Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Why Do You Care About Tech Conferences?
An anonymous user is "just starting a programming career," and has several questions for Slashdot's readers:
What exactly is the role of tech conferences? I always assumed they were mostly for exhibitors to pitch me things, but then what's in it for me? Am I just going there to network, or am I learning new cutting-edge techniques and getting enlightened by awesome training sessions? Or is it just a fun way to get a free trip to Las Vegas?
And then what's in it for my employer, who's paying to send me there? If my boss has to approve the cost of attending a conference, what's going to make him say yes? I mean, do employers really get enough value from that extra conference-only information to justify sending off their employees for several days of non-productivity? (Don't they know all that networking could lead me to job offers from other companies?)
It's always been a little intimidating the way people talk about conferences, like everyone already knows all about them, and drop the conference's name into the conversations like you should already know what it is. I always assumed people just attended only conferences for their current programming language or platform -- but is there more to it than that? What exactly is the big deal?
I'm struggling to even find the right metaphor for this -- is it a live interactive infomercial or a grand gathering of geeky good will? So leave your best answers in the comments. Why do you care about tech conferences?
And then what's in it for my employer, who's paying to send me there? If my boss has to approve the cost of attending a conference, what's going to make him say yes? I mean, do employers really get enough value from that extra conference-only information to justify sending off their employees for several days of non-productivity? (Don't they know all that networking could lead me to job offers from other companies?)
It's always been a little intimidating the way people talk about conferences, like everyone already knows all about them, and drop the conference's name into the conversations like you should already know what it is. I always assumed people just attended only conferences for their current programming language or platform -- but is there more to it than that? What exactly is the big deal?
I'm struggling to even find the right metaphor for this -- is it a live interactive infomercial or a grand gathering of geeky good will? So leave your best answers in the comments. Why do you care about tech conferences?
Time away from the desk? maybe a new city to check out?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
If it's on your employer's dime.
For you: fun, broadening, exposure to more of what the industry segment is about, chance to make connections which could prove valuable to your career, opportunities to attend technical seminars or paper presentations which will clue you in to what academia or standards groups are up to.
For your employer: a way of rewarding selected employees with a nice perk, boosting their morale, gflying the company flag to keep up name recognition with others in the industry, giving them a chance to get a clue about what academia or standards groups are up to.
I'm old enough to remember a time where tech conferences were actually useful, when actual techies were present that actually knew about the tech.
Of course, there were already salespeople there, as well. But both categories knew their stuff:
One could actually learn something, get good information from insiders, pose and get immediate answers to relevant questions, access that was hard to get otherwise, in those days.
But it has been decades since that state of things. I have stopped going to tech conferences when they started getting populated by junior sales folks and booth babes only. All you seem to get now is some bored young person handing you a flyer before losing eye contact and returning to whatever is more interesting on that smartphone screen. I'm making it a caricature, but that's what it feels like to someone like me..
I can get that flyer as a PDF without leaving the office.. and a lot more information, online.. So why bother going to a conference?
Cheers,
Anonymous Old Grumpy
Tech conferences are mainly a PR stunt that generates little to no business to a company. For the most part they are just (unsuccessful) advertisement which is the reason why they are losing popularity and most companies are only attending one a year (if any).
Free stuff!
yeah right.
but why I care about tech conferences?
Because I can watch the videos, catch up on new technologies, for free, after the fact, at my leisure - given the audio quality is acceptable.
System level programmers (OS, codec, driver, browser, compiler, etc...) don't benefit much from conferences. But people closer to the IT level do. For example, I am a former system level developer and now am writing IT automation systems. Without conferences, I would lack access to resources of information from companies like Microsoft and Cisco regarding automation tools and APIs.
A great example would be Powershell DSC which is like Puppet, Chef or Ansible but likely to be supported for the next 20 years. Powershell DSC has tons of documentation, but there is no training or structured books on the topic which are relevant to current versions.
I can spend 1000 hours figuring it out or I can go to Microsoft Build or Ignite and corner a developer from the team and get it spelled out to me in 10 minutes.
While I'm at the show, I can learn that 125,000 lines of code and 6 months of work I have planned for the year which I'll have to support already exists but isn't obvious where it could be found.
So, for $10,000 for plane tickets, hotel, food, show entrance, etc... I can probably save my company $100,000.
Oh, and of course while I'm there, I can build my social network and find like minded individuals.
It's all about knowledge. The technical talks are rarely, if ever worth attending. Let's face it, now one is going to give out trade secrets in those things. At best, they are a minor muse towards how you could do something. The real benefits in conferences is seeing things you didn't know existed. Do you need a 10+2 1/10G ethernet, mil-rugged, layer 3 switch in a forum factor the size off your fist? If you do, then hell knowing the right company is the difference between a project going bust and making it. Conferences are about sharing knowledge of the technology that exists that you don't know about, not about saving costs on commodity items. No one is going to go to a conference and say "zomg, I just saved my company 50% on the price of steel!".
Though I've only been to one. Basically the headliner(s) masturbate on stage while the audience crowds around and oohs and ahhs.
