What I've learned sending proposals to conferences | Hacker News Reader

What I've learned sending proposals to conferences

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151 pointsvalzevul40 comments

A bit of a tangent, but am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out ticket invites and request for papers.

Conferences were originally for leading experts in a particular field to share new research and present papers that were going to be published, and give people the chance to ask questions and find out more from the authors.

Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck.

I recognise the networking aspect of them can be useful, but I couldn't justify spending the ticket price of some of them, to go to a conf based around one very narrow tech (unless it was a narrow but widely used and lucrative tech, and I was looking for work in that area currently).

I go to a few conferences for fairly specialised tech (like NixCon) and also to the much larger generic events (like the Chaos Communication Congress) and while both kinds have a lot of excellent talks going on, the talks are only peripherally what it's about for me.

Networking and community building is by far the #1 reason why I attend these events, you can always watch talk recordings later.

Nice, I didn't expect that NixOS has its own conference. I have been at OpenSUSE summit twice, I will definitely go to DebConf once they come to a less exotic place (from my perspective). I was looking for an Archlinux conference, but could not find one. You don't need to be deeply involved in the project to benefit from a conference. I have been to Akademy twice when they happened to be in the area and I am not even a real KDE user. LinuxCon Australia is nearly a must for every engaged Linux developer, at least once in a lifetime. Still hesitating whether I'll do it a second time (I'm from Europe). I guess I need to go to my 9th Fosdem in 5 weeks.

Just today my daughter complained: Dad why do you always go to your stupid conferences? I answered: Most of my colleagues from 20 years ago are no longer in software development. One runs a laundry, another one a fitness studio, some are unemployed...

Yes, unfortunately speaking at a conference I haven't done for over 25 years any more. Back than I was a university employee and they only allowed attendance when you spoke. To speak you need to be really involved and I find it difficult to find the time on the side of my day job.

Well, Nix is a much wider ecosystem than "just" NixOS - the package manager has many other applications, too (for example I gave a talk about Nixery this year).

From that perspective I don't find it so surprising that there's a conference about it :)

> You don't need to be deeply involved in the project to benefit from a conference

Agree! Many conferences these days will have tracks focused on "beginners", too (NixCon did this year).

There has always been a big overlap of people I know from computer conferences, science-fiction conventions, hacking congressions, and musical concerts. So some times I'll slip up and say "Grateful Dead Conference" or "SF Concert" or "Chaos Communication Convention", or "Unix Congress".

I agree. It is a mixed bag though, while too many conferences might equal a lower average quality, more conferences might mean that conferences are more accessible.

More conferences also can “peer-pressure” other conferences into good behavior, e.g. a lot of conferences now provide the talks online for free. A lot of conferences have diversity or student grants. Some conferences even pay for babysitters for speakers.

Personally I don’t like the big conferences I have been to in Frontend Development. I like smaller one day events much more, higher information diversity. And I like other conferences outside of my normal scope, because I can learn much more.

> Some conferences even pay for babysitters for speakers.

That is a REALLY great idea.

Do some conferences also pay for babysitters for the children of speakers, too?

Lol, sometimes speakers do need handlers :P

SeaGL in Seattle does offer free childcare to all attendees, in addition to being free to attend.

>> Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck.

Exactly why I stopped going to conferences. The quality of the speakers is mostly terrible. They choose a grand sounding topic then the talk turns out to be incredibly shallow and pointless. I often wonder how many of them could actually speak at depth, extemporaneously, about the subect of their talk or if their actual knowledge collides with the end of their slides.

I think also it's just a way for the speakers to advertise the company they work for.

> The quality of the speakers is mostly terrible. They choose a grand sounding topic then the talk turns out to be incredibly shallow and pointless.

Yea, I'd like to speak at a conference some day, maybe when I'm more experienced and feel like I have something worthy to contribute. That's not looking likely - I'm turning 40 soon and still don't feel like I've mastered any aspect of computer science and/or developed any new insight into software development to the degree I could get up at a large conference and act like an authority on anything.

And then I go to conferences where I'm forced to sit through presentations that the speaker obviously threw together on the plane (while half-drunk) the day before. Terrible and shallow and pointless, indeed.

For quite a few, it is a _main_ goal for the speakers to either draw attention to their company's product or to provide an air of thought leadership on behalf of their company.

Of course it is. Any conference being paid for in one way of another by companies will do the companies bidding. He who holds the gold makes the rules, as they say.

But trying going to a conference that isn't organised by a company, or as a venue for companies to show their products. They exist. They are usually associated with open source groups/meetups of some kind. In some ways they are very vanilla - no fancy food or hotels, nobody actually pays for that crap out of their own pocket.

But the talks - the talks are from a different world. Nobody is there to talk about their company. It's engineers talking to other engineers. Some are serious, some are playful, some are seriously nuts, but all know they are talking to their peers and are not game to spout too much bullshit. If they don't believe it, it doesn't get said. It's like comparing the comments on HN to the journalistic output on a mass media site.

