backing paper (it was glued on to the top edge) - ripping this off while doing a presentation makes you look like a complete prat. and then...
but you get my drift.
as for actually attending conferences, i have mercifully blanked most from my mind. i do remember one on MS COM (which is an OK tech, but it was OLE back then, which confused everybody) presented by MS programmers. after about half an hour of uninspired, maundering nonsense i turned to the guy i was there with and said:
"fuck this, i'm going to a pub"
and did.
Every conference this year will probably be touched by talks talking about AI. If there's a year to go, it's probably this one.
Why? My intuition is telling me that this is a 'buy the rumor, sell the news' situation (with this being the 'sell' part)
It would be like buying bitcoin for the first time at $60k.
Some employers require all employees to complete a certain amount of professional development every year. You want your patent lawyers to know about the latest developments in patent law, your HR people to know about the latest developments in employment law, and so on. In this case, merely having accomplished the professional development goals you set last year counts as goals being achieved.
Don't like that? Maybe your employer is starting a big project that's going to produce business benefits but relies on a new technology. For example, if you were previously an expert in virtual machines, and you've expanded your knowledge to Docker containers so you can help on an important new project - that's an achievement even if you were paid while you trained.
Perhaps you learned something at the conference you were able to put into effect directly, making your product better. That's an achievement - you're keeping the company at the cutting edge of technology!
Perhaps your employer is facing challenges with Foo, and the world's greatest expert on Foo was speaking at the conference, and you were able to quiz them about your challenges over coffee and get some great advice.
Perhaps after the conference you gave presentations to your peers at the company, passing on your new knowledge. That's helped the company by improving everyone's skills, not just yours - as well as demonstrating cross-team impact.
Perhaps at the conference you talked to some people who were interested in joining the company, and the chance to talk to an engineer in person along with the proof you're a cutting edge company following the very latest in technology has lead to more and higher quality job applicants.
Those things can shift strategy or tactics in ways that are a force multiplier so I consider it worth my or my teams time.
Usually "increasing your skills and knowledge" is not part of performance reviews. They are about your work performance (Duh). I.e. results, not learnings.
It is a shame that many people who claim to support diversity and tolerance actually have no interest in it.
But there are more killer apps per industry than there are fingers to count with, with more relevant use cases being discovered practically daily. Yesterday was better, but now is when you make every effort to figure out what you're doing to stay relevant before someone else can tell you that you're not.
Just making some extra money after the day job.
Here's one strategy:
It's a celebration of outlandish ideas in software :)
It has been one of the most glowing examples of "the infinite game" for me, the thing you can't ever win but want to keep playing. Conferences allow us to physically manifest our desire for being part of a community of peers that willingly teach each other. The progressive optimism of the tech community allows for that to happen without being exclusively about trade shows or cash cows.
Professional development plans and activities are often a line item.
It seems that tech conferences are more about career, and focused on jobs. Hacker conferences, on the other hand, focus on ideas and Big Problems that exist in the world. As an example, look at the slides from a talk at CCC Congress, and compare them to a slide from a tech conference. Chances are the speaker is not using their legal name, and also most likely does not share their company, if they are working.
Many years ago you would attend and get some good knowledge, not now nor has that been true for say the past 20+ years. I would say 99+% of the "classes" are about how this Product will make your life better and you get Mom and Apple Pie too.
About 15 years ago, I told my manager that I will no longer go to these and maybe you should send the new young hires to them. Why, most of them will feel good for being picked and are a bit too young to know how much of a waste most of these conferences are :) Plus the young people will get to see competitors of the products we bought, getting a better idea on how to do things.
The only other people that these would be good for are marketing people.
On the way back, my 13 yo son asked "How do you talk to people" and I said that there's not much you can do about it other than just do it. It IS a skill you can practice by doing. But you just need to acknowledge the anxiety, take a breath, and let it go and just say something. "Oh, I see you have for First Pycon ribbon, welcome to pycon. What do you do?" "Oh, you have a speaker ribbon, what is your talk on?"
Probably another 30% is excitement and feeling revitalized at what I've seen and who I've talked to.
Maybe 20% is cross-pollination with others in the industry, I had some really good "Open Space" talks this year. These are "Birds of a Feather" session, a group of people talking peer-to-peer about a subject. Still trying to decide if the advice from a Bloomberg SRE applies at all to my tiny company. :-)
So that leaves maybe 20% for the talks.
Plus, I got some pretty good dad-cred for introducing my son to the guy that was interviewed on a podcast we listened to on the way to the conf.
