What’s the point of tech conferences? | Hacker News Reader

What’s the point of tech conferences?

chelseatroy.com

115 pointsBerislavLopac113 comments

As a freelancer you go to a conference to meet customers and colleagues and remember them that you're still alive :-) and still working on the technologies the conference is about. The best way to signal that is to give speech.

As an employee:

If you are in the position to spend money, hire people, buy services, you also meet people you work with and it helps.

If you're junior in general or in some technology, it can be a way to be exposed to it and learn some unknown unknown.

Anything in between, maybe it's just a nice day off, paid by the company.

Building on this: it's also a great way for everyone more broadly to see what direction the industry is taking.

Every conference this year will probably be touched by talks talking about AI. If there's a year to go, it's probably this one.

> If there's a year to go, it's probably this one.

Why? My intuition is telling me that this is a 'buy the rumor, sell the news' situation (with this being the 'sell' part)

It would be like buying bitcoin for the first time at $60k.

This would be true if there wasn't a killer app.

But there are more killer apps per industry than there are fingers to count with, with more relevant use cases being discovered practically daily. Yesterday was better, but now is when you make every effort to figure out what you're doing to stay relevant before someone else can tell you that you're not.

For the sales team it’s an easy way to see multiple buyers at once, much easier to see them if they’re spread across a wide area.

For presenters to pad their CV. Source: that’s literally why I do it. Plus nothing like getting a LinkedIn-ready picture of yourself on stage in front of a ginormous screen with a headset looking all TED.

Edit: Or if you create a conference that will largely be attended by tech employees you can make bank with a few months of after-work grinding. (Also odd how the op slips in shibari reference in a tech paper.)

> Or if you create a conference that will largely be attended by tech employees you can make bank with a few months of after-work grinding

Most the people I know who organize conferences or are a part of organizing conferences don't make much "bank" to brag about and it's mostly about getting contacts, having fun and giving back to the community somewhat for them. But these people are all based in Europe, maybe elsewhere it looks differently.

I know some people who put on US conferences and holy shit they put in an incredible amount of work and do not make money at all

I consider 100k USD for a few months of work sending out emails just to coordinate a three day conference to be “bank”.

I doubt $100K is anything like a typical profit for putting on a small time conference, i.e. one that can be done with just some additional volunteer staff to help with registration etc. A conference like that is doing well to get a few hundred attendees and even a $100-200 registration fee is probably on the high side. OK. Maybe you can get some sponsorships but that's another task to do--and vendors get a lot of requests for sponsorships. Considering all the expenses, you're probably doing a good job if you breakeven--especially for a conference with no track record and an existing attendee mailing list.

In much of the world the path to making bank is dependent on getting contacts.

Sure, but if I grind leetcode to get a good job, then work 50 hours per week at it and by doing so make bank - describing my action as "people who grind leetcode can make bank" conceals more than it reveals.

yeah but as we increase what amount we mean by bank we will notice that having contacts becomes more and more an essential component.

Grinding leetcode has an upperbound as to how much 'bank' it contributes, and in some conversations people would laugh and say that small amount you are talking about does not constitute bank as they sip on their fancy little drinks on their private jets whilst going through their contacts list.

Yeah, but you usually don't count them as the same thing, but more like "more contacts > more work > more bank", but that's just doing normal client work for money.

Is it odd? The "tech paper" is a blog post on a personal website of someone at Mozilla.

What do you mean by after-work grinding?

> What do you mean by after-work grinding?

Just making some extra money after the day job.

Here's one strategy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfT2wdsiWfE

LOL made my day. Thanks.