> I often wonder how many of them could actually speak at depth, extemporaneously, about the subect of their talk or if their actual knowledge collides with the end of their slides.

Was not my experience at CppCon at least. In fact, the problem is usually that they are pretty pedestrian presenters and/or run out of time. But most clearly know what they are talking about. Maybe this is different at other conferences though.

I guess C++ is immune to hypes at this point. You can't bullshit your way through a topic where most of your audience probably has at least a decade of C++ experience under their belts.

> The quality of the speakers is mostly terrible. They choose a grand sounding topic then the talk turns out to be incredibly shallow and pointless.

Indeed, but after the 20 minutes of inane drivel the speaker enjoys a lifetime with a CV attesting to the fact that he spoke at a conference about a grand sounding topic, thus he is a bona fide expert and reference on a grand sounding topic.

Part of the issue is that companies now many use "developer advocates" as mouthpieces at the conferences. They are usually good at giving presentations, being social, being PC, etc but are generally lacking any real depth about the product they are presenting.

At most tech conferences you are now getting presentations from a technical marketer on a circuit who has given the same presentation (or a variation of it) 10 times in the last month rather than the people who did the work.

> The quality of the speakers is mostly terrible.

I agree - mostly. I was at Visual Studio Live in Vegas a few years back and apart from Donovan Brown giving an absolutely mind-blowing presentation of Azure DevOps the quality of the sessions was so bad I felt it as an insult.

At Anglebrackets I've had better luck. I went earlier this year and saw a presentation on Blazor given by one of the devs on the team.

I'm an expert in some things, beginner in others. I've done a few conference talks, and on topics where I'm an enthusiast, I've always made sure to title/label as "intro to ... foo" or "foo 101". The last thing I've wanted to do was to make someone feel they wasted their time at my talk, precisely because I've felt that way about so many others over the years.

I don’t need more conferences. But I do appreciate smaller conferences.

Ad-hoc BOFs (Birds of a feather) usually give me some good ideas.

If it’s on a specific open source project I can usually code with the core maintainers and squash bugs with immediate feedback on my MR.

Smaller settings mean better Q&A with a keynote or a discussion at breakfast the next morning.

When I contrast these small conferences with the mega conferences. I find it hard to justify just exactly what I get out of the big ones. You can usually watch the sessions on YouTube after the fact.

Smaller conferences probably in the end equates to “more conferences” being held though. So I don’t mind all the conference notices for conferences I won’t attend.

Quality generally varies wildly, but I don't think "too many conferences" is necessarily the reason.

Three arguments for more conferences:

a) A conference focused on a very specific topic can provide more in-depth/specialized talks on it. A talk on some technology a a wide-breath conference will always have to include some generic "what is this thing" segment, even if it wants to talk about something specific, and will only have 1-2 talks on it.

b) More conferences means it's more likely there's an interesting one nearby. A conference that's a reasonable train ride away is a lot easier to justify, both for me privately or at work, than one that involves long-distance (or even intercontinental) travel.

c) to a degree it means smaller conferences, which makes getting into contact with people somewhat easier (as long as interesting people are still there - it is a balance)

The "hallway track" is honestly the most value I get out of conferences. Talking to others, people willing to share things verbally in smaller groups, etc. Requires some amount of social networking to meet and talk to folks to build those relationships but the value out of that has paid off over the years for me. Super useful if you ever need to reach out to someone unicast for a question/favor.

This is a pattern now in greater society, one of the (arguable) downsides to tech is that the bar for publishing or organizing just about anything has been lowered - so now it isn't tenured professors with years of experience in academic best practices giving carefully prepared talks summarizing months of research, it's programmers with no formal education presenting whatever in a totally casual manner.

Don't get me wrong, that it's casual isn't necessarily a problem, but literature, journalism, even scientific publications are all seeing wider distributions of quality now that it's so much easier for the average person to find a platform. And I think the predominant expansion is at the lower end of the distribution given that there was previously a strong effective selection pressure for quality, since it took substantial resources just to publish any media.

Sorry, I disagree with the reference to academia: the median quality of academic conference talks is abismal in my experience. Sure they are more technical, but they are also that much less engaging, and target a much more narrow audience. No experimenting with styles and flows, just cookie-cutter formats with lots of text and plenty of citations.

Programmer conferences may have a more open format and obviously that invites some low quality talks, but it also leaves the door open to really amazing, totally experimental formats and topics. I'm thinking of stuff like Gary Bernhardt's "The Birth and Death of Javascript" [1], which would never fly at an academic conference in my experience (or at least would not be appreciated), but was immensely influential in programming circles.

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

I think there is nothing wrong with like minded people getting together in person to discuss common interests.

It bucks the trend of increasing isolation as people can do everything from their phone and/or from home.

I would even say everything is right with the world.

I would also say, if you are just a consumer of conferences, maybe you should step it up and become an active participant.

Yup. For many companies with a large audience or usebase that are already doing everything else, a conference/event is a natural evolution to keep growing their brand.

