Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences | Hacker News Reader

Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences

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92 pointswalterbell72 comments

> The benefits to both the employee and the company are indirect, hard to measure, and long term. They can't be measured in dollars.

There are many things that employers could provide that "can't be measured in dollars" that would result in bankruptcy. In order to back up the claim implied by the headline, this article really would need some sort of cost/benefit analysis, which is not provided.

Your employees could quit when they get other offers from businesses that care about professional development. You will have higher turnover and institutional knowledge will constantly be leaving and having to be relearned. Onboarding new employees more often has a direct, measurable cost but is obviously different for every business and position.

Your employees could learn advantageous and/or competitive information from talking with people at the conference. They will bring this back to you and ask for a raise when it turns out it's a bonus for everyone, but that's what we want, right? Maybe it's important enough that you get to pitch the new thing to the CEO and you get a raise as well. Everybody wins.

This really doesn't have anything to do with what the person you replied to said. He merely asked for some sort of cost/benefit deal, rather than handwaving away the analysis.

And I plainly told him that conferences are a perk and perks play into job decisions and that there is a direct cost to losing your employees.

I think it can be measured, but if we got to that point, are we even human beings and not just organic, robots? I think this plays into what kind of "culture" are you trying to cultivate. Culture is a very hard thing to measure as well.

My old accounting professor use to say, "You get what you measure".

Can't you measure culture by your company employee retention rate quarter over quarter or year over year?

You can have a terrible culture among people who are locked in by illiquid equity or the inability to get hired anywhere else.

You can have a great culture among people with a high propensity to want to try new and different things every few years.

The problem is entirely short term thinking with precise measuring can also lead to bankruptcy by not understanding how the rest of the world is changing, missing out on an idea that sparks a whole new business division, all of this other 'stuff' that's hard to measure. In general I think the point is being a miser is not going to lead to great success or new ideas and ways of doing things.

Just to flip it around, for the fully-loaded cost of sending 2 people to 1 conference that requires travel by plane, you can hire the keynote speaker to come to your office and train 40 people for 2 days. This kind of arrangement is generally more cost-effective and inclusive since it doesn't require multi-day travel commitments.

Attending conferences isn't about watching a few keynotes many of which are recorded anyway.

Exactly. It's about the relationships you make there.

And most businesses don't benefit from the relationships you make there enough for them to pay for you to go.

Yes it could happen - but mostly it doesn't. Particularly if we're talking about engineers in tech.

But a single keynote is far less effective than a 2 day conference in terms of what you learn. Send 2 people. Have them prepare conference notes and present to the 40 when they get back. It will be keynote x 10 (things you learn outside a single keynote) x 40 (all the employees that get to learn from the 2 that went).

Keynote is such a minor part of attending a 2 day conference that 10x is a conservative estimate.

Edit: And that's just "things learned" that doesn't even count the 20-30 conversations had that can spark collaborative efforts.

Keynote is minimal.

Sending two people and having them paraphrase the talks they saw based on the partial notes they took doesn't exactly sound like an efficient process.

I don't think the OP was suggesting you hire the keynote speaker to come, deliver their keynote and leave. The point is that you could do a lot more than that.

> Sending two people and having them paraphrase the talks they saw based on the partial notes they took doesn't exactly sound like an efficient process.

Don't think of it as education. Think of it as spies debriefing the station crew at the embassy.

This is the right way to think about it. The talks are probably recorded anyway. Really, you want to get some people to go out, see how others are doing things and solving problems, and bringing back the parts that are relevant to your current problems ("Oh, this guy solved problem X, which is really similar to what Ted was stuck on when we left!")

I mean, if I'm thinking about it that way, why am I sending developers on a spy mission?

I'm not sure developers are naturally skilled at parsing presentations (done by other developers, who also often aren't fantastic presenters) into meaningful presentations to give back in the office. Not that conferences aren't worth it, I'm just not sure they're worth it for that.

I think you have a point there. In a previous company we had Scott Meyers come in for a week for a lot of money and I felt the level of C++ skills in general and also the willingness to learn went up a lot.

You do have a point there about travel costs and hiring a speaker. But consider that sending those employees to a conference is not just about training.

Those employees are representing the company when they attend, network, and quite possibly sell the company's services or products to others that they meet.