Doing extra work on your own projects outside your main job

You can get a linkedin-ready picture of your self without having to give a presentation... just hop on stage before/after a talk , pose, and have someone take a picture. No one will be the wiser

Has anyone actually experienced this mythical "networking at the conference"? Like, how do you even do it? A talk ends and everyone have a short break before the next one starts. Presenter is immediately surrounded by 5-10 people half whom are his/her friends, half are asking about merch, and half are are the most extroverted people in the room who probably can bruteforce this networking stuff. Others are vaguely drifting around the room and trip over chairs, drinking water and talking to their friends who came together in a group. Who do you even talk to there? About what? It's like a dating site except with no bio details altogether, meaning there is no base point to start a conversation. And if you do randomly engage in a conversation with a complete stranger it's inevitably goes like this - ask each other about general profession, then more specific question about your industry, then name of your corporation, then awkward silence...

Being present at the conference is the base point of conversation.

But if you’re running out of “how to get to know someone” topics, that’s more generally stuff like.. well, my reply converts to nested conference talk outline here, and so:

  - invent a question
  - about something cool
    - cool to you is fine
    - as long as it’s relevant
      - the conference is relevant
      - so are tangents from it
      - sometimes the venue too
  - or about them
    - ask what’s cool to them
    - about the conference
    - or tangentially about it
    - or the venue architecture
  - ask for more details
    - or be quiet and sip coffee
    - quiet isn’t always an end
    - it’s restful
  - mirror how long your answers are
    - the spice must flow
    - don’t drown them in it
    - add 10% to be extroverted
    - subtract 50% to be introverted
  - you can be plainly trying here
    - you don’t need to disguise it
    - being obvious can be encouraging
    - being obvious isn’t bad
    - subtlety is not mandatory
  - tell them you appreciated the chat
    - unless you totally hated it
    - it costs nothing to be nice
    - say it plainly
      - it was nice to chat
      - i appreciate what you said
      - glad to meet you
      - have fun at the conference

> how do you even do it?

Some exhibit/booth areas are staffed by knowledgeable people who are happy to answer questions, chat and/or listen to ideas for using or improving their products.

> no base point to start a conversation

How about the topic of the talk?

If you ask a question during Q&A, others may be interested and approach you to follow up.

> like a dating site except with no bio

Conference speakers typically have public bios and photos, which helps with hallway recognition. Those who are open to talking can often be found in a small group, which can be joined via topical comment/question.

Booths/exhibits are a good option if a conference has them, but it's closer to an exhibition/expo than to a conference. They then act like a crystallization centers where people can gather in smaller groups and ask questions about the booth or tech being presented, about company, recruiting etc. It's like a small and short conference all to yourself or a very small group. That indeed works somewhat.

But usually such very big shows happen somewhere in the USA/UK/west Europe etc. And pricey. What I've seen in my country were usually a conferences structured like a series of talks with breaks. If conference is big then 2 or 3 treks in parallel in different room. In this case there is only one point of interest - the presenter, and maybe one or two previous or next presenters. It's not a problem to recognize presenter, a problem is talk to him/her longer than a single carefully prepared question and answer, because there are like 20 other people around all trying to talk to him/her.

> a problem is talk to him/her longer than a single carefully prepared question and answer, because there are like 20 other people around all trying to talk to him/her

If enough people want to talk to a presenter, the conversation usually moves outside the presentation room to allow more time. It is worth listening carefully to the questions of others in the queue, since you may meet someone with a question close to your interests.

Limited time is a challenge, but it's also good practice for developing a short pitch about a question or topic. If successful, the goal should be to exchange contact info with the presenter, for a longer discussion at the same conference.

My experience: Skip most of the talks (maybe only 1-2 per day). Spend time drinking coffee and bumping into random strangers. Then spend more time with people you found nice/interesting.

This is the way. Conference corridors are way more interesting than the talks themselves. Usually. If there are zero interesting talks, then it’s a bad conference, and likely the people there are less interesting.

Start by making eye contact and saying Hi. Then if they’re receptive ask some innocuous questions like “why did you come here” or “what did you think of this talk.”

I'll go with a "what brought you here".

I find this is the basic of networking hack. And this is what most people do. Say "hi" and ask their opinion or their story.

Or you can offer your opinion "I found that new technique very interesting". "I didn't understand why that's better than X".