Of course, when you increase the number of speaking spots over many conferences, a) the act of speaking becomes more commoditised (so speakers just re-use the same material over and over), and b) the quality level starts to drop.

It's super common for conference organisers to try to lock down people with impressive sounding titles from noteworthy companies just to sell tickets (SoAndSo from Google!). Just because those folks have great jobs at great companies doesn't necessarily translate into a useful or inspiring talk.

IMO, when speakers get into storytelling mode or get really specific, that's when it gets interesting. Would love to see more speakers move beyond that "blogspot" mindset as well.

Often Name from Company is really Nameless from their regional Business Support Department. Simple and dry and minimal content but well rehearsed and presented "heres our product" pitches.

True. And yet some are really good and I wouldn't miss them.

But I've been and spoken to many conferences this year and I have to admit it was hard to sit and listen to presentations.

I wanted to meet people and exchange ideas instead.

There's a couple of interesting formats:

- network centric conference with few and great speeches in non sterile locations. See WRWS in a theater in Como for instance.

- smaller ones with workshops. We co-organized one in Milan this year and we were given a 30 people room. It was packed with interested people all day for the simple reason that they chose to be there.

Now we are playing with the idea to spend a weekend in some Tuscany villa where everyone sleeps and eats there during the conference in an effort to maximize networking and workshops over speeches.

In short: it's diverse and evolving.

What's the name of the conference?

I'm in Milan and I have access to a beautiful villa 10 minutes off Bellagio on Como lake, on the mountain side. it would be great to organise something together.

It was Hicon, 5th of December, we organized the Blockchain in Travel part.

I was also a couple of times in Como, presenting our project, every heard of VRWS? It was two years in the row in Como.

I'm interested to know more about your villa in Bellagio!

I go to meet specific people, get specific questions answered, plan how to get specific things done over the next n months or whatever. Pull them into a room for a few hours for brain dumps. Very valuable compared to email/chat etc

I've long suspected there's a backend 'conference industry' capable of organising whatever -con you want to. If the price is low enough then more and more frameworks / etc afford it.

Conferences are, mostly, absolutely a scam. They're primarily a way for speakers to launder free time into reputation, without having to actually put in the work to become an expert, and secondarily a way for attendees to launder company training budgets into paid time off.

As you observe, the actual educational value is substantially less than putting the same amount of time into reading.

This is why it really grinds my gears when I see conference speakers whining on Twitter about being mistreated ("they refused to pay for business class flights!"), because speakers are already being paid to advance their own career!

> and secondarily a way for attendees to launder company training budgets into paid time off.

That's the only reason I still go, making sure that the hotel has a rooftop pool at least!

it also happened at a conference that some speaker showed some of my experiments as an inspiration for the topic they were talking about ,without crediting me, even though it wasn't hard to find me

Quality is so low nowadays that the guy was speaking there on the stage, showing my code, while I was in the audience knowing that it wasn't talk material, or I would be the one presenting it at a conference!

> and secondarily a way for attendees to launder company training budgets into paid time off.

Speak for yourself.

My job has gotten good value from the conferences I go to but if the rest of you live like that that would go a good way towards explaining why my very reasonable requests always has to be defended :-/

It seems to be a growing trend in other avenues of communicating scholarship. For example, there are too many journals, conferences, blogs, podcasts, degrees etc.

There are so many now that it's a strong hypothesis to say the quality of the median conference, journal, blog, podcast etc have really declined over the years.

I think that as the number of these channels begin to grow, the branding will become increasingly important to separate the good from the bad because there are too many to evaluate them all thoroughly.

> A bit of a tangent, but am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences?

I work for a decade-and-a-half old open-source project which is had genuine collaboration from a number of large companies. We've been having a yearly conference mainly to have face-time and hash out architectural decisions that are difficult to do over email since nearly the beginning; these meetings are really critical for the proper functioning of the project.

But conference venues are getting more expensive. Much more expensive. The cost of hosting a conference has probably tripled in the last 5 years. The boom in conferences is a big part of that.

Our connected world was supposed to make this sort of face-to-face collaboration obsolete. Instead it's made it more common than ever.

I've had about a half-dozen proposals accepted over several years. IMHO, picking a 'hot technology' is the biggest factor that's seemed relevant to the papers I had accepted.

> ... conferences are not about talks, they are about the community

Definitely some of the best have been ones where I never made it to any presentations but spent the whole time engrossed in the “corridor session”.

Unless there is some rigor in the selection of the speakers of the conference (e.g., top CS conferences) they're mostly a scam and a waste of time.

I’ve rarely enjoyed conversations or networking at conferences I’ve attended. It probably is a good use of the time, but man is it dreadful. I think a lot of people must enjoy the opportunity to talk to others who work in the same part of our field. I’d just rather talk about pretty much anything else.

Whatever value I’ve gotten from them has always been in the talks, so for me a conference needs to have interesting speakers.

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