I've never felt a need to attend one and don't expect I ever will.
I think the days of going to tech conferences just to see vendors are long gone. Most I've been to have either a handful or no vendors.
The reason I like going to tech conferences, is actually to take a step back from day to day work in the industry and think about larger trends. Where is your field going? What is the leading edge of things being done? Do you agree with the common assessment about ways to approach solving problems?
Basically, to think and inspire new ideas...
Also of course there are the people. You can't really know until you get to any given conference what the people that attend are like, but to to as many people as you can. The parties (if they are parties) are nice, but more spectacle and harder to talk to people at - find people between sessions and talk to them, just say hi and ask them what they are working on and why they are there.
When I say talk to as many as you can, listen to Clint Eastwoon and "know your limitations". For a lot of us social interaction is draining so if you've maxed yours out, don't feel bad not chatting for a while. Do what you can.
These days more and more content is online or streamed so there may not be as much reason to go. But it's still good to just have that break from work and routine, otherwise the videos may be there but you will not watch them or really pay attention they way you do if you are there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It was a reward for getting stuff done.
In the 80's I wanted to go to a Usenix conference in Mission Valley. Boss said "why would I send you there". Me: "because for the past 3 years you've sent me to a week long conference in Vegas that I didn't want to go to and couldn't contribute". Boss: "But your good at what you do (telemetry), and I thought you liked those trips. Me: I don't gamble, I don't deal with customers well, I hate crowds. Boss: No.
Ended up paying the entrance fee myself and taking vacation days.
Did I mention Mission Valley was 10 miles from my condo? No airfare, no hotel, no food chits? Something like $60 and a couple days off, and I learned more at that damned USENIX than I did in 8 years of that stupid show in Vegas.
Best show? Got an all expense paid show to New Orleans, before Katrina. What sucked? Took the wife. I'd do the show, get to the hotel, and say "Ya know, I'd like to see foo" . Her response? "I saw foo yesterday, what else do you wanna see?".
Of course, back then companies would reserve 3-5 airplane seats 6 months in advance, then a couple days before the show decide who got to go. That all ended well before 9/11 when airlines decided they could charge fees for changes.
That's two things. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
If you have to ask, the conferences you are considering are not worth it for your employer. I attend roughly five conferences per year but they are specific to my industry and all of them post schedules ahead of time. One is extremely large and the others are small. There is no question that they are useful for learning from experts, meeting my counterparts elsewhere, and exchanging tips and tricks. I meet vendors at one of them but it's usually the engineers who normally don't get to talk to customers, so it's actually useful.
Seriously, if you have to ask, it's not worth it or you are just in the wrong field and don't know it.
I've gone to quite a few different events (both as an attendee and as a speaker), including free events, pricey events, events where I went for my own reasons, events where I went for an employer or a client, etc.
Here are the criteria I have found that help me judge whether I should really care about the specific conference:
For me, this mostly means that I end up attending events that resemble meetups, Linuxfest-type, coding workshops, hackathons, etc. While some of them do have vendors, the type of events which I favor make it pretty easy to stick to the "interesting" parts and avoid the vendors altogether.
Of course, if you want to just go and socialize, just about any event will end up with groups of people that skip all the sessions and do nothing but talk.
Tell me this does not look useful to someone working on modern compiler issues!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you go to a conference that is part of an active community, the biggest benefit IMHO is the human networking. Get to mingle with people who share your interests, values and ideas, and learn from others, teach what you know, and just get to have interesting discussions that can influence the direction of the project.
In my 29 years in the industry, I've attended many, many conferences. They all have their peak years and peak value, until they don't. Some communities just grow too large and become too broad. Networld+InterOp was one of my favorites to attend back in the 90s, but they grew too much and became too dominated by vendors. Sadly, the same has been going on with the OpenStack community in recent years, with the additional annoyance of petty fights about direction.
The folks at the Cloud Foundry Foundation keep their conferences deliberately small and targeted to the core audience, which makes them much more enjoyable, although it becomes harder to get talks accepted.
And let's face it, some conferences (particularly vendor conferences) are not very valuable, but they throw great parties, with lots of swag, free booze and just plain fun with single-serving friends. Those also have their niche, and there is nothing wrong with that either.
Just be clear what do you (or your employer) want to get out of the conference and go from there.
It might be through the technical track, or it might be through networking, but you may learn how to do something you have always done one way, in a different, better way. OR you may tell somebody else the cool thing that you have done, and they think 'Wow thats so much better than our existing process!'
The sharing of idea's can pay off handsomely.
Oh, sorry, I thought you said you were just starting your political career...
I've attended the siggraph conference numerous times. It has a trade show, discussion panels, research papers, art exhibits, networking, job fair, film festival. It's awesome!!
> Am I just going there to network, or am I learning new cutting-edge techniques and getting enlightened by awesome training sessions? Or is it just a fun way to get a free trip to Las Vegas?