Or if you're super focused on something specific go for that. You're looking for a job, a client, an employee, ask for that directly. "Hi, I really enjoyed the talk and I'm looking for a job in the area. Are you working on something similar?".

Deleted comment

Ask a specific question. "Excuse me, did you catch what the speaker was saying about async routines? I think I've done async before but I'm not sure." Now the person you're talking to can explain something, and you can segue the conversation into some related topic.

Yes absolutely, but the trick is that you don't go to all the talks. Every con I've ever gone to has had official and unofficial networking events and I've learned far, far more from talking to people there than I've learned going to talks that I'm only kinda interested in and will be published later

> Has anyone actually experienced this mythical "networking at the conference"?

Yes, but for me It Depends. I'm not great at starting up conversations with people I don't already know, and it makes me uncomfortable. So whether or not I'm at a conference specific to my (fairly niche) field or not makes a huge difference. If I am, I tend to socialize quite a bit as I know a bunch of people even if a bit tangentially. But when I'm at a more standard software conference I tend to keep to myself and utilize "the hallway track" a lot less.

Just got back from KubeCon Amsterdam, I did quite a bit of networking. Most of it happens at after hours events, I also went out to a bar with another group I met.

I've been to tech conferences as a junior level engineer and, most recently, as a speaker. I don't think I have walked away from a single conference or convention without a meaningfully impactful new connection, project, partnership, or experience — particularly in the "hallway track" outside of the talks.

It has been one of the most glowing examples of "the infinite game" for me, the thing you can't ever win but want to keep playing. Conferences allow us to physically manifest our desire for being part of a community of peers that willingly teach each other. The progressive optimism of the tech community allows for that to happen without being exclusively about trade shows or cash cows.

I frequently MC for a conference in my sector. For the last 3 years it's been remote for obvious reasons - then in Nov 22 I was asked to do it again as the conference returned to f2f mode.

The organiser and I are good friends and we've talked about his virtual offerings over the past few years. The f2f conference is way, way harder to put together, more expensive, more inconvenient for everyone concerned, expense and time for travel, etc. His profit margins are much reduced, too.

And yet - it was absolutely and obviously a better conference when he did it again in "the real world". Seeing old friends, being dedicated to actually turning up and listening to talks rather than being 80% distracted and only sort-of listening while juggling other work, going to the pub for a pint, meeting new people.

As ever - it's not (just) the talks that make for a great conference, it's the bits in-between the talks.

Long live (real world) conferences!

It turns out that people really, really like going places and drinking.

I find conferences help my imposter syndrome immensely. I remember being at a conference and thinking it was all so incredibly basic, then looking around and seeing people scribble notes and feeling a huge sense of relief.

For me what does it is going to talks I barely understand then asking questions to some colleague that attended with me and seeing they are struggling as much as I.

Now I feel bad, considering I'm one of those guys who takes a lot of notes during a talk.

A lot of us probably take notes to keep our attention from drifting. Also, most talks have at least a nugget or two about something I hadn't quite thought of that way before.

Personally I have to "prove" that I took something away from the conference to justify the expense to my company. I take a lot of notes, even if it's basic material, because it allows me to copy the flow of the presentation for when I inevitably have to show that I learned something back at work.

The paradox of expecting to take away something incredible and profound from a conference lies in the idea that the anticipation and pressure to have a profound experience can overshadow the actual experience itself. This could lead to an unsatisfactory outcome, becoming too focused on finding meaning rather than being present.

Maybe mention this as your take away from your next conference.

Eh, I'd rather just play the game and get to travel, socialize, eat, and learn cool new stuff for free.

I've had similar experiences. In some cases it was a talk that was way over my head and seeing people who I viewed as way above me also struggling. In some other cases it was like you describe, seeing talks that I viewed as elementary boggling the minds of many attendees. Granted other times I was befuddled and no one else was. So the real lesson is everyone has different strengths & weaknesses.

> I’ve said myself that “I get very little out of 95% of tech talks.” Just this morning I walked into a packed lecture hall, discovered that the presenter’s slides for this 100-person room featured 16 lines of code in 8-point font, and walked back out.

