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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?
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.
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.
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.
No, we call that "Klugscheisser"
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
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
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
"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
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...
The only people that seem to be trump-obsessed crazy are people from the 'left'.
nope a klugscheißer is a knowitall
the situation in the article would be called "um den heißen brei reden" ~ "talk around the hot mash" ===> avoid burning your tongue by not touching the point.
metaphorically...
or maybe being full of hot air...
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.
Apparently this journalist never attended PDC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Developers, developers, developers!
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.
How about simply "labern"? The English word for that is babbling
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.
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.
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.
No, we call that "Klugscheisser"
How about "Dummschwätzer" . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
How about simply "labern"? The English word for that is babbling
What I hear from colleagues complaining about useless meetings is something like:
"Viel gelabert; nichts gesagt!" - much babbled; little said.
Then, of course, the absolute classic for a political leader:
Was kümmert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern? Nichts hindert mich, weiser zu werden." - Why should I care about my babble from yesterday? Nothing prevents me from becoming wiser. - Konrad Adenauer
Disclaimer: I'm fluent in German, but not a native speaker.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Conferences that require peer-reviewed acceptance of the papers are what I consider tech conferences. As someone that has ONE published IEEE paper (NOT as the first author) and helped with another, internal-reviewed, government, paper as an intern, there is literally no comparison between something like Collision Conference, or the local promote-tech conferences I go to in New Mexico, and an actually peer reviewed conference. None. They have literally nothing in common, except that they both are nominally conferences.
The promote-tech conferences are filled with wild optimism, alcohol, and dumbassery. The peer reviewed conferences are filled with super hardcore academics, and very high end engineers, actually driving technology forward. It is easy to pay to go to these tech parties, including purchasing "speaker" spots, and much more difficult to get accepted to a high end research conference as a speaker. I believe Defcon is sort of in the middle. I applied for a full speaking spot there, was rejected, but then offered a lightning talk spot, and then was offered a lighting talk backup spot there before I could reply to the lighting spot talk. I declined. Defcon to me seems like a cross between the two, but closer to the party type of event than the academic type of event.
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.
The performing name of Cantinflas was originally a nonsense name that he adopted to keep his family from knowing that he was performing. The verb is derived from his name.
There are four types of tech conferences: https://momjian.us/main/blogs/... Only some of them are useful to specific groups.