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Are Tech Conferences Overrated? (cnn.com)
"The tech industry has reached a maximum saturation point for conferences, summits and forums," writes CNN's senior media reporter, sharing his general disillusionment after Recode's recent Code Conference:
But even at their best, these events fail to generate truly significant news because executives have been media-trained to the point of impenetrability... [S]peakers like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek have mastered the art -- there should be a German word for it -- of speaking for 30+ minutes without saying much of consequence or going beyond their comfort zone... [I]n two days, nothing was said on stage that fundamentally changed the existing narrative for any of these companies... Business executives are more strategic and more cautious than ever in how they speak publicly. The business media needs to be equally strategic in pushing them to say more.
He argues that the best things about conferences happen offstage, when attendees network and talk among themselves. Is that your experience, Slashdot readers?
Share your own thoughts in the comments. Are tech conferences overrated?
He argues that the best things about conferences happen offstage, when attendees network and talk among themselves. Is that your experience, Slashdot readers?
Share your own thoughts in the comments. Are tech conferences overrated?
YEAH!
have mastered the art -- there should be a German word for it -- of speaking for 30+ minutes without saying much of consequence or going beyond their comfort zone... [I]n two days, nothing was said on stage that fundamentally changed the existing narrative for any of these companies
We call that "Politik".
Sounds like the author means marketing conferences not tech conferences.
I go to tech conferences to listen to senior developers and architects speak about exiting new technologies. I'm not looking for a scoop so I'm completely satisfied.
If the speakers are business executives and the target audience is CNN journalists, it's not a tech conference. It's a business/media/marketing conference.
Techies speak at actual tech conferences. And I usually enjoy and learn quite a few things in the tech conferences I attend to.
YES !
What makes you think all other conferences are any different?
At least in tech we also have contributors conferences where the speakers are talking technically about new stuff they are doing, or discussing new techniques, etc.
Due to managerism and due to various educational reforms we do not produce anymore
people able to think, able to develop new things, able to run with their own legs. As a
result we do not have nothing new, we can't, there are no R&D anymore, only some
"popularization" of pre-existing tech.
Hear hear.
But tech conferences are not immune.
There is a growing number of highly technical invitation only conferences just because none wants
to deal with the non-engineering content (.i.e. marketing spin and other bs) any more.
back in the day, conferences were smaller, less "markety" and you could actually meet and have good discussions with people who were the actual drivers of technology.
The value of the networking done with people at the conferences meant you could actually directly contact people who could help you when you ran into a problem or found a bug in a new technology.
Something changed and it became all about the product, not the people, and conferences got bigger and less personal, and with the exception of more prizes and t-shirts less valuable career-wise.
It's always been like that, other than an occasional interesting keynote about a truly new, innovative product (the original iphone for example)
Personally (speaking only for myself) I do not attend conferences where there are going to be a lot of black people present. This is just my personal preference, and I certainly don't hate black people or bear them any ill will. To the contrary, I wish them success.
However, for many personal reasons I would rather not rub elbows with blacks. For one thing, black folks smell different than whites. It is sort of a a musky smell like damp wool and perhaps a little "acidic". Also black people tend to be loud and boisterous which distracts from the conference proceedings.
And because I'm a white woman, the colored boys all try to hit on me, which disgusts me frankly. I'm thankful that so few colored people are employed in the tech field. It's mostly whites, south Asians, and east Asians. These groups are fairly simpatico and get along well. And at conferences you can learn quite a bit from these groups. But rarely have I seen a colored guy contribute anything of interest or importance.
That's just the way it is. Does this make me a "bad" person? Of course not. There is no hate involved. It boils down to freedom of association. It is one woman's right to choose!.
The American word is "marketing" and the Yiddish word is "spiel", which is from the German word for "game" or "play". Germans are direct, so you're right that there should be a German word for it, one that implies disdain, like "spiel".
Marketing conf: .. maybe mixed up with a little dose of scamming for good measure
Stuff like google IO og Apples events are pure marketing and hype building.
Those are a waste of everyones time and money .... and when people buy the overhyped crap then we see even more waste of money and time
Bingo. Small tech conferences are definitely good. Meet up some other technical people, often there are focused workshops about something that is definitely of interest and these events are usually not too expensive.