Now let's pour some out for the Whiskey BOF.
I love conferences, but I also loved other types of clearly pop-cultural conferences, and that's what they are.
I used to make a living producing livestreams for these kinds of conferences and they're all about passionate geeks coming together to build connections over the current latest trends.
They are about bonding over either rejecting the values of "the establishment" in your area of interest, or of simply examining how "new pop idea X" fits into the set of values your community is currently built around.
So they are about community building around a set of values, often trying to set themselves apart from the mainstream. Nothing wrong with that.
2. Fancy swag (that is definitely not a bribe)
3. Being wined and dined by sales people (that is definitely not a bribe)
4. Networking
5. Learn niche aspects of a programming language or framework, and prepare yourself for the future features
6. Food platters (can be hit or miss); word of advice, watch out for the fat Developers with the goatees and ponytails, or the skinny developers who dive bomb the food queue, they will clean up the buffet of the good stuff before you get there. Also duck out the presentation 5 minutes before lunchtime so you beat the queues.
And that's the real answer I would give to this question, too. The conf is a reason to go but the function of tech confs is to be a catalyst for meeting people.
In my experience those who get the least out of conferences are the groups of two to ten colleagues that just go to a few talks and otherwise hang around always in their own group, possibly even in a language different from the event's.
Instead I recommend the same advice I found helpful when I went to my first tech event: try to talk to at least one new person during each break, leave room for at least one extra person when standing in a group, always talk English (or whatever the event's main language is) even when the other person speaks your native language (if you're a non-native speaker) and if the sessions are recorded, prioritize talking with people over attending the talks.
And of course, cheesy as it may feel, bring business cards and exchange them liberally, even if it's just an easy way to look up the other person's name without having to stare at their chest to read the badge. If they didn't bring any, this also gives you an excuse to stare at their badge to "make sure you get the spelling right" as you write their name and contact details (GitHub, Twitter, e-mail, website, whatever) down. And yes, introducing yourself will feel increasingly rehearsed over time but that's because you're literally practicing it. It's a good skill to build either way.
The most fruitful conference I ever attended had amazing talks but I didn't attend more than a handful of them because I spent the entire time talking to other attendees, speakers and vendors. It's a bad time to ask your tech support questions (except as an opener if they're the kind of person that enjoys that and the problem is sufficiently interesting) but it's a great way to meet people, even if the benefits may not be immediately obvious until you run into each other again (e.g. I met one guy from Facebook early into his career and after running into each other for several years in a row he heavily tried to recruit me because he had changed into management by that point -- which I declined on ethical grounds, but still). It's an easy "in" even with bigger companies, especially if you wouldn't normally have access to those people.
Oh, and of course it's also an easy way to talk to other people in your field and find out both about the cool things other people are doing and also about how everyone else seems to run into similar problems as you and you're not actually that incompetent after all, because the boring problems are legitimately difficult to solve.
In summary, this is why "remote conferences" do nothing for me and largely seem to just be a way to charge people for video access that used to be free pre-pandemic.
Some exhibit/booth areas are staffed by knowledgeable people who are happy to answer questions, chat and/or listen to ideas for using or improving their products.
> no base point to start a conversation
How about the topic of the talk?
If you ask a question during Q&A, others may be interested and approach you to follow up.
> like a dating site except with no bio
Conference speakers typically have public bios and photos, which helps with hallway recognition. Those who are open to talking can often be found in a small group, which can be joined via topical comment/question.
This makes me sad. When O'Reilly and SD West still held their conferences, you could easily leapfrog your knowledge of a newer language (such as go or -- way back in the day -- Java) to a much higher level. Cons in the latter half the 2000s were some of the first places where you could see someone demonstrate an entire AJAX code solution, which eventually morphed into the backbone of what became the Web 2.0 revolution ('revolution' at least from a career-growth standpiont, whatever one may think of the movement). I learned c++ from Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, and Scott Myers at these Cons. Pre-pandemic, I definitely got professional value from technical sessions at GDC.
I'm sure this is a coincidence, but it seems to me that once shops tipped toward glue-jobs of Dockerfiles with declarative serverless cloud templates, a lot more of the online and talk content emphasised "what to" (commodity) instead of "how to" (craftsmanship).
The comparison is the creative and artistic fields, which absolutely host events and all kinds of opportunities for practicing creatives to meet other practicing creatives and discuss their work.
That’s because programming isn’t an engineering exercise. It’s art. Which isn’t to say engineering practices don’t improve the practice of our art. Just ask a large sculpture artist how much engineering they have to do to put different types of metal in the air.