This makes me sad. When O'Reilly and SD West still held their conferences, you could easily leapfrog your knowledge of a newer language (such as go or -- way back in the day -- Java) to a much higher level. Cons in the latter half the 2000s were some of the first places where you could see someone demonstrate an entire AJAX code solution, which eventually morphed into the backbone of what became the Web 2.0 revolution ('revolution' at least from a career-growth standpiont, whatever one may think of the movement). I learned c++ from Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, and Scott Myers at these Cons. Pre-pandemic, I definitely got professional value from technical sessions at GDC.

I'm sure this is a coincidence, but it seems to me that once shops tipped toward glue-jobs of Dockerfiles with declarative serverless cloud templates, a lot more of the online and talk content emphasised "what to" (commodity) instead of "how to" (craftsmanship).

O'Reilly events (especially OSCON) were certainly one of the losses from the pandemic. Though one suspects the events were already on the bubble given how quickly and completely they were axed. Also, truth be told, I'm pretty sure that OSCON and O'Reilly generally were a less central presence in the tech world than they once were once Tim became less directly involved.

There's only one left but shout out to Strange Loop for talk quality. I've found it's less useful in terms of direct practical application to a normal person's work day, but they consistently have talks that give me a lot of food for thought.

Cynical voice:

Professional Development budgets can be hard to spend. Spluring everything on a conference gets you some half-decent benefits - something to put on your self-assessment for your review cycle; a couple of days out-of-the-office; some half-decent food, snacks, and corporate gifts; and finally the chance to travel to an interesting new city on your company's money.

> gets you some half-decent benefits - something to put on your self-assessment for your review cycle

How you put going to a conference on your self assessment?

> Personal improvements this year

> Went to a conference, learned a bunch of stuff on company time

> Business value added this year

> Went to a conference and got better!

Or what?

It depends.

Some employers require all employees to complete a certain amount of professional development every year. You want your patent lawyers to know about the latest developments in patent law, your HR people to know about the latest developments in employment law, and so on. In this case, merely having accomplished the professional development goals you set last year counts as goals being achieved.

Don't like that? Maybe your employer is starting a big project that's going to produce business benefits but relies on a new technology. For example, if you were previously an expert in virtual machines, and you've expanded your knowledge to Docker containers so you can help on an important new project - that's an achievement even if you were paid while you trained.

Perhaps you learned something at the conference you were able to put into effect directly, making your product better. That's an achievement - you're keeping the company at the cutting edge of technology!

Perhaps your employer is facing challenges with Foo, and the world's greatest expert on Foo was speaking at the conference, and you were able to quiz them about your challenges over coffee and get some great advice.

Perhaps after the conference you gave presentations to your peers at the company, passing on your new knowledge. That's helped the company by improving everyone's skills, not just yours - as well as demonstrating cross-team impact.

Perhaps at the conference you talked to some people who were interested in joining the company, and the chance to talk to an engineer in person along with the proof you're a cutting edge company following the very latest in technology has lead to more and higher quality job applicants.

Usually whoever gets to go to a conference has to do a summary session to the rest of the team, pointing out the key takeways and what should be further looked into as the upcoming internal roadmaps in technology adoption.

It is this session that can be pivoted into what one has done to help the team skill up during the current year.

Pretty much. From the non-cynical perspective it shows that you took some time to increase your knowledge and skills in the area of [conference topic] which is ultimately of advantage to the company. Especially so if you can tie it into the objective and key-results of your team/division/company.

Brb, gonna put all the conference talks I watched on YouTube, all the articles I read and all the projects I built down on my performance review self-assessment.

Usually "increasing your skills and knowledge" is not part of performance reviews. They are about your work performance (Duh). I.e. results, not learnings.

>Usually "increasing your skills and knowledge" is not part of performance reviews.

Professional development plans and activities are often a line item.

It's been on a lot of mine. Typically at the beginning of the year when we set goals, I may have a goal to "learn more about X." Then at mid year/end of year review, I can say I read these books, took this online course, or attended a conference on X.

