Why Your Excellent Conference Talk Was Rejected
promptworks.com
promptworks.com
- Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers, and it's an excellent way to get practice at presenting in a lower stress environment. It's not always small audiences either, I've seen and given talks with 50 or more attendees at a local meet up. As for getting accepted, organizers are always in need of talks, and organizers are not getting 6 submissions per month, they're usually lucky if they can fill every month with a talk, so you're much more likely to be accepted.
- Maintain a blog. Writing articles on your blog is practice for writing a talk, and gives you a steady stream of ideas that can be turned into a presentation fairly easily.
I'm going to add a couple more:
- Give a lightning talk at conferences you attend. As well as giving you practice, you are also visible to all the attendees, including people who will be selecting talks at future conferences you submit to.
- Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted.
These steps aren't going to make it so that you're immediately accepted at large conferences, but they give you the start the article is claiming you need. And finally, if you're rejected, don't give up. Conferences do take chances on new speakers (although probably not all new speakers who submit a talk), and being rejected doesn't mean your talk is bad, or that your skills are bad, just that you didn't get it this time.
And also it lets you make a fool of yourself with a smaller audience.
Very few people are good at something the first time they try it. Why do you imagine you're a great presenter the first time out? As with anything else, make your mistakes in small domains.
Not that I am ever likely to speak at a conference.
Easier to look a fool telling jokes than look a fool making a valid point.
edit: or Toastmasters
Among other things, Toastmasters will cure you of what ails many accomplished speakers. That is, the verbal or non-verbal tic (umm, ahh, so, like, wild gestures, hands in pocket).
And you would be amazed at the kinds of mistakes that you can make!
A few years back I did a 3 hour tutorial at OSCON. I put a lot of effort into making sure that I had 3 hours of material I planned on presenting, with some extra I could slip in. I "presented" to an empty room and was sure of my timing.
Turns out that I speak quite a bit faster in front of a real audience. I was done in 2.5 hours, including what I planned on leaving out...
Then again, it's probably doubly cringeworthy if I did see it. Once for the mistakes I would see, and once again for the difference in how well I felt I did to what I imagine would be apparent once I could review it.
Some of the UK Infosec conferences now have these where they pair new speakers with experienced mentors who coach them leading up to the day.
It's a good way to get new people into the speaking pool in a friendly environment and from what I've seen can produce some great talks.
Our local python user group regularly attracts 100+ people crowds and they always have space for speakers. If you want to try dipping your toe, it's hard to screw up a 5 minute talk.
As the primary meetup organizer for SLC Python, I wholeheartedly agree. We often have people practicing their talks in front of our group before they go onto much larger forums such as PyCon and Open West. It's also a good chance to practice public speaking and presenting complicated ideas.
(Note: The reason is not speculation as they tell you in a rejection email.)
I've been rejected for conferences where every speaker that was accepted looked well under 30. At the least, no one had grey hair.
It's frustrating to me because the very same conferences are highly vocal about seeking diversity, and do usually end up with some gender diversity (although non-Asian/non-White speakers are almost always poorly represented). But there's no age diversity: everyone on stage is between 20-30, or else goes to a plastic surgeon and dresses to look that age.
> One 60-year-old software engineer, fired in January after seven years at a chipmaker in San Jose, now wears casual button-downs, khakis, and sneakers to interviews, studies embedded systems (cell phones, video game consoles) at a local extension school, and has started working out and dyeing his gray hair a dark auburn. He also had blepharoplasty, plastic surgery to remove bags and dark circles under his eyes. “It’s smart to stay current and look as young as possible if you want to keep working in an industry where so many people are in their 20s,” he says. “I still want to work in tech, because I love solving problems. And I don’t yet have enough saved for retirement.”
/rimshot
At the end of the day, people want a movie that reaffirms their personal views more than they want a quality constructed film. They want music that triggers their own pet emotions, not a technically clever composition. And they want a friend, not a coworker.
I want to see talks where presentors have radically different approaches to problems. I want to see Zed Shaw and Douglas Crockford have a passionate explitive laden argument about the merits of Ruby vs server side JS only to see Ken Thompson or Rob Pike blow their minds with a talk about go. So what if they all happen to be white guys. What matters is they have interesting things to say and vastly different perspectives coming from long careers in the industry honing their craft.
Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers. If someone doesn't want to go to a conference on concurrency and distributed algorithms because a demographic de-jour isn't speaking then that person isn't passionate about the subject of the conference and the conference is better off without them there.
That may seem harsh but I'm just throwing my opinion out there for the sake of diversity of ideas ;)
It's supposed to be about equality, right? How can we get more equal than focusing on the ideas themselves?
Is it safe to say you're a member of a demographic who has never had those checkboxes applied to them negatively?
It sure sounds like you're trying to do that right now.
Can you explain to me why using race/demographics as a means to sideline and devalue my opinion isn't the highest form of hypocrisy in this context?
In other words... Isn't your question a perfect example of you "applying those checkboxes" to me negatively?
It's funny that you can say that right after someone implied I was a member of an over-represented group and then used that assumption as leverage against me in an argument. So that statement is demonstrably false.
Then you are not the audience those "demographic checkboxes" are there for. (Neither am I.)
I'm a white male engineer, and I've never had the experience of going to a tech conference and wondering whether I'm supposed to be there because I don't see anyone else who looks like me. That experience is common for engineers who are women, POC, or in various other demographics.
For all I know you might be a member of one of those demographics, but if you "couldn't care less" then I assume you haven't had that experience either. That doesn't affect your right to an opinion, but it does mean you are not fully considering at least one reason that demographic diversity is important.
Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers.
I haven't met a single hacker or engineer who wasn't also a person, and other things that matter to people include feeling welcome and accepted.
If you're accustomed to feeling welcome and accepted at technical conferences, it's easy to say that feeling welcome and accepted doesn't matter to you at such conferences. If most conferences didn't make you feel that way, it might matter to you more to find one that did.
One way to make people feel welcome and accepted is to reduce the extent to which they feel like the "odd one out", in as many senses as possible.
As autarch points out above, this isn't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that replaced quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have more than one criterion to optimise for. Multi-objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal.
Perhaps there's a desirable balance to be struck here.
this isn't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that replaced quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have more than one criterion to optimise for. Multi-objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal.
Hopefully we can agree that a conference which had interesting technical content and was welcoming to a broad range of people would be better than a conference that had only one or the other.
Personally, I care about having the most interesting technical ideas and interesting minds at the conferences I choose to attend.
The jist of my opinion is this: The subject technology should always be the highest priority at a technology conference.
If you consider the feeling of being, say, the only person of color at a conference to be a "superficial hangup", then perhaps your beliefs about what makes people comfortable have not been closely examined. It sounds like a statement about what makes you comfortable.
Imagine you pay a lot of money to attend a conference. And I'm not even talking about flight+food+hotel as some conferences' cover are pretty high (blackhat). Now you go in a talk and discover that the speaker is just horrible. The topic might be interesting but you get nothing out of it because the speaker is just bad.
Now this is a problem because as an attendant you're no happy, and this is the responsibility of the judges of the CFP. They need to work to protect you from these kind of talks.
I'd much tolerate beginners at smaller conferences, or meetups. This is where you can get experience before going to a bigger one. A one that might even give you money and pay for your travel+accommodation.
By the way, I think most of you people have no idea how bad talks can be. In more academic conferences, foreign speakers make a big chunk of the talks and some of them can't speak english at all. It's painful for everyone to sit through that kind of talk. (Note that I'm a foreigner myself, just saying that some of us are EXTREMELY BAD AT ENGLISH (not going to point fingers).)
At most conferences I attended, there were scores of presenters who, frankly, sucked, or the supposedly "technical" topic turned out to be unabashed product/service pitch.
And many still care even though their company pays for them.
> the supposedly "technical" topic turned out to be unabashed product/service pitch.
That's another issue though, bad content.
In contrast, while I don't want to paint a rosy picture of academic conferences, you always get detailed feedback on your paper/talk that you submit. It may be biased, it may be frustrating, but at least you can tell that someone at least looked at your paper/talk and gave you some feedback. Industry conferences never do this.