The fact that programming pays so well has led many to believe the nature of our field is fundamentally different than what it is. We are lucky enough to be passionate about one of the few artistic and creative fields that is extremely lucrative.
We should never lose sight of how fortunate we are.
Conferences are about community, networking, business development, increasing personal status (which explains the meltdowns mentioned in the article), and sometimes just simply getting away from work and being social while enjoying life.
This is why online events really are very much subpar experiences to real-world, in-person gatherings. Online events fill their roles as well, but they tend to be more of the education-oriented stuff that I guess the OP is looking for. In which case, online events are just another form of online content like any other. But they aren't conferences.
But usually such very big shows happen somewhere in the USA/UK/west Europe etc. And pricey. What I've seen in my country were usually a conferences structured like a series of talks with breaks. If conference is big then 2 or 3 treks in parallel in different room. In this case there is only one point of interest - the presenter, and maybe one or two previous or next presenters. It's not a problem to recognize presenter, a problem is talk to him/her longer than a single carefully prepared question and answer, because there are like 20 other people around all trying to talk to him/her.
I find this is the basic of networking hack. And this is what most people do. Say "hi" and ask their opinion or their story.
Or you can offer your opinion "I found that new technique very interesting". "I didn't understand why that's better than X".
Or if you're super focused on something specific go for that. You're looking for a job, a client, an employee, ask for that directly. "Hi, I really enjoyed the talk and I'm looking for a job in the area. Are you working on something similar?".
If enough people want to talk to a presenter, the conversation usually moves outside the presentation room to allow more time. It is worth listening carefully to the questions of others in the queue, since you may meet someone with a question close to your interests.
Limited time is a challenge, but it's also good practice for developing a short pitch about a question or topic. If successful, the goal should be to exchange contact info with the presenter, for a longer discussion at the same conference.
Isn't this exactly Chelsea's take, too?
Yes, but for me It Depends. I'm not great at starting up conversations with people I don't already know, and it makes me uncomfortable. So whether or not I'm at a conference specific to my (fairly niche) field or not makes a huge difference. If I am, I tend to socialize quite a bit as I know a bunch of people even if a bit tangentially. But when I'm at a more standard software conference I tend to keep to myself and utilize "the hallway track" a lot less.
It just checks off that you did what you said you planned to do.
* Attendees. I think the author did a good job of explaining what they get out of conferences. Travel! Diffuse connections that may or may not turn into more later, but are missed when not available. Plus some incidental learning.
* Sponsors. These folks put up some money to have a seat at the table. As a sponsor, you can support the community and get a good reputation, recruit (as author mentions), or have sales conversations. That's about it.
* Speakers. These provide content for the attendees. Either paid (devrel) or on their own initiative. Speakers want to share their ideas, increase their brand, and connect with others (speakers and attendees).
It's tough to put on a community conferences without all three of these actors being present.
But if you’re running out of “how to get to know someone” topics, that’s more generally stuff like.. well, my reply converts to nested conference talk outline here, and so:
- invent a question
- about something cool
- cool to you is fine
- as long as it’s relevant
- the conference is relevant
- so are tangents from it
- sometimes the venue too
- or about them
- ask what’s cool to them
- about the conference
- or tangentially about it
- or the venue architecture
- ask for more details
- or be quiet and sip coffee
- quiet isn’t always an end
- it’s restful
- mirror how long your answers are
- the spice must flow
- don’t drown them in it
- add 10% to be extroverted
- subtract 50% to be introverted
- you can be plainly trying here
- you don’t need to disguise it
- being obvious can be encouraging
- being obvious isn’t bad
- subtlety is not mandatory
- tell them you appreciated the chat
- unless you totally hated it
- it costs nothing to be nice
- say it plainly
- it was nice to chat
- i appreciate what you said
- glad to meet you
- have fun at the conferenceMaybe mention this as your take away from your next conference.
We do? I am only vaguely aware that such things exist. I've been to a few trade shows over the years, but only when my employer pays for them. I had hoped this article might answer the question posed in its title, but after getting halfway through, it still seems to be taking the answer as much for granted as the conferences, so I think I'll move on.
Hey that's me (aside from the fountains of knowledge part... and the well-to-do part...).
Grinding leetcode has an upperbound as to how much 'bank' it contributes, and in some conversations people would laugh and say that small amount you are talking about does not constitute bank as they sip on their fancy little drinks on their private jets whilst going through their contacts list.