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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?
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
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!".
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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 think it's just an opportinity for the middle management to get drunk with their buddies. You can literally get all the product information, customer experience stories and analyses from the Internet. Hell, often even before the conferences. In my opinion there are very few cases where such trips are useful and justified anymore.
Ignore all the conference bs and just be fucking awesome in your own area of expertise.
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.
And if that's what you hire, that's what you get.
I know, there is this story floating that companies only hire the cheapest idiots for the jobs, and yes, those companies exist. And as usual, you get what you pay for. Just like when you buy the cheapest, crookedest hardware, what you get is an insecure mess that may or may not work for more than the warranty period requires.
I hire quality, I pay for quality and I get quality. I expect a lot and I offer a lot. So far I haven't met a developer or security person whose willingness to learn surpassed my willingness to send him to a SANS or ICS course.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
P.S. I wont come back to read an answer, so you can continue to write nonsense.
Ouch, a hit-and-run comment! I can only assume my comment hit your soft spot. You must be among the middle management I mentioned. You can try to fool yourself, but you can't fool me.
In your office it is very easy to get stuck with your own way of doing things and your companies approved products. You could be suffering at your job and you don't know it. Going to these conferences even just visiting the sales booths you get to see what else is out there and how to approach a problem differently. Realizing you may need a new class of products to stay competitive. That is companies pay for people to go to these. Also it gives your company exposure too. Sometimes those vendors may not sell anything to you but can become a partner were you can both expand the customer base.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I had the luck to work for a consulting outfit where my direct manager sent me to all conferences he could (actually several a year), to in his words "broaden my horizons". After all his years, I am the proof he was right.
While sending guys early in his career does not seem beneficial, believe me it is. He helped me achieve a certain place, and in exchange, I also helped the firm secure several businesses in a market abroad.
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.
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.
Booth Babes.