Yes. You're going there to network - not just with companies who might hire you away, but with potential future colleagues you might help to recruit. You're going to talk to other attendees about what they're doing, compare notes on what works and what doesn't, and meet subject-matter experts who you can tweet if you get stuck. You're going to get invited to the local tech community Slack, where you can do all of the above (and more) even after the conference is over.
You might well be enlightened by the sessions - you'll probably run into at least a few things you didn't know about before. You're unlikely to learn all the details, but you'll at least find out that the thing exists, and probably enough information to decide whether it's worth investigating further at work (or away from work). Speaking of away from work, it's likely to pique your interest about things which aren't relevant at work (yet), possibly enough that you'll investigate them on your own time.
The free trip to Vegas (/ wherever) shouldn't be ignored. Having a good time, and associating that good time with work having paid for it, shouldn't be under-valued - it's likely to be reflected in your productivity and loyalty.
Many of these things are great for your employer as well as for you. What manager doesn't want a team filled with well-connected, loyal, enthusiastic developers who are interested in the latest developments in tech and may well do some learning on their own time as well?
For me, I've been able to have booths to demo software systems that my team and I work on. Having them at shows is similar to running focus group tests. We let people try out the software with limited or no instruction whatsoever to observe how each person uniquely uses the software, we see what is confusing for users, and what we can do to improve their overall experience. For us, it is all about user experience when it comes to shows, it is an invaluable resource to see people interacting naturally, instead of in a scripted way or waiting for bug reports that may never come in (especially for UX issues)
For some reason, I simply don't make the time to really dive into certain subjects. With a conference, I often come to the US and leave the family in Europe. So there's nothing else that draws away the focus. Lots of times with iOS conferences, you can book a day with an intensive workshop before the talks start, and that's really nice as well.
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I'm a 40-year industry 'veteran' and have been to a great many conferences. In the main, my employers paid for (usually) expensive tickets.
However, I often find nowadays that the informal ones, self-organised unconferences, open-source meetups are a great deal better. We talk about things that concern and are useful to us as equals rather than being sold products and being lectured to by 'thought leaders', 'evangelists' and 'horizon scanners' (whatever they are, I'm joking, before anyone tells me). Immediately I see the choppy two-hand motion and the inevitable outpouring of buzzwords, I know I'm in the wrong place. As for the networking, that's often fairly cynical.
Better, because I'm a Brit, I've been going to and (in one case) organising some Raspberry Pi Jams: https://www.raspberrypi.org/ja... for kids, parents and teachers etc. The levels of enthusiasm and expertise in these put some of the 'professional' ones to shame, ok, agree, that's slightly off-topic. There's a few Saturday the 11th too, look at the calendar further down the page.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
swag, raffles, and after-hours parties watching disfunctional men (mostly) hitting (or not) on local barmaids. Hilarious.
captcha: excrete
Say you're out of college having spent a large chunk of your life and mney nt the intellectual puruit of discilpine and curiosity (which leads to creativity ultimately). But now you join the everyday humdrum of meetings, code, TPS reports, etc. In a few years you will likely be struggling withe the fact that while skills have aptly channeled and exploited, there's a fair chance that you are intellectually to stultify.
Well-chosen Tech/trade conferences give you the opportunity to not just network with people but also ideas...which again leads to innovation...assuming that tech being your chosen field..is what is going to keep you mentally in the game.
As a development manager I aleays tried toget my folks out to at leadt ne conference a year as part of my training budget. Mainly so my folks would stay excited and keep their head in the game.
Go to OSCON (O'Reiily open source conference) or JavaOne or whatever makes sense to your personal career. Sell it to your boss as a form of training.
There is a HUGE industry for putting on conferences. I work for a guy who does this as an additional job 3 months out of the year and pulls in $100k for about 50 hours of work organizing it.
The vast majority of conferences are built on this:
1. someone wants to make bank by charging companies 300-1000$ per visit (which is chump change), so they put out a call for "experts";
2. "experts" send in proposals (often paying 3000-7000$ for prime speaking slots), but the funny part is, you don't HAVE to be expert. There is almost zero vetting of speakers.
3. These "experts" get to put a line item on their LinkedIn that says "Speaker at Conference X Y Z".
4. Audience members are usually clueless, and there is very much a "rock star" aura where the audience thinks the person on stage is some kind of authority. Truth be told, most speakers don't know about their topic until a few months before and they just send a proposal and learn on the fly. VERY FEW ARE EXPERTS. (I know this because I have spoken at several, and I've joked with other speakers about how we pulled the title out of our butts, slapped together some slides after googling, and got our company to pay the speaker fee.)
5. Audience members tell their manager that there is some conference with a name related to their job, and since it is basically a free vacation most employees get per year, blammo, $1k entry fee done and done
So you get a few dudes pumping money into marketing for a bogus new conference, you get half-assed "experts" who want to pad their resumes, and you get somnambulistic cube-drones getting their corps to shell out for an overpriced ticket to a mediocre event so they can have a half-assed vacation.
The content is shit, the organizers make a fucking FORTUNE, and the speakers get a gold star on their resume regardless of how little they know.
There are some good ones, like SigGraph and ISCCC but the vast majority are shit.