If those employee have speaking spots (they're speaking at the conference), then the company has an even better chance at getting the company's name out there in front of a lot of people. In that case, the company can benefit even more when it comes to branding and other benefits that speakers give the company.

What do you mean by fully-loaded? Are you counting the cost of those 40 people taking two days away from work? If not ... ($200 per hour * 16 hours + $1,000 travel) * 2 employees ~ $8,400. Is training that cheap? To paraphrase a few folks from Hacker News, "Y'all need to raise your rates."

Yes but then 40 people learn stuff instead of 2. So I think the benefits side has some additions, not just the cost side.

If you're giving up $128k in lost labor, you should make sure to hire an expert instructor. It's a rare keynote speaker that can also be a highly efficient teacher for 16 hours.

Keynotes are all too often (depends on the conference, of course, but I see it a lot) either marketing stunts by well known people or companies, or high-level philosophical talks (which can be extremely interesting, but typically less useful for actual learning). So you miss out on all of the other, potentially better for learning, presentations.

You also lose out on the (IMHO) most important and useful part of conferences: the hallway networking.

I generally opt to abstain from conferences, even if my employer is willing to foot the bill.

I'm unlikely to learn anything from the conference that I couldn't learn on the web, and almost certainly not enough to justify the expenditure of time.

Plus, a round-trip flight crossing a couple of time zones would probably double my carbon footprint for the year.

I feel similarly. I find that conferences are kind of wasteful, from the signage, materials to the travel to get everyone into the same place. I can see greater value if a company is remote and you want to engage with a community that way. I feel like at least in the Bay Area there is a plethora of local events so no need to travel high and low for events.

I can't speak to the carbon footprint, but there is so much value in attending conferences if you are connecting with new people.

That's a big if. I don't go to a lot of conferences, but I've never been to one where I ever maintained contact with anyone I met there, after the conference was over.

That's the reason why I created an online course about this. I include lots of ways to follow up and stay connected after the conference. That's key.

The first thing in networking is showing up. The second is following up.

As a counterpoint: I have. I've also used conferences as a means of getting face-time with people I otherwise only interact with online. There are also people I share information with, but only interact with once a year at a conference (that is, the conference is the means of staying in touch). Sometimes its also about meeting people who, while you might not stay in touch with them, if for some reason you end up interacting with them in the future, they remember you and you have a head start (last year I almost got a job (I turned it down only because it would have increased my commute beyond what I was willing and I wasn't prepared to relocate) because I met the CTO at a conference 5 years ago). The value of these things varies, of course, so I won't say that conferences are definitely and always worthwhile, but they definitely can be.

I've had similar experiences, but I also think your answer could be paraphrased as "conferences are good because extroverts like them." Some people who are otherwise really good developers aren't going to get much value from a bunch of forced socialization.

Also, in context of "companies should pay for their employees", none of the experiences you note benefitted the company. If you had left the company because you met a new connection at a conference, not only would the employer be out $3K to send you to the conference, they'd be out $50K or more to hire your replacement.

but I also think your answer could be paraphrased as "conferences are good because extroverts like them

Sure, except that I'm far from an extrovert and that's exactly why I like conferences: I find it incredibly difficult to network and a conference provides a nice, safe, closed environment for me to do so regardless.

Also, in context of "companies should pay for their employees", none of the experiences you note benefitted the company

Absolutely. I wasn't really relying in the context of the article but rather as a counterpoint to not finding personal value in conferences. I've went to almost all conferences I've been to on my own dime, so I obviously wasn't there to benefit my employers.

Let's assume we're talking about developer conferences. Because that seems to be the only kind where we get contention about the value of attending.

Entrepreneurs conference? Can't build that start up on your own. Sales conference? You'd be derelict in your duties if you are not networking over every possible shill you can.

But programmers? Well. We're just expected to glom into some dark corner and crank out code, right?

Coding for programmers [nerds] is fun, we should do it all the time [nights and weekends] and magically improve/learn new tech by osmosis. /s

I genuinely think this is how many people outside dev think.

To be fair, conferences are not always the best way to learn new things. It's variable depending on the conference, and there are some at the lower end that are glorified trade shows.