And often very well known techs or authors are keynote speakers. I have seen, and sometimes spoken to people like Richard Stallman, Stoyan Stepanov, Axel Rauschmeier, Peter-Paul Koch and Aaron Walters at such events. Maybe not people who will win the Turing award or manage trillion-dollar companies, but experts in their field and definitely worth listening to.
Conferences like these are also a good place to hear about new developments in their fields.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
If you really believed that, you wouldn't post as AC.
With so much content and so many online forums, I'd guess that the personal contact with others in the industry is the only key benefit of conferences these days. Everything else can be had online.
I've been to a small conference and that didn't make it good. In fact, it was horrible. Check your sample size.
But I need a week off work, so I'll go.
So the only thing a fucking journalist wants at tech conference is juicy news...
Thatâ(TM)s not why most people attend tech conferences.....
Itâ(TM)s mostly for beer and after party with fellow nerds
That's for sure.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You're the reason we have to wait until the end of the boring talk to get freebies. At least pretend to be interested in all the latest leftist/Nazi security that'll keep us safe and secure from the al-Qaeda sleeper cells. Seig heil Poeterring. AE911Truth org
No. End of discussion.
Why? There could be a myriad of reasons, eg. their employer is a trump- obsessed crazy who also looks at /. Whether they are right of course, time will tell.
Is it not important to differentiate between the keynotes (which tend to be marketing, 'strategy' and buzz speak) and the workshops (which have real innovative demos of new tech)?
"Bollocks"
Most conferences are just a few days away from work. The ones that have a celebrity speaker are just a waste of time if you think you're going to learn any technical skills. At best they will give a techy an idea of which skills they should build up in order to get a better job. But most offer nothing more than a set of proceedings (that will probably never get read), a holiday camp for nerds and a hangover.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
At least, I have never been to a conference where the interesting thing was in a presentation.
It is always about the interaction with other attendees.
Good conferences even realize this and make sure to have plenty of space for people to talk and socialize outside of the boring presentations.
Recode's Code Conference, which just wrapped up here in Palos Verdes, is the gold standard of US tech conferences.
It's not the "gold standard" of tech conferences. What do you think tech is, a place where celebrities try to make news by drinking a lot?
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek fail to generate truly significant news
Oh, yes, apparently that is what you think. Even though those are business leaders and not tech leaders, people don't go to these conferences to hear news, that's what a newspaper is for. They go to hear the ideas of the speakers, learn from the minds they presumably admire.
A real tech conference is more like DEFCON or Abstractions.io or SIGGRAPH. People who speak actually understand tech, not how to market it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
1:1 wrong translated "steam talker"
Like steam goes out off a steam engine .. every word vanishes into thin air. "Dampfplauderer" are also experts in bombarding others with buzzwords.
It sounds something like:
Dammph.. P->Louder-ER
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki...
Are Ted Conferences Overrated?
Really depends on who the orator is.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Tech conferences are a complete failure for one reason: they still haven't figured out telepresense. All the technologywe have and yet we have to all fly to a signle place at an exact time period in order to watch a slide deck and do a quick q&a... pathetic.
But... as many have pointed out, TFA has nothing to do with tech conferences despite the title.
But I love going to them anyway because they are paid vacations for me. You rarely learn about anything new. Totally pointless otherwise.
The only people that seem to be trump-obsessed crazy are people from the 'left'.
All that incredible sex, for example, or those amazing parties.
You dipshits on the right still think those comments are coming from 'leftists'.
No wonder Trump won. There's a rube born every minute I guess.
If those conferences are boring then don't go. Don't support events that have no value. Don't waste our time by reporting how boring they are.
Why not go to interesting events, the RISC V gigs, DEFCON, etc?
That's not how conferences work.
Imagine this. What would be missed if those kind of Tedx-type of conferences never happened? probably nothing.
Instead it's a completely waste of time.
Those companies have much more skillful employees than some random *berg executive, that even if that *berg went missing, the operations and services won't be disrupt.