It just checks off that you did what you said you planned to do.

Cynical from an employer's point of view, conference trips are good perks to offer. More expensive than regular vacation days, but also more likely to improve employees. Also, employees still have to answer emails.

It's interesting to differentiate between tech conferences and hacker conferences. When you compare tech conferences, as cited in the article and in this thread, to conferences like DefCon (at least in the AP days), HOPE, and CCC Congress, the differences are startling.

It seems that tech conferences are more about career, and focused on jobs. Hacker conferences, on the other hand, focus on ideas and Big Problems that exist in the world. As an example, look at the slides from a talk at CCC Congress, and compare them to a slide from a tech conference. Chances are the speaker is not using their legal name, and also most likely does not share their company, if they are working.

I've noticed in some niches, it's an opportunity for vendors to brainwash the attendees. Cybersecurity is one example. Vendors spend a lot of time pushing language around regulations, perceived risks, etc, that are "only solvable" with their expensive tools. And passing FUD about open source tools that solve the same problems as their paid tools.

Lots of little ways to push harder too, like giving out organizational or individual awards like "CISO of the year" to stroke egos. Or "free training" that's really pushing more sales.

Conferences aren't for education (primarily). You can get most of your education needs met more effectively online and in videos, blog posts, articles, especially if you have an urgent need.

Conferences are about community, networking, business development, increasing personal status (which explains the meltdowns mentioned in the article), and sometimes just simply getting away from work and being social while enjoying life.

This is why online events really are very much subpar experiences to real-world, in-person gatherings. Online events fill their roles as well, but they tend to be more of the education-oriented stuff that I guess the OP is looking for. In which case, online events are just another form of online content like any other. But they aren't conferences.

Also having just returned from PyCon, I have a slightly different take than Chelsea. Contrary to the "ugh... networking." take, ~30% of what I took away from PyCon was exactly the networking. Or at least that's much of what I consider the "hallway track". Hallway track also consists of reconnecting with old friends and tech/social things after the conference.

On the way back, my 13 yo son asked "How do you talk to people" and I said that there's not much you can do about it other than just do it. It IS a skill you can practice by doing. But you just need to acknowledge the anxiety, take a breath, and let it go and just say something. "Oh, I see you have for First Pycon ribbon, welcome to pycon. What do you do?" "Oh, you have a speaker ribbon, what is your talk on?"

Probably another 30% is excitement and feeling revitalized at what I've seen and who I've talked to.

Maybe 20% is cross-pollination with others in the industry, I had some really good "Open Space" talks this year. These are "Birds of a Feather" session, a group of people talking peer-to-peer about a subject. Still trying to decide if the advice from a Bloomberg SRE applies at all to my tiny company. :-)

So that leaves maybe 20% for the talks.

Plus, I got some pretty good dad-cred for introducing my son to the guy that was interviewed on a podcast we listened to on the way to the conf.

Now let's pour some out for the Whiskey BOF.

> I have a slightly different take than Chelsea. Contrary to the "ugh... networking." take, ~30% of what I took away from PyCon was exactly the networking. Or at least that's much of what I consider the "hallway track". Hallway track also consists of reconnecting with old friends and tech/social things after the conference.

Isn't this exactly Chelsea's take, too?

In the end, yes, but "ugh... networking" was also mentioned, IIRC, at least twice, maybe more.

1. Swag

2. Fancy swag (that is definitely not a bribe)

3. Being wined and dined by sales people (that is definitely not a bribe)

4. Networking

5. Learn niche aspects of a programming language or framework, and prepare yourself for the future features

6. Food platters (can be hit or miss); word of advice, watch out for the fat Developers with the goatees and ponytails, or the skinny developers who dive bomb the food queue, they will clean up the buffet of the good stuff before you get there. Also duck out the presentation 5 minutes before lunchtime so you beat the queues.