Heartbreaker #7 - The You Don't Have Any Personal Contacts on The Conference Circuit And Aren't Particularly Attractive Or Personable Topic
Heartbreaker #8 – The intercooler.js You Are All Doing It Wrong And You Should Feel Bad Topic
So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarly been a poor idea. Please do not take rejections personnaly.
There's also the case of having too many good talks and simply having to tailor the conference around a specific track of talks that might make the most sense for a given audience or for a given industry focus.
Most conferences have been converted to strictly money-making entities.
Here is how it works:
- a RFP is published
- you submit
- you get a response: "Unfortunately, your proposal did not get accepted, however, we have a limited number of time slots for sponsors. If you become a silver sponsor..." In other words, you can submit any crap, as long as you provide "sponsorship".
This may or may not apply to DevOps Days, I don't know enough about it. Also, the above does not invalidate some good points made by the author regarding selecting the right angle of the presentation, etc.
I've had talks rejected from places even where we were sponsoring.
I've been cold-called by several conferences before (not totally unusual, I've spoken at a few large ones, and my name's out there) where they ask me to speak, but "don't have the budget" for payment and don't reimburse or offer a stipend for travel costs. Unsurprisingly, they charge hundreds of dollars for admission, have extremely cheap venues, and a somewhat lackluster roster of gullible "expert speakers."
Sure, there's a large gray area between "not a very good conference" and "scammy ripoff" but it's another thing to watch out for.
For example, all the ACM conferences.
I actually like this - everyone contributes to the costs, and speakers are just attendees like everyone else.
I've seen people get extremely irate when they see this, saying it's a scam, but at many conferences speakers are just normal attendees like anyone else.
But for most conferences, interesting speakers provide the whole value of the conference - it is what attracts attendees. Therefore, organizers make decent money off of speakers, so no, they are not like regular attendees.
Them, I am reminded that many speakers tour many events with the same talk. I rather like the idea of having fresh speakers on stage over the 4th instance of the very same old talk.
That makes it even less likely that the talk will turn out (as well as complicating the conference schedule). Giving a 30 minute talk is much easier than giving a 10-15 minute talk. "If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now."
Many conference organizers will give some slots to brand new presenters, especially if the topic seems interesting; they just want a good balance of new and experienced presenters. But a conference that has so many talk submissions that it has to reject incredible talks can afford to be more selective.
- Short meetup talk (10-20 minutes).
- Long meetup talk (20-40 minutes)
- Conference talk.
The only gotcha is that most meetups are not recorded. That makes it difficult to apply for conferences outside of your hometown.
I doubt many meetups will mind if you bring one.
As others have said, it's generally better to build up to a conference presentation through doing smaller events like user groups and maybe lightning or rookie track talks, before trying for a main track slot.
I'd rather have an experience talker who is used to giving his talk. You know you will get way more out of it.
I understand the problem of creating engaging presentations as well as compelling content, but there are ways to achieve this other than being prejudicial. For example, if you want to create an invited talk or two for those whose presentations the program committee particularly likes, great. And if you want to provide presentation coaching for those who you accept who haven't presented before, even better. (I have provided this coaching informally in the past, and have found that a little coaching can go a long way.) But a blinded review process must be viewed as a constraint on the problem: to do any less is to deprive ourselves of the new ideas and presenters that provide us our collective vitality!
[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/p...
At the same time, it sounds like they had many, many submissions that were worthy of presentation, and this was a bigger conference. There are smaller conferences which are not as inundated with presentations to which newer speakers can apply, and from there apply to the bigger ones.
It's just like everything else in life, where you have to prove yourself on a smaller scale before being allowed on bigger things.
As an aside, I do not understand why my comment is being voted down; is a double blind review process that controversial?!
As long as there's content, and the speakers receive some communication about being prepared, practicing, and ensuring they will meet the time limit, how is there so much worry that it's preferable to reject good abstracts than take the risk??
On top of that, it seems like risky presenters with good abstracts could easily be given the opportunity to send in a video of them speaking or have a phone call with a conference organizer.
Given these things, it's seems sad to trivially reject based on inexperience, it hurts the conference more than the applicants, and of course gives the impression the conference cares more about style than substance. I realize that's a rash decision making wild generalizations based on a small amount of text... OTOH that is probably how some of those less experienced applicants feel.