And I will conclude with this: Why would you want to hear someone which has a meaningless position in such a big company? "...b..but he/she/it is the COO"... yeah that COO doesn't matter any more, there are tens of people below him taking critical decisions so as the COO has enough time for the Circlejerk thing.
There's two general types of conferences I can think of, and I think both are overrated for different reasons:
The big flashy vendor conferences like MS Ignite, Citrix Synergy, VMWorld, etc...these are just holdovers from the era where the only way to learn anything new about a product was a conference or having a sales guy come talk to you. Think CES or Comdex. They do have some useful content, but everything is basically a marketing spin. It's all about dragging thousands of people to a convention center once a year as the only sales opportunity, plying them with food/alcohol/marketing cheerleaders, and getting them to buy something. Every time I go into a big city convention center, I can almost see the ghosts of the junior sales and marketing people in line at the onsite office place waiting to fax their big career-making order to headquarters. That's what those venues are set up for.
And on the smaller side...every DevOps tool, new language, new JavaScript framework, etc. has its own conference. It seems like it's the way to legitimize that tool's use. DockerCon, RubyCon, JenkinsCon, ChefCon, etc. (yes, I made some of those up but you get the point.) You may get way less marketing at a conference like this, but IMO it's just a way for the truly laser-focused among that conference's tool's users to promote their personal projects or "get on the speaking circuit."
I also think this is partially what's driving a lot of the imposter syndrome in tech. We all know there are plenty of people who thought they could keep the same skillset for 20 years and be OK...but if you listen to all the conference speakers, bloggers, Twitterers and open source contributors, it's very easy to feel like you know nothing. This (IMO) is because a lot of these blogs, speaking engagements, etc. are self-promotion and people with very little going on outside of their work worlds are cultivating the image that they're super rockstar geniuses. For those of us who do keep up, but have to choose very carefully what we spend our time learning, it's tough to not feel like you know nothing compared to someone who appears to know all the buzzwords. I've had to tell myself and others I know who experience this more than once that no one knows everything and unless you're willing to spend all your off-work time reading, you're not even going to get to a fraction of it.
At a tech conference?
In general, keynote speakers at tech conferences give extremely crappy speeches that aren't worth attending.
but happens in vegas stay in vegas
Tech conferences are where you pay $2,000 to have someone continually try to sell you something you don't need. Tech conferences are the biggest scam on the planet. They should pay you to attend. The lectures are usually nonsense and are generally just a giant sales pitch centered around a technology.
Conferences are about conferring. It's not a PR event where you get to blather about your own stuff endlessly, while making sure that the competition and the tough questions aren't within a thousand yards.
It's a love fest. Kiss kiss. Pure vanity. Nothing else exists in the high-cost reality distortion field. The stench of bullshit is everywhere, and the fanbois are buying suitcase full loads of merch.
The venues that used to talk real issues are gone. It's all about the lovefest. Kiss kiss.
There were a lot of conferences, often the crux of independent financiers, that really evolved this industry. If it's a vendor show, however, it's a love fest. Nothing to see there, just a vacation with logo merch. Nothing controversial. Nothing to see there.
Bottom line: it's who's financing it that dictates whether you'll be subject to actual conferring, knowledge transfer across a spectrum, and independent voices, uncontrolled by a PR machine.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I've just watched the videos for years. Great reference and saves money. I can always goto the Apple developer boards and ask Eskimo.
Propaganda is invisible, you sit through it and the next thing you know you want to save n1gglets in some shitty middle eastern n1ggerstan.
Scheissegesprach
If the "tech conference" is centered around CEOs and COOs, then it isn't a "tech conference", it is a PR conference. Exciting news comes from companies doing something CREATIVE, not trying to ensure stable returns and a predictable dividend for investors by playing it safe.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
...since the last Computer Faire in San Francisco (at the Civic Auditorium and Brooks Hall). Back then, strange and wonderful new things were turning up like ArcInfo (on an Apple II+!!) and Autocad (on a PC-XT and a Cromemco box and a mouse that worked on a Radio Shack computer (sort of). Then there was the year of the Osborne computer - and a number of other knockoffs some of which were quite attractive. The conference produced a "proceedings" book that had actual technical content, and the basement had a vast array of ... um ... parts sellers for those who needed something not easily obtainable in everyday commerce.