As someone who attended way too many events pre-pandemic, at some point I came to the conclusion that life is too short to eat bad conference venue food just because it's there. I mostly skip the long lines, soggy sandwiches, and most of the rest of the food on offer. It was harder when I was an analyst because they mostly fed us separately and pretty well.

In practice, it's often a bit hard to separate out single-vendor centric and broader tradeshows from more grounds-up community efforts. Certainly, there's a continuum from purely volunteer weekend jaunts to fairly non-commercial but nonetheless heavily corporate sponsored large-ish events. (I'll refrain from giving specific examples to avoid ratholing a discussion of specific events.)

I agree with most of the basic points. I find a lot of breakouts are more useful for letting me know about something that might be worth following up on than teaching me in depth. I zone out on a lot of demos pretty quickly; they have to be really compelling which is rare. One reason I'm generally a fan of shorter breakouts and keynotes.

The author also says that submittals are judged blindly (as in the name of the submitter isn't known). This isn't anything like universal practice though it may be more common with community events in the interests of supposed fairness. But IMO the reality is that the identity of the speaker should often factor in so long as the committee doesn't just pick "the usual suspects."

This has been a common problem as “tech” has increasingly grown into a field that’s departed from some of its roots, but the parallel for tech conferences isn’t in the engineering field, nor is it in a wildly random suggestion of fan conferences:

The comparison is the creative and artistic fields, which absolutely host events and all kinds of opportunities for practicing creatives to meet other practicing creatives and discuss their work.

That’s because programming isn’t an engineering exercise. It’s art. Which isn’t to say engineering practices don’t improve the practice of our art. Just ask a large sculpture artist how much engineering they have to do to put different types of metal in the air.

The fact that programming pays so well has led many to believe the nature of our field is fundamentally different than what it is. We are lucky enough to be passionate about one of the few artistic and creative fields that is extremely lucrative.

We should never lose sight of how fortunate we are.

For me, it's dedicated time focused on the subject area without operational distractions, a little more sticking your head out of your company and meeting other people with similar interests but much different contexts, and a chance to ask a question of experts in person who would otherwise never talk to you. You don't get these from attending an online conference in my experience.

Those things can shift strategy or tactics in ways that are a force multiplier so I consider it worth my or my teams time.

It's also tempting with an online conference to think "I've got this other stuff I should get done today but I can always watch the video later." If you're like me, later rarely comes.

For commercial entities, no other reason except for marketing.

Many years ago you would attend and get some good knowledge, not now nor has that been true for say the past 20+ years. I would say 99+% of the "classes" are about how this Product will make your life better and you get Mom and Apple Pie too.

About 15 years ago, I told my manager that I will no longer go to these and maybe you should send the new young hires to them. Why, most of them will feel good for being picked and are a bit too young to know how much of a waste most of these conferences are :) Plus the young people will get to see competitors of the products we bought, getting a better idea on how to do things.

The only other people that these would be good for are marketing people.

To get out of the house. When I started in tech, I went to conferences in pretty much every job. It was a lot of fun - and these were boring "legacy" businesses.

I remember I went to an Adobe conference in Chicago years and years ago, and they were giving away free iPad v1's to all participants. We were just in awe of these, and Adobe pretty much sabotaged the whole conference because no one was listening to the speakers, we were all just heads down playing with these new tablet thingies (not all of us even had smartphones at the time).

Sometimes I would take two days off and book my return trip for later. You are already there and your flight is covered - just pay extra for the stay and do touristy things.

Also - you can learn things.

working at a training & consultancy company (i was a trainer, and used to standing up in front of a lot of people):

sales: we need you to give a talk at yaddayadda conference.

me: aw, noah!

you had to create a load of foils (this was pre powerpoint) for whatever bullshit idea the conference organisers had. then go to the conference (i hate traveling) and then be accosted by friendly people who i had taught and could not at all remember (worst memory in the world for faces). and then find that the office staff had not separated the foils from their backing paper (it was glued on to the top edge) - ripping this off while doing a presentation makes you look like a complete prat. and then...

but you get my drift.

as for actually attending conferences, i have mercifully blanked most from my mind. i do remember one on MS COM (which is an OK tech, but it was OLE back then, which confused everybody) presented by MS programmers. after about half an hour of uninspired, maundering nonsense i turned to the guy i was there with and said:

"fuck this, i'm going to a pub"

and did.

