zlacker

  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.

A trade show is where you hawk your wares. A tech conference has sponsors, these are companies that want to sell you things. From their perspective, KubeCon for example, is where they try and convince you that their monitoring and alerting software is the best one. So that's what it is for.

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.

That's why the guys with the beer bellies wearing Hawaiian shirts at these shindigs are often well-to-do fountains of knowledge who just want to have fun. They have been around long enough.

>>HopenH+(OP)
>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.

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.

>>HopenH+(OP)
> That's why the guys with the beer bellies wearing Hawaiian shirts at these shindigs are often well-to-do fountains of knowledge who just want to have fun. They have been around long enough.

Hey that's me (aside from the fountains of knowledge part... and the well-to-do part...).