Sadly the CSS is optimized, which makes understanding its implementation a little tough, but i suspect it'd make for fun reading!
> [...]
> This presentation would have been accepted if we had seen speaker talked at local meetup groups, had a recorded presentation we could view, or maintained a blog so that we could foresee of how he would present his ideas and build an argument.
Perhaps we were outliers, but @buu700 and I were accepted to BlackHat and DEF CON with no prior speaking experience outside from a dry run of the talk to a single meet-up.
One delivery -- and the talk as delivered in both conferences ended up being far different from that specific instance. Now if the article suggests that just doing it once is fine, cool, but if it's suggesting a track record of past smaller conferences, I'm inclined to disagree, as are the reviewers for the largest conferences.
It helps, but being bereft of it certainly doesn't disqualify you.
It didn't go all that smoothly at DEF CON (which I'll freely attribute to us both being conference noobs), but it went pretty well overall, all things considered.
Don't know if we'll have anything interesting to talk about next year, but I'm looking forward to potentially doing it again.
If the situation is: We have 5 talks on "Getting started with Xamarin". You pick the experienced speaker, but there is only 1 talk on "Implement your backend in Swift" it is much more likely to get picked.
Jokes aside. The issues raised are very good, but I can't help but think biased to a certain intended crowd. How does the panel(?) stay objective? Are the different views on topics and how to formulate the synopsis (exaggeration) perhaps relevant to a certain type of conference attendee and so deserving of a separate conference track?
I was lucky enough to give the talk twice at a local user group prior to the conference, which helped with the actual conference talk, I am sure.
I don't get paid to do any of it, I just really enjoy talking about this stuff. Through these talks and blogging I've been recruited by 3 different companies to contribute to their company tech blogs and I was invited to speak at a rather large and exclusive conference where I was the only speaker not from a HUGE company on the docket.
It happened because I was giving the talk locally, somebody affiliated with the conference drove in from about an hour away to hear it and then stuck around to invite me to speak. I never considered that conferences would recruit but apparently they do.
Everyone is a n00b at some time. But being a conference n00b doesn't mean you're not an expert on the subject of your talk, that your content is not original, that you're not an excellent speaker, or that your talk would not be excellent. All it means is that you're a n00b to public conferences. The wholesale discounting of candidate talks based on such narrow criteria is foolish.
Both good and bad examples are important, but articles like this that include only the rejected outlines just feels quite discouraging.
The topics need to also be aligned consistently around a larger theme, that is closed by a concrete conclusion that people can ideally apply in their life.
Everyone are submitting to talk about the exact same subject.
"Whats new in Angular2", "Using Redux", etc.
I don't care about how a presenter presents their information at a technical conference. If this was a conference for public speaking and entertainment I'd think it's important then.
Much like you don't hire someone with no experience writing software to come in a write you a brand new point-of-sale system for your chain of a thousand stores just because they're enthusiastic.
However, I don't think this is wrong, especially for such a large conference. If this were a smaller conference then I think it would actually be overzealous, but that is not what I think in this case, which is why I said it was only my initial reaction.
I would also like to add that the example summary given shows more than just enthusiasm, it shows knowledge of topic as well as the ability to convey that information in a concise and reasonable way. So, a more apt comparison would be not hiring said person to build your brand new POS system just because their academics were good and make a nice resume (just without job experience).
"If you want to present at a big conference, then you must have experience doing smaller conferences or presentations."
You can gain experience by presenting in local meetups, making videos and posting them online, doing short tech talks at your job, etc. Doing those first will net you a lot of valuable skills and experiences.
If you are looking to get into public speaking there are no shortage of meetups desperate to get speakers booked in, on any topic you like, in almost every city in the world (try meetup.com). Once you've done one or two you'll hopefully have some video of you usefully presenting complex ideas to an audience. From there getting into a conference gets drastically easier. Spend a little time and start with that. Having some initial visibility before jumping straight to huge international conference scale is typically a requirement, and a pretty reasonable one.
I don't want to put people off public speaking; it's super rewarding professionally and personally, and we as an industry do desperately need to hear a wide variety of ideas from as many people as possible.