I paid my own way to an embedded CPU vendor conference. Learned about heir new high-end processors at the time, and also took some nice high-preformance BCB design courses. Didn't network with others at all, and had nothing to do with my day job, just stuff I was that interested in.
A few things about culture can be OK, hard to have a modern conference without them - but you want a conference that at the core has some technically impressive material. You can usually tell either from the schedule for the conference, or the schedule from past conferences f there's not one up yet.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Long live Trump's America!
I tend to like going because of the door prizes. There isn't usually a huge ratio between number of good prizes and number of attendees. Other than that I can take the conference or leave it.
Some conferences are great for sharing ideas, meeting people in the field and learning some really awesome stuff. Most of these make recordings of the talks available but being there and being able to chat to a speaker over breakfast or a talking with someone over a beer who is tackling the same problems you are can be invaluable. You learn about new techniques, new approaches, the latest trick from field Y which may be applicable to your field X and just have a really good time.
Some conferences are shit money grabs which operate as scams and should be avoided. As a hint, look at the reputation for the conference and who is paying. If companies can buy ('sponsor') speaker slots then you are going to be subjected to sales pitches.
A good employer wants a happy employee that grows within the company, expanding their skills and adding more value over time. They can't be too concerned that you will get poached, if you are not happy you are going to leave anyway. Sending you to a conference is a way of investing in you, increasing your skill level and making you a more valuable employee.
Tell me more about these "booth babes", good sir.
"A promotional model is a model hired to drive consumer demand for a product, service, brand, or concept by directly interacting with potential customers. A majority of promotional models typically tend to be conventionally attractive in physical appearance. They serve to make a product or service more appealing and can provide information to journalists and consumers at trade show and convention events."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotional_model
Depends on the conference, but at many sessions will be given by people who are prominent in whatever community the conference is about. Depending on the speaker, you can ask questions during or after the session. But what's really important to understand is that most conferences make a big thing about speakers being accessible to attendees. So if you are attending a conference where there is a speaker who is really knowledgeable about something you want to ask questions about, ping them on some form of social media and ask if you can have some time with them. Many speakers make themselves available for just this sort of thing during conferences and it's surprising how many attendees never take advantage of the opportunity.
I don't.
Conferences are basically just a day off. No employer sets any expectations from conference attendance (except maybe to ensure that you bring back the conference material - to prove you actually went) and they seem to be used as treats for the non-essential staff that an employer can afford to be without for a few days.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Seriously, the tides have shifted.
A conference is mostly a place for marketing folks to get an idea of what people are peddling. It's a bazaar.
this can be valuable to you and your employer in 2 obvious ways.
1) you will come across products that you would otherwise not search for.
2) your employer will learn about how your product(s) suit the current market.
If neither of these things are something you or your employer care about, then they are useless.
When I send people I ask for 2 things:
1) find one gem of the shared knowledge in the sea of presentations that you can learn from
2) identify the closest competition and see what they are doing different
I used to like to attend conferences because they were user focused. Meaning the end-users would deliver the majority of the presentations on what they did with X and lessons learned, pitfalls avoided etc etc...
Now most of the sessions are a vendor pitching some product and feature set.
I've seen way better content with local Meetups than the larger conferences.
I guess it depends on the conference but visiting FOSDEM inspired me to not be a lazy fuck and do something cool in my spare time. Plus, you get to know what the big projects are doing and you get a cool idea here and there, discover things which you didn't even know existed.
HOOKERS AND BLOW
I went to ISSCC once. The 20 minute talks only cover a very tiny portion of the whole design, and details are usually missing. However, they can put you on track on what are the usual approach for a given problem, if not showing you something different. The forums - series of longer informative tasks - were far way more interesting. Networking is something that people do in these conferences, too. Including people in your own large company.
If its something like CES then its one giant infomercial, if its something like DefCon or CCC then its well worth it.
Neither does the bible. That's a defective translation. In fact, the word that often gets mistranslated as "again" can mean either "again" or "from above", and in particular, Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus as meaning "again", when in fact his meaning was "from above", as is made clear later in the passage when he corrects that misunderstanding. If you translate it as "again", the entire passage makes no sense.
Technically correct. Those things were argued in the early days of the church, and a consensus was reached. The bible also doesn't say anything about abortion, but most Christians still think that it is wrong. The Bible is not the end of Christian understanding of faith, but rather the beginning.
1 Corinthians 7 actually suggests that is preferred, but it isn't a mandate, which is why many priests were not celibate until 1139.
The passage in question is hyperbolic. It was not intended to be taken literally. Jesus himself used some of those words that are "forbidden" in that passage to describe others. The purpose of the passage was to chastise pharisees and others for their excessive pride.
"Sola fide" (faith alone) is an almost entirely Paul-centric tradition. Nobody but Paul explicitly stated that view. More significantly, what Paul said (at least in the epistles that are universally believed to have actually been written by Paul) was that salvation did not come from works that upheld Jewish law. Most of the strong support for sola fide in the epistles comes from Ephesians, which many scholars argue may not have even been written by Paul.