But for me, the obvious reason to attend is to network with other developers. Whether your company sees that as useful or not will probably determine if they spring for it.

I don't do a lot of development these days but IMO it's mostly a mistake to conflate conferences with deep-dive training (except to the degree that some conferences come with workshops attached). In addition to the networking/hallway track, conferences are useful to exposing yourself to new ideas, concepts, projects, etc. that you can then look into in greater depth after the event.

This thinking is at least as prevalent within dev as outside depending on what forums you frequent.

I was hired as the keynote speaker for two VMUG User Cons. I explained to the organizers that I'm more into business networking and not infrastructure networking. They exclaimed, "that's why we want you!" They wanted me to get their members connecting with one another and meeting new people.

So... yes even programmers need people. :)

That's why you should call yourself an engineer.

I know Amazon gets a generally bad rap around HN, but my organization at least pays for all SDEs to attend one conference a year. While not everybody takes advantage of it, those that have typically provide several brown bag sessions to disseminate their learnings to the team.

I've found it very useful both to attend and to learn from those that attended, particularly when I can get the highlights (and potentially new ideas!) of a conference I'd never attend personally.

I agree but most conferences are a waste. The ones that have good "corridor sessions" are the best, and you need some experience to get value out of those (so send the new kids along with someone who has a bit of experience)

I'm not familiar with that term. What is a "corridor session"?

It's when you talk to people in the hallway in between or instead of talks; also known as "the hallway track."

This is where I spend most of my time these days. It has gotten so bad I just sign up for workshops and hang out during the main conference.

This is where I've made some of my best friends from conferences. Hallways, restaurants, and bars. :)

>>I agree but most conferences are a waste.

In my experience, this is because most conferences are actually trade shows. But they aren't called that, because organizers want to disguise the fact that they want to use the event to sell products and services, rather than to teach to and train attendees.

From a purely "stuff learned" perspective, conferences are a huge waste. You could furnish an entire team with several years worth of Pluralsight subscriptions for the cost of sending a couple of them to a conference in another state. Having said that I more or less make it a condition that my employer will send me to at least one relevant conference each year.

IMO, the value of conferences is:

- It's a work-related break from work (read; easy to justify). Most conferences are pretty fun to go to, assuming you don't just rock up for the talks and then hide in your hotel afterwards.

- Networking. If you're at a conf, go and talk to people. It's amazing what you can get done just with a few conversations.

- You WILL learn stuff, and not necessarily JUST what you came there to learn. I'm yet to come back from a conference without at least 4 or 5 new ideas.

- You'll have the chance to talk to people who know a hell of a lot more about product/tech XYZ, and there's a good chance they're being paid to stand around and answer your questions.

- If you want certs, exams are often cheaper at conferences and there's nearly always some cram/lab sessions being run beforehand.

Ultimately, the value of a conference is somewhere between buying ping pong tables and Xboxs for the break room, and hiring a guest speaker for a few days - it's as much of a hearts and minds exercise as it is a learning and development one.

EDIT: Formatting

In my personal experience at places I've worked, there has been a strong negative correlation between conference attendance and overall quality and productivity of the staff. Conferences offer such an easy out for people who want to waste a week while pretending to work and taking a quasi-vacation on the company dime that if you're careless in permitting conference attendance, it can easily turn into a free-for-all.

At one small conference I attended, most companies were represented by one or two people, maybe a CXX and a bizdev guy. Our company had a couple dozen people there. The attendee list was published, and it was kind of embarrassing when they acknowledged our presence during the intro remarks because it basically told everyone what a joke of a company we were. The only reason my team was there was so that my boss could add more make-work to put in his quarterly report while earning points from his team for being that "good boss" that supports employee development. It was such a mismanaged mess at that company that they even paid for a team of contractors to take a paid week off to attend a conference, mostly so that they could pad their resumes, since none of that knowledge was actually applicable to the project they were on.

At my next job, people were too busy trying to hit their goals to pitch their boss on conferences in Vegas.