It's not immediately easy though, just because you're a great developer/designer/PM/other. It's famously scary, and a quite substantial skill in itself, and if you jump from zero experience to trying to present hard concepts to an audience of hundreds of people who are paying hundreds of dollars, you'll struggle, and it won't do you or your audience or your confidence any good.
Spend a little time warming up. If you're already great, waiting a month and talking at a local meetup first will just be extra practice. If you're not, you'll want to find that out in a small friendly room of nice people, not on a huge stage in a vast auditorium live streamed around the world.
Another good way to start is user groups: Many will let anyone speak as long as they claim to have a relevant topic. After a video or two of those, you move up until you are eventually invited into conferences that invite speakers, as opposed to ask for submissions. Even for a talented speaker, the road from one end to the other will take about 3 years, speaking at least 5 times a year.
I for one don't think is worth it at all, but I have friends that have 10+ speaking trips a year.
There are all sorts of ways an aspiring presenter can get experience or demonstrate ability that don't involve catching a break from a sympathetic organizer whose job is looking out for the attendees that spent thousands of dollars to be there.
Really I was also about ready to smash them over the head with that requirement, but reading that part does make it seem pretty reasonable.
If they just were behind the title and opening paragraph, they would scroll out of view relatively quickly. You'd get the nice effect, but stop being distracted.
Didn't even notice them, so I clicked back to the article. Sure enough, there are spinning cogs.
Didn't notice them, no distractions.
> The premise is good, but the abstract is so short we have no idea where this is going to go. Even if the speaker were experienced and a known conference superstar, it is hard to give the presenter a speaking slot without more detail.
When you go to a performance by a standup comedian, you don't read an abstract first: if there is even a title it is probably arbitrary or a gag.
When I go to a conference and am choosing to bother going to see a talk, I select talks based on who is speaking, not based on their abstract.
In my experience, a good speaker is interesting no matter what they are talking about, and otherwise the talk ends up being disappointing no matter how on point the abstract is to my interests.
You might then ask: "but surely the good speaker is capable of making a good abstract?", but the best talks are also coordinated and topical and deep.
The person whose talks I most enjoy and now never miss is essentially incapable of making an abstract ahead of time, as his talk is based on his thoughts and passions at that moment, and are about topics so compelling that after the talk I would have a hard time summarizing it other than "you really should have been there".
You might then ask "but is the speaker actually good if the audience member can't summarize the talk?", and I will claim the exact opposite: if you can replace the talk with a summary of the content and (maybe) the slides, you should not be wasting anyone's time with a talk.
This is something both many conferences and many attendees fundamentally seem to not "get": they ask for peoples' slides, as if they have meaning. One may as well ask for a photograph of the empty sets for a play they missed instead of a video of the performance, that is how much content you can recover from the slides and abstract of a good talk.
> It’s crummy to turn away such a good presentation, but it’s also risky to entrust your conference audience to someone who has never presented before.
But this is also how you get extremely loyal speakers who will speak at your conference for free while refusing to even bother speaking at other venues. It is also how you manage to show your audience "something new" instead of "the same old people that every conference gets to speak as they are the safe bet / known quantity".
The absolute best regular conference I go to, by far, gets all of this: the couple that runs 360|iDev works with new speakers to hone ideas (many speakers I have talked to are incredibly grateful to this conference for giving them "their break"), but doesn't even bother with an approval process for known good speakers, and they then aren't afraid to have sessions at their conference with neither a title nor an abstract, just a name, a bio, and a "placeholder" title and abstract that are devoid of content. It is seriously the only conference where I really find myself interested to bother attending any of the talks past "I guess I absolutely need to try to see this so I can talk about it with other people tonight sigh".
Expanding into the category of atypical conferences, XOXO takes the cake, but it is half-festival, was never sure if it was anything more than a temporary concept, and doesn't really have a "topic" that is easy to describe. But, the Andy's hand-nurture first-time speakers based on core attendees and prior speakers "nominating" people they really want to see give talks, many of whom are artists or bloggers who might even "perform" in various ways but have never given a talk. The schedule has names and bios, but not a single title or abstract.
><list of different reasons some submissions were not good [and in one case, you would have been picked if not for this not good quality]>
please.
What are the chances this submission was brigaded to the top^ spot?