But if we assume that the Pauline epistles were actually written by Paul, it is important to understand that nearly all of the other apostles disagreed. For example (and I'll use the KJV just so you won't claim that my translation is faulty), James (Ch. 2) said:
"Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar? Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?"
But keep believing that heresy. The thing is, those who have faith who also work to make the world better still have faith, and are thus saved either way, but those who claim that faith alone is enough and perform no works to support that faith are either saved or are screwed, depending on whether Paul was right.
Huh? The word "Vicar" does not mean "God", and never did. It means "on
Oops. ... the Economist, Cited here ...
Pussy.
I've never left a conference without getting laid. The chicks at those things are absolute FREAKS!
American conferences are losing booth babe appeal. Any firm that staffs their booths with traditional branded models/small-time actresses in corporate logos is going to get panned by SJWs who are tried of that sort of thing.
If you want the real babes, you have to hit up Asian conferences. They still bring the T&A to tech conferences.
I really do not care for tech conferences. They introduce nothing that Google cannot provide.
Easy credits to keep my certifications.
You see, to retain security certifications, you either have to show some training, or some publication, or you have to go to security conferences.
Take a wild guess what's the easy way out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But Asians girls don't have much T&A...
Networking.
I find the news coming out of conferences are very rarely interesting. What most others seem to be commenting and what the question really is on inspection beyond the headline is, they like to go when their boss pays the trip. That's something else I would probably enjoy myself. But I wouldn't count on getting something valuable from it, really. Except for extremely narrow focus events with classes etc.
Nearly all of the spending is on healthcare and education but this is about American Catholic Church spending and both of those are businesses in the US, chasing money, not charity.
Captain Obvious strikes again!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It is an opportunity to take a break from your day-to-day (and probably narrow-focused) operations in order to be inspired by new ideas and to understand the larger trends in your field.
There is also a lot to learn from good speakers, potentially saving many hours of trying to swim through the multitudes of material (of varying quality and correctness levels) to study out there.
That being said, you should also beware of the traps set by vendors trying to lock you into their products. Talking to as many people as you can after a session and exchanging opinions is one way of avoiding such traps, because they are not always obvious.
I wrote this blog post about eight years which explains the major reasons as I seem them. Largely, for me, it's a matter of broadening my focus beyond what's right in from of me.
"The Value of Conferences"
http://gadgetopia.com/post/6851
Thick & Athletic?
What exactly is the role of tech conferences?
To establish new business connections. To discover new trends/solutions/ideas which you might have missed due to being busy. To talk to your purveyors and discuss the things in person which are difficult to discuss over the phone/e-mail.
And then what's in it for my employer, who's paying to send me there?
Likewise.
Because I'm so ronry!
Nor give a damn.
I've always made a checklist of "TO-DOs" to take from the conference to at least try out when I got back. These could include some product demos for things I hadn't seen before, or little tips that I could roll out the next week. I've gone to a show ever year for the past 4 years, while never having gone to one the previous 10. Beyond direct learning, the networking is amazing. With a little effort, you can build a network not just for your own career, but for bouncing ideas or looking for assistance in your current job. I find that they are totally worth it. They are NOT easy....you spend a lot of hours learning and meeting people. You can make it a boondoggle, but if you put forth a little effort, you will learn more in a week than you will learn the rest of your year.
Stuff I've gotten from conferences I've attended over the last few years (in no particular order) - Learned stuff from good quality presenters - Learned how to do good presentation using PowerPoint, instead of usual Death By PPT (the speakers/experts at the conferences I've gone to have been very good both technically and as presenters) - Picked up a few shiny things from trade stands alongside the main conference - Free beer and food at post conference networking sessions - Chance to travel to new places, and try to fit in a bit of exploration I don't think you'll ever go to a conference where every last minute is of value to you, but there should be some things that you can take away and get benefit from after the conference. The big challenge is trying to express that with some form of tangibleness so that you can persuade your boss to pay for your fees, travel, accommodation, etc.
I've been to an industry conference which included Ron Jeremy shooting a porno at one of the after parties. It's called Internext (formerly IA2000). It's the online porn convention. The booth babes aren't random models hired for the show, they are the porn stars who actually work for (and occasionally own) the companies at the booths. Everybody who was anybody in porn was there. (This was several years ago, I don't know what attendance is like now.)
One year, they had us split between two conference rooms at opposite ends of the casino, so to get from one session to the next 1,000 porn people, including a couple hundred models, would walk in masse through the casino to the other conference room. The looks we got from some of the casino patrons were priceless.
A bigger problem is "bean-counteritis", an endemic loss of vision and courage in management position-holders. Entrepreneurialism and indeed all capitalism is based on taking selected risks. If you only bet on documented sure things, poor returns are guaranteed.