Conferences are places where people with overlapping interests meet for fun and profit. I know a married couple who met at a Drupal conference, and one of my closest friends now is a dev I met at a PHP meetup in 2006. I’ve been hired by a company I met at a conference, and used a tool I saw advertised there. Oh, and I also got excited about Symfony when I saw someone give a talk on it in 2011.

Guildhalls and mason lodges have been meeting for 100s of years for essentially the same reasons.

Ask not what the conference can do for you, but what you can do for the conference.

I used to go to SXSW interactive most years, and one of the things that baffled me was why the conference had so many low quality panels - literally hundreds of sessions with 5 speakers and evidently very little preparation.

Then a friend pointed out that the primary purpose of a panel was to get companies to pay to send those five people to Austin, TX so you could hang out with them and have conversations.

That really clicked for me: the goal was to get a large number of (hopefully) interesting people in one place. It wasn't really about the content at all.

There are exceptions but panels are often pretty bad. As you say, often not well-prepped. And if it's sponsors, everyone has their talking points and everyone is probably going to be nice and polite to each other. Panels can be good but it's not the norm.

>Now, I’m not on the RailsConf committee this year, but I have been on it in the past. I was on it the year that we decided not to make David Hanemeier-Hansson[1], original committer to Rails, the keynote speaker for the first time in sixteen years. That guy melted down in this giant blog post that echoed throughout the halls of the online tech bro cafeteria for weeks.

David Heinemeier-Hansson wasn't the "original committer to Rails". He built the first version of Rails entirely on his own. As he's known to be quite opinionated and harsh in his tone, I read the "melt down" that was mentioned here and I really don't think it reads in that tone at all[2]. While I did find the article here quite interesting and do share some of the sentiment regarding tech conferences, I find this paragraph quite disingenuous.

[1] Misspelling by author

[2] https://world.hey.com/dhh/no-railsconf-faa7935e

I agree it’s a weird way to minimize his role, a sort of rewriting of history, for the same political reasons he was not invited to speak (also for false reasons).

It is a shame that many people who claim to support diversity and tolerance actually have no interest in it.

I read the whole thing and I have no idea whats going on. The post starts reminiscing the work of the year. Common end of the year post. Then an email is presented in which the conf people just say they are looking for other options. The only reason given is that they were "offline" a lot. (btw, what does that mean? Isn't git history being online?) And then the author starts giving a "I hate woke culture" speech. This reads like a GPT output with ctx=potato. I am definitely missing something.

Was this incident the catalist for Rails World[0]?

https://rubyonrails.org/2023/4/6/rails-world-is-coming

I wouldn't call it a meltdown. The committee was doubtless in a tough spot and DHH is almost certainly not wrong that the decision was political and the email was disingenuous. But there would also have almost certainly been a lot of noise had they gone the other way.

The author seems to compare tech conferences to fancons like Worldcon, ComicCon, etc., but surely the better comparison (and presumably their actual inspiration) is scientific conferences. Yes, the official reason for a scientific conference is the talks, but just like a tech conference the main draw is in the hallways, talking to colleagues. Which is why the "virtual conferences" during the pandemic years didn't really work.

Annual sync points for the community, networking and sharing interesting things that they’ve learned/worked on?

At least that’s what I’m hoping for since I took over conference planning for the first time for the Carolina Code Conference in August.

Call for Speakers is open til May 25 btw.

https://blog.carolina.codes/p/call-for-speakers-is-now-open-...

Case study, https://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/ (which is currently ongoing!) says:

The European Lisp Symposium is a premier forum for the discussion and dissemination of all aspects of design, implementation and application of any of the Lisp dialects, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Clojure, Racket, ACL2, AutoLisp, ISLISP, Dylan, SKILL, Hy, Shen, Carp, Janet, uLisp, Picolisp, Gamelisp, TXR, and so on. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate.

