Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
But generally the speakers went into exhaustive detail about a small idea that is not noteworthy, unique, or new, while the audience oohed and aahed over it anyway.
TED is a way for smug and wealthy liberals who fancy themselves intelligent to have a simulated "graduate school" experience without having to do any research, write any papers or indeed do any actual work while signalling to others how "smart" they are by attending these public lectures. It's mental masturbation for people who want to believe that they're intelligent and sophisticated, but in reality, like most wealthy and pretentious liberals, they're lazy, ignorant, stupid and all too easily impressed by fading academics who prostitute their professions in exchange for the money proffered by the rich fools in the audience.