It was at ChefConf that I found out that Chef had finally discarded Sean O'Mara, and that Chef would *finally* stop insisting that all Chef published cookbooks published or updated by Chef employees being rewritten as LWRP's, "Light Weight Resource Protocols" that no longer actually configured your servers. They're just tools you can call from your own individually written and maintained personal cookbooks, which makes using chef pretty pointless since we were being forced to write all our own wrapper cookbooks anyway. Think I'm kidding? The mysql, tomcat, yum, and nagios cokbooks had all had very incompatible upgrades doing this under his reign, upgrades that *broke* numerous other cookbooks by discarding features, and for with the other cookbooks had to be rewritten to *prevent* the updates. It's been a big problem with Chef. (Don't get me on the "users" and "hostsfile" cookbooks, which were written with this !@#$ stupid idea at their core, and forced you to write a distinct wrapper recipe to add or delete *every single static user or hostsfile entry* you might want to manage.) It was also amazing how Sean's presence had been consistently mentioned in the mailing lists, but at the conference, he was "always somewhere else" until somebody at the Chef booth let me know he no longer worked there.
There was booze at *my* table that night while I walked some attendees through changes we could expect in the structure of new cookbooks. And they do seem to be playing out that way, as a general improvement in the quality and stability of cookbooks instead of "let's turn that working cookbook into a pile of blank pages and a scrabble bag of letters so they can write their own cookbooks!!! That will give the developers freedom to write their own!!!"
Conferences like GDC can teach you a lot about various aspects of your trade you didn't even know mattered. Other conferences are researchers telling what they're doing. Other conferences are for companies to sell you on their latest tech and dev tools. While benefits such as networking and taking time off work are true to all of them, each of these types are different in other value they provide and highly depends on what you do in your work and what you're interested in.
Walking a show floor will reveal new innovations and uses for technologies that googlers and media don't understand the value of. If you think you can sit at your computer and find everything applicable to what you do, then you clearly haven't spent enough time away from your computer. Even if the tech at the show isn't immediately applicable to what you are working on, the cleverness of some things will help you in understanding other ways a given technology can be used.
The reason this occurs is that media is made up of generally clueless people writing about things that get the most views. They have no actual idea of which emerging technologies are going to be most interesting to you or your company. Then, Google is going to see a lot of hits for people searching for the things that the media has published about, so, even through Google you are going to have a hard time finding the truly innovative technologies and applications of technologies that are most applicable to you.
Consider the other side of this. You have some really innovative, but narrowly applicable tech and you want to promote it. You've sent it to the media and none of them care because, frankly, they just can't understand why it is so useful to your target market. Then, you try advertising through Google, social media, you buy email lists, have sales force pounding the phones, and nada. So now you think about going to a show and, et voila, you have 50 new customers (getting just one would cover the cost of the show) because they walked passed your booth and immediately understood the value of what you are selling. Consider also the value of this to the new customers - they can come back and show their teams this new tech that solves a problem they had been just living with for decades.
Standards don't originate in a series of carefully documented drafts from a standards committee...
They originate from someone talking to someone else about how they're each doing basically the same thing, and hey, maybe it would be worth standardizing. Then one of them talks to a third person.. and before you know it, someone is scribbling a draft on a bar napkin or (these days) their laptop, and that's what starts the process going.
A couple years go by, perhaps with a "birds of a feather" session, or just an ad hoc meetup, and someone says "ok, which standards org should we take this to.. IEEE? ANSI? XYZ?".. someone who knows someone who knows someone in the org shepherds it through the "getting a new standard process" and *then* you're into the formal draft and comment phase.
You can't do this by email, or video conference, or whatever.. It's inherently a "person at company A talking to person at company B, in person, in a undocumented, unrecorded, way, which would be illegal collusion if it were about business practices,pricing, etc.". Because only when the conversation is unheard and undocumented, can you be comfortable proposing an idea that might be a pile of steaming ordure, and the other person can call you out on it and say, that's the biggest pile of ordure I've ever seen. On the other hand, they might also say, that's a good idea, but how about if we do this slightly different thing...
"You seem to be having trouble managing Tourette's Syndrome. Can I help you with that?"
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Booth Babes.
The number one thing I always get from conferences (programming) is I learn about everything I've been doing wrong for the past year, and how I should be doing them in the future.
When you work primarily as an individual, it's easy to lose track of the modern way of doing things. Conferences really help redirect you to doing things the right way.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you want a bonus of $1'000 from your employer, and your employer pays you $1'000, the first thing that happens is your employer then gets to pay another ~25% of employer taxes on salaries. The second thing that happens is you get to pay another ~40% of income tax.
So, that $1'000 costs your employer $1'250, and you only get to keep $600.
On the other hand, if you employer spends that $1'000 to send you to vegas, your employer gets to write it all off as an expense, so it's tax free to him. You don't pay any tax on it at all. The conference organizers get the $1'000, and they pay the tax on it -- in theory, in practice every conference loses money on paper.
So the real question is this: why do you want tho $1'000 bonus? If you want to brag that you got $1'000, then you want the money. But if you plan to spend that money on something, then you'll always be better off having your employer purchase it for you -- simply so that cash doesn't trade hands, triggering taxes to be incurred.
So let's close the loop here. You want more money so you can afford to take your family on a vacation to las vegas. You find a conference to attend, your employer sends you, pays for the hotel room, and a first-class flight, and the conference ticket. You trade the first-class ticket for four couch tickets, you take your family to the same hotel room, you attend a few hours of a conference, your family vacations for free.