What killed it? 1) Marketing - it was there in spades already, but by modern standards it was on the scale of criers at a town fair; 2) Money - it started to cost too much to get it; and 3) Interest - as the number of small exhibitors and real, informative presentations decreased, it wasn't worth the effort. Then, everything specialized into conferences for the lovers of one brand or product, and it was all over. Academic conferences don't fill the gap, and are WAY too expensive unless you're getting a publication reference from it.
George Carlin (RIP), was absolutely correct about it too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPrRxhYJMkQ
Tech conferences often begin with big keynote presentations, at least part of which are full of marketing for whatever company is sponsoring. This is the part that all the tech reporters pay attention to, and want to write dozens of articles about.
Once the presentations shift to the actual technical content people like us came for, those people tend to wander off and stop paying attention.
So yeah, maybe tech conference no longer generate value for people who write articles on how tech conferences no longer generate value. :-)
Doesn't mean they no longer generate value for attendees actually working with tech.
Most are just regurgitated "duhs" by people who prefer to talk than to get work done.
I was at DevOpsDays and a talk was given about "scaling log data"; this was in 2015 when this had already been vetted out. The speaker talked about time stamps and UTC. Nothing at all about scaling. Yes, I'm not retarded; I can read the manuals too.
At that same conference there was a "Engineering Docker containers for scale". The talk was by an exec who talked about why containers are good. Nothing technical at all.
So, what does this mean? If the talk had marketing words, it's probably a shit talk.
It definitely depends on the conference. I attend an annual conference for a niche open source project. As is typical of many open source projects, documentation tends to not be the strongest suit. But sessions at the conference are almost always full of great information and real-world examples. Plus the networking and face time with others youâ(TM)ve known only from email or IRC...it all adds up to a worthwhile trip each year. Keynote speakers, on the other hand, are almost universally worthless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
imhe, the vast majority of these are just overly-affluent privileged people using other people's money to live beyond their, and our, means. There's just no end to entitlement. A lot of business travel is simply unnecessary but it makes people feel important and it get's them out of the office.
I bet the journalist thinks they're a "tech-savvy guru"
Any more things I can reassure you about?
Yes
No the reason Trump won is that most of us are tired of globalist America-last economic policies and especially the politically correct bullshit we've been living with for decades and we finally rose up tp do something about it.
The extremely vocal and fairly well funded opposition is a lot smaller than they like to let on, and being concentrated in very small tightly packed cities, the illusion of relevance blinds them to reality. The reality is the rest of us are tired of being told what to do and what to think by you. I'd think you'd have learned that lesson by now, but you'll be taught it as often as necessary. We will not be ruled by the likes of you again.
Both talks and networking result in huge amounts of value. The info exchanged can be to notch and useful When it is not I do not attend. No need to attend all of them, but occasional attendance has tremendous results.
Tech conferences might have been more useful in the past but Adria Richards and her Donglegate cancer on society followed by the sweeping authoritarian "Code of Conduct" nonsense we've seen take hold the past few years has rendered them useless trash. Things can't be fun anymore; people can't be treated like adults anymore. Thanks, SJW shitcunts.
In order to answer the question of whether a conference is overrated it is first necessary to know what the rating is.
Lots of posts have already made the valid point that if the main speakers are CEOs and other execs then it's not a tech conference, but attendees with brain cells already know that so it wouldn't figure into the rating.
So what are the ratings of IETF, IEEE, PyCon, OpenStack PTG (not summit; PTG is the tech event, summit is the marketing event), and other tech conferences? Without being specific about which conferences and what the ratings were it's impossible to have any intelligent discussion of whether the ratings are accurate.
Keynote speeches always were just candy to draw people in, to pay the entrance fee. They were never the substance of what goes on at a (good) tech conference.
Tech conferences provide two main functions:
1) Connect vendors with customers and vice versa (i.e., exhibit hall)
2) Provide education in the form of breakout sessions
Yes, quality varies greatly, but the lack of "big announcements" at "tech conferences" really has nothing to do with whether tech conferences are overrated.
There are four types of tech conferences: https://momjian.us/main/blogs/... Only some of them are useful to specific groups.