Conference attendance can provide benefits to employers under the right circumstances, but if I had my own company and an employee initiated a request to attend a conference, I'd insist that he have some skin in the game--he'd either have to take vacation days, or if it counted as work days, he'd have to pay for a significant part of the travel/registration costs himself. If he's not willing, then it probably wasn't worth much to him anyway.

here's how its supposed to work:

you have a great contributor. someone who does a substantial amount of work and has come up with enough novel stuff to get a paper published in the field.

they go to the conference, and no you don't get their output for a few days...except some work on the plane and some nights at the hotel

but they give a great talk, and learn about a bunch of new exciting things in their field to bring back with them. every time someone talks to this person and is impressed by their work, the name of your company gets associated transitively

when the people at the conference think about a new job, or using a product in your space, they implicitly think 'foo co - thats a great place doing really cool stuff'

I completely agree with you about the value of conferences(for my industry) and I've stopped attending them. I find trainings generally more valuable, though they are frequently pricey. One alternative I've also considered is the ability to work remotely/disconnected for a week or so to focus on researching a new technology or skill. For a self-starter I think this could be a great use of time and money for all parties.

Obviously for any of these scenarios to work you need an employee that wants to learn, and an employer who is willing to invest in their employee's growth.

I guess you should also ask your employee to pay for his laptop? Clearly if he's not willing to put in $500 towards a new MBP it can't be worth much to him anyways ;)

Why would you hire someone as an employee if you don't trust them not to abuse company resources like that? Their "skin in the game" is that they're your employees.

It sounds like those places with negative correlation had other problems. I'd say correlation not causation.

The biggest problem with a large number of tech conferences is that the speakers are not qualified to speak and, as a result, have lower quality attendees, but often charge $700+ for tickets, hotels, time off etc.. Some egregious examples include a speaker who can't code giving keynotes at multiple tech conference about how to mentor junior developers, soft talks that have nothing to do with the subject of the conference, talks about mental health by people who are not mental health professionals, thinly veiled talks pushing political agendas that have a (loose at best)relationship to tech and "Bootcamp Grads Have Feelings Too" which was at a major tech conference for one of the big communities. We don't see nurses aids fresh out of school keynoting medical conferences, but somehow in tech this has become a thing.

Someone else was saying that they are stealth trade shows but I'm not sure even that is true for a lot of conference because honestly I don't think that many of these events do either very well. There are some that still focus on quality content where the material and the attendees are much more beneficial, but the conferences with the weak speaker line ups are a waste of money and in some communities it feels like we have too many conferences, many of which are not providing real value to companies for the money and time spent.

It's one thing to have a conference with intense technical material that has some interesting hallway convos during breaks and socialization in the evening. But many of these lower quality events feel like we have a bubble in this space. I'm saying this as someone who has spoken at a decent number of conferences and as an organizer 3 community based (not for profit) conferences. Or put another way, there are some that are worth it, but a lot more that are a waste of time.

I've been to a few Security conferences to maintain "points" to maintain a certification. The last conference I was at there was a guy talking about how to be a newbie. Nothing technical about the talk, and was basically just common sense stuff that most adults should already know. But hey I got "points".

The company I work for typically pays for one conference a year per dev (and obviously this is on "company time"). After 3 years I'm just about to take advantage of this for the first time (heading to GopehrCon!).

- It's a perk.

- It's a chance to clear your head.

- You get to meet a lot of interesting people, chat to them about what they're doing.

- It's not the same as watching the videos. You can interact with the presenters after their talk. You can discuss the topics with others. Your time is 100% on the topic at hand.

- It shows the company really cares about professional development. They're putting their money where their mouth is.

- It shows trust in employees not to abuse this.

- Conferences help create a sense of community in the industry.

It's not something I do often, go to conferences, but it's nice to have the company's support if you want to.

If employers offered either a cash comp increase, or a conference, which would employees choose?

Tanstaafl...

If you count the tax benefit (that is, for W-2 employees who couldn't otherwise get a write-off on the conference), I'd really prefer something like one or two conferences a year. That is, the company could spend $2k to send me to a conference, but if they just paid me an extra $2k I'd only have $1500 after taxes.

Most employees regularly choose not to go to conferences without having the option of taking $1500 instead. I'd gladly take a $3000/year raise to continue not going to 2 conferences every year. If I was instead told that I was going to go to 2 conferences every year as part of my compensation, I'd start looking for new employment.

There are a whole lot of companies you don't want to work for then. Few employers will word it quite so explicitly. But I'd say event attendance is an implicit perk at lots of places. Its considered mutually beneficial.