And we can add another few "win"s to the pile. The conference organizers make money, and the sponsors get to advertize to you, las vegas tourism now gets your whole family.
And even the government tax department wins in the end. If you'd received the cash, you'd have saved it, not spent it immediately. Instead, the $1'000 got spent instantly, and increased tourism, and three businesses (countless if you multiply every business in the conference). And your family's on vacation, undoutedly spending money at every turn.
The government wants you to spend your money instantly. That's what runs economies.
So, the next time you sit down to negotiate terms with your employer, do whatever you can to avoid asking for money. Ask for the things that you'll do with that money. For example:
You don't want $500. You want a company-purchased phone, that they'll "own" but never touch, never see, and write-off six-months later as being obsolete.
You don't want $15'000 either. You want a budget to renovate your home office, as a home office, with a nice desk, bookshelves, flooring, paint, artwork. You certainly do work at home some reasonable amount of time, and during emergencies, and when you're on-call.
You don't want $1'500 either. You want your employer to cover your gas/car expenses to commute in to the office.
You don't want $250 either. You want a company-billed meal at the keg when you spend five hours over drinks with your friends (also colleagues).
You pay tax on things that you get to call "yours". But if you don't care about what it's called, and you don't mind using things that are, in every sense of the words, owned by your employer, then you'll get to use a lot more.
Think about it this way -- going to the keg for a great meal, twice a week, with the colleagues that you like, often with families included, sounds like a great life. Add some shop-talk to it, and it becomes a business conference. Include families, and it becomes a longer business conference.
Tell your employer that he can deduct the cost of those keg meals from your salary, and everybody wins -- assuming you enjoy the keg.
To be clear, different cities/provinces/states/countries have different percentages and different rules about what can and cannot be fully written off (my geography only allows 50% of meals, for example). So you get to navigate what is and what is not profitable.
Again, to be crystal clear, the idea here is not to illegally get away with not paying taxes. The idea here is to choose the lifestyle to which fewer taxes
Testicles & Androgen.
It all depends on whether the subject matter is relevant to you and your company. Once you get past that hurdle, I see it as twofold:
1. Getting level set on what's new.
2. Improving/learning skills that can be brought back into the business and applied.
A third possible area might be networking - but that is dependent on the type of conference. Some conferences do not lend themselves to that.
That is why any person who doesn't want to spend his life suffering the horrors of unearned guilt rejects Christianity from the outset. "Proud" and "free" belong together; stand on your own outside the prison of religion.
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The same reason as any other conference. Company paid booze, drink, and hoes.
As a conference organizer, I can attest to the value of a tech conference if there are educational/tech sessions ad guests that are useful to you. Ie, ones you'll learn some useful skill or get ideas for further research.
Many big conferences turn into parties where the sessions are generic/dull and it's a sales-pitch for either the conference organizers or the vendors. I don't need to attend another session about "Why XYZ is awesome". I want to know how it's awesome and see demos of what it is capable of so that it can blow my mind.
At a good conference:
Attendees can learn useful skills or get worthwhile ideas from tech sessions, learn about new technologies, industry trends, etc...
Sponsors gain viewership & notice by everyone involved.
Vendors can get their products in front of a crowd of people from their industry.
Speakers improve their brand and public speaking skills.
Networking (an often ugly word) consists of meeting and talking to people in roles like your own and learning how they solve problems you may also encounter.
Your employer stands to gain from sending you to the conference in that you'll learn/network, which makes you a better employee, and will probably have some fun, making you a happier employee. The worst thing for them is to maintain a fleet of employees that stagnate and don't learn new skills.
Sure, there are nebulous opportunities for "networking" and some real learning that goes on, but the prime motivator for many is those two items. The rest of it is just the official stuff you have to do in order to get those items.
Remember that upgrade you were promised last year or the bug you have been working around for 3 months? Well the tech conference is the perfect time to get to person at a vendor who is in a position to resolve your issue. I always have a list of things to discuss with each vendor I visit. Some have even asked me to leave the booth as I am "scaring the other customers". :-)
And the other key purpose is ideas. Hopefully, you will be exposed to the latest products and thinking in your area and that should give you some ideas to take back.
Sure there is all the networking stuff and drinking with colleagues but a far as pitching attendance to your employer, those are the key points to cover that will add value for your attendance. Who knows? You might even learn something or at the very least hear what your competitors are saying.
lesbo butchy faggets sucking cocks
I think you've really misunderstood the meaning of some or most of these words.
I don't know which conferences have speakers pay - that seems crazy. I've spoken at a number of conferences and never paid - I always at least got lodging, sometimes airfare, sometimes some small payment in addition.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've heard people dress up at conventions. You'll get to see huge walking mice, people dressed as rubies or bug cups of java. They'll be CAT5 wielding ninjas, people with tiny RAMs forgetting their location and people with larger RAMs helping them out. Sometimes couples link themselves together as multi-core CPUs. Go for the views. Make sure to pick out your own costume before you go.
Posting anonymously as I work a lot of tech conferences.
Over the past 20 years I can’t count how many conferences I’ve been to, well I could I have a box with every lanyard I’ve ever received from a conference, but that seems like to much work. I’ve gone to conferences, spoken at conferences as a guest, as a sponsor, as part of the company putting it on, I’ve been on the main stage, I’ve reviewed presentations, did planning, gathered sponsorships, just about every role imaginable. And most of the sentiments here are correct, conferences today just aren’t what they used to be.
There are two types of conference, an industry conference, basically something put on by an industry group, and a company conference. With an industry event 50% of the sessions are by sponsors and half are by industry people. I generally find these conferences to be better IF there is a good way to really see what’s a sponsor session and what’s an industry session, otherwise you’ll just be getting some teaser sales pitch. I’ve done the teaser pitch and it sucks for the audience, a conference consultant told me to not really tip your hat that you’re pitching something until 15 minutes in, then it will be too later for them to run to another session. Company conferences are a total waste, for everyone. The company sponsored presentations are all marketing fluff. For the most part sponsors don’t really care, they’re just there for the booth. I’ve had more and more sponsors try to negotiate their sessions away, and I don’t blame them, no one from the company is going to go and most customers know they are getting a bad sales pitch.
Almost every conference is just something you can get at the home office. You can watch most of the general sessions online (and here’s a secret most of the people on the main stage are just reading a teleprompter half the time they never even bothered to read the copy before getting on stage, I had an exec admit he didn’t even understand what the company he just gushed over really did), people will come to your office a give you presentations ( ones actually more in line with what you care about as the title and content of a conference presentation often don’t match, I was often given titles and abstracts to present that made no sense and I had to craft some sort of content to somewhat match), hands on labs are often online or available by downloading VMs, the booth people are all marketing droids now tweeting( I mean social selling) every 10 on the 10. The only plus is networking, you can put faces to the name, and sometimes get some good insights.
I should also add that I don’t only think company conferences are of minimal value for attendees, I think they are of minimal value for sponsors and for the company themselves. I haven’t seen a conference generate new leads in years and half the time the sponsors are only there because they have MDF to burn. If you want a subsidized vacation where you use some of your time to go to the conference have fun, you want to network do it (but have a plan first), but to really learn something good sessions are few and far between.
You network so you can get a job in a company you networked with. The best jobs around are available through friends and acquaintances and plus it allows you to know what you are going into. It is also somewhat motivating.
Every tech conference I've gone to has been worthless. I'm not one of these extroverted assholes that talks to strangers and enjoys "networking." I want to go for the talks, but rarely have these talks ever been at or beyond my level, meaning they are boring and redundant for me. I don't claim to be a tech genius or anything, but I find the talks are typically aimed at an extremely novice level.
Honestly, I feel like the whole thing is a racket, designed to get a free trip out of employers, from the presenters, exhibitors, and employees themselves. Not to mention the companies that put these up typically make quite a lot of money from them. And of course I can appreciate the chance to travel and see some place new, but that's really not a good return on an employer's investment at all.
I recently attended a Cisco conference and it was helpful. In my case, it was only 20 minutes away from my office, so it didn't cost anything to go. 90% of it was just like people on Slashdot complain about with these conferences ... a lot of bored-looking people manning booths where they just hand you a business card and some pamphlet for hardware you don't need a "contact person" to shop for. (EG. Plantronics was there. Wireless telephone headsets and bluetooth headsets are pretty much commodities these days. If I want a Plantronics product, I'll just order it on Amazon or something. I really didn't need the woman's contact info.)
But it's that 10% of info that turns out to be a real gem. EG. Had a specific question about the future roadmap for a Meraki product and got Cisco to admit that the current offering was "under-powered" and did, indeed suffer from the complaints we had about it. They said it was on the way out, and they recommended buying a different unit they sell until that update/refresh is made available. That might sound like a "small thing" - but it's the kind of information your salespeople won't usually tell you over the phone when you're ordering, and cemented our strategy to stop buying that one unit.
Also picked up a flier from a local firm specializing in recovering your whole network and server infrastructure in case you've been hacked. Do I think I'll ever need their services? I sure hope we don't! But that's something nice to file away, as a "just in case". You don't want to have to spend a lot of time finding suitable people to assist with a disaster like that AFTER the fact.
Are you kidding? Besides, the Russians like to export their women to China, Japan, and anywhere else there is money involved. So if you don't like the local flavor, you are guaranteed some of that.
And the Thai girls, yowza.
You get out of town, you get to expense a bunch of meals, you get to hump women from other companies which is way less problematic than humping people at your own workplace, you can get really drunk and not have to face anyone you know who saw it...really the benefits are tremendous.
I goto meetups. They are cheaper, takes less of my time and in my area. There it is easy to both find people who are interested in your area (since meetups can be quite focused) and find people who are hiring. You are also more likely to get an interview from a meetup (IMO) because most of the time only people ACTUALLY interested in that field (and not just a paycheck) go to meetups.