I'm fine with it being a perk, I meant I'd leave if it became mandatory like those awful company retreat perks.

I doubt all that many consider company retreats a perk :-)

As for events, it really depends on the event and your role. If your job in part involves working with partners, communities, etc. then F2F interactions with many of those people may be important. Many people also enjoy attending such events but they're usually not (and shouldn't be) complete boondoggles.

If it was a conference I wanted to go to anyway, and I was going to get the ticket in addition to time off and all other logistics, I'd take the conferences.

Some constraints need to be applied to this advice, otherwise the conference circuit becomes a huge waste of time that could easily be spent more productively in the office:

1. Always support your employees speaking at conferences if they've been invited/selected, and make sure they rep your company on conf materials (which is usually the norm).

2. For merely attending the conference but not speaking, make sure there's a concrete justification. Examples:

- Someone you know will be at the conference is on your med-long term recruitment list, but no one at your company knows them in person yet. An impromptu meeting at the conference or afterparty along with a discussion of (and demonstration of your appreciation of) their work gets you on their radar much more effectively than a recruiter could.

- Similar rationale for people or companies you think might be valuable to collaborate or partner with.

- The conference presentations and/or workshop sessions deep dive into some topic of direct relevance to your core business, and provide enough info that employees who attend can apply it immediately upon returning.

3. Make sure the people you send are appropriate for the conference. Send your engineers to highly technical/academic conferences but not the business-oriented ones. Send your sales people to sales conferences. Etc. Be on the lookout for conferences that look highly technical but aren't actually.

4. Consider limiting the number of non-speaking conference attendances per year per employee that the company will pay for, around 2 to 4. This forces employees to choose carefully, prioritize the most valuable ones, and get as much out of them as possible.

5. Consider requiring the attending employees to provide a post-conference writeup detailing and informing other employees what they learned. Again this keeps them focused on extracting value rather than having a mini-vacation.

Heh, paying. I'd be pretty happy if I didn't have to use PTO to attend conferences.

Or at least I'd attend way more of them.

Same here. I'd be perfectly happy not being paid to attend conferences, as long as I don't have to use up vacation time to do it.

Companies have an incentive to make their employees more productive, but other things being equal, you'd prefer to teach your employees non-transferable skills rather than transferable ones, since non-transferable skills can't be used on the job market to bid up wages.

There's a comment here about how conferences are great to help your developers make connections in industry. That seems like a mixed bag -- why should companies help their best developers to find their next job somewhere else?

There's an interesting Econtalk episode on the book "Learning by Doing" where this came up:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...

[To summarize: when the textile mill was invented, skilled individual labor became much more valuable (because skilled workers were much more productive), but wages didn't rise much over a period of 50 years. This finally changed with the introduction of interchangeable parts in machines, which made job skills transferable, which allowed skilled employees to demand higher wages from their employers.]

I agree with the statement but I think it should be stronger. Companies should pay and encourage their employees to learn. Obvious inefficiencies and productivity would be created.

I tried attending the IEEE IMS conference in Hawaii this year; my company said not to even ask.

I've known many the employee who's learned nothing, and achieved nothing attending conferences. The presupposition that conferences are instawin somehow is flawed methinks.

This is exactly why I launched an online course. So people can set goals and know how to meet new people. It's not pushy, traditional networking stuff either. It's to build true relationships with cool people who can lead you to new business opportunities later. Networking is about helping others first.

In my experience conferences are just a huge waste of money. I can leisurely read everything covered at a 2-day conference in half a day, and I don't have to suffer through people trying to pepper in memes.

I only go to them because my company pays for them and I can find conferences in cities I want to visit. As an industry we're likely wasting billions on conferences where people just hang out and network with people who can find us better jobs.

I actually tried to stop going to them, but my boss insisted because he doesn't want the budget to get cut.

I could not agree more.

Capital one takes it a notch higher and Sponsors their employees to attend two conferences. I agree with all the points noted by article. Even though majority of conferences are a waste of time if you already read hacker news. They still do help as noted.

Conferences prevent paradigm inbreeding and developers stuck in companys frame-work mikrobubbles. Thats how we always did it! ->Employee Thats how everyone else did it, and what worked and what not! ->Conference

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