The European Lisp Symposium invites high quality papers about novel research results, insights and lessons learned from practical applications and educational perspectives. We also encourage submissions about known ideas as long as they are presented in a new setting and/or in a highly elegant way.

As someone who's been involved with the program and technicalities of some ELS editions: it's also certainly an occasion for Lisp programmers and enthusiasts and companies to see each other in person and network a little bit in addition to talking about their research and work.

They’re “work holidays”.

Right. I can count on less than the fingers of one hand the number of useful conferences I've been to (and by useful, I mean there was one little thing in the entire conference which was not a total waste of time).

This is the kind of honesty that ruins things for everybody.

As long as it's spoken in an acceptable manner and/or venue, this kind of honesty is fine. Everybody already knows what's up. Management isn't as easily fooled as people want to think, there's simply an expected level of decorum and keeping up appearances.

Haha, that explains why my comment below got downvoted to zero!

What I never understood is: why tech conferences focus on everything but the skills we should care about? Every time I take a look on the talks section of a given conference seems like gathering the "quickstart" section of N technologies and just fill some hours of the day talking about it.

The breakout rooms and tutorial sections are for ICs and other interested parties. The big talk rooms are for the check writers, managers, and decision makers. I've been the conferences that will have business tracks and technical tracks. And the technical rooms were the reason I even bother to go.

Come to my tiny tech conference in Southern California!

It's a celebration of outlandish ideas in software :)

https://outland.sh

"So I think what happened is computing has turned into pop culture" -Alan Kay

I love conferences, but I also loved other types of clearly pop-cultural conferences, and that's what they are.

I used to make a living producing livestreams for these kinds of conferences and they're all about passionate geeks coming together to build connections over the current latest trends.

They are about bonding over either rejecting the values of "the establishment" in your area of interest, or of simply examining how "new pop idea X" fits into the set of values your community is currently built around.

So they are about community building around a set of values, often trying to set themselves apart from the mainstream. Nothing wrong with that.

"We software engineers take the existence of nonacademic, noncorporate conferences for granted."

We do? I am only vaguely aware that such things exist. I've been to a few trade shows over the years, but only when my employer pays for them. I had hoped this article might answer the question posed in its title, but after getting halfway through, it still seems to be taking the answer as much for granted as the conferences, so I think I'll move on.

If you attend a conference out of state, how do you (or your employer) deal with the state tax consequences? There are some states with no threshold on the number of days you can work in the state without filing. If you work just one day in Colorado, New Jersey, Vermont, etc… you probably have to pay income tax for that one day of work in the state.

Out of curiosity, is there any case to be made for attending a tech conference when you are paying out of pocket?

Attending as a freelancer/consultant--especially if speaking--or just for fun in a location you'd do a bunch of tourist stuff in anyway. Maybe, if you can get a free ticket (typically as a speaker). Or if it's low cost (i.e. no more than a few hundred $). But I wouldn't pay for a $1K+ ticket out of my own pocket.

I've done it here and there for cheaper conferences. I refer to them as my nerd vacations. But they're also far more targeted and more likely to have high quality talks, not the larger "trade show" type conferences.

Yep. I paid out of pocket to attend Handmade Seattle last fall and it was easily the best money I've spent - in spite of Handmade's emphases on systems and graphics programming both being pretty far outside my wheelhouse.

If you're a freelance networking to get customers, maybe.

Yes. The best conferences are the ones where most people are paying out of pocket.

At community conferences, I think there are three major constituencies.

* Attendees. I think the author did a good job of explaining what they get out of conferences. Travel! Diffuse connections that may or may not turn into more later, but are missed when not available. Plus some incidental learning.

* Sponsors. These folks put up some money to have a seat at the table. As a sponsor, you can support the community and get a good reputation, recruit (as author mentions), or have sales conversations. That's about it.

* Speakers. These provide content for the attendees. Either paid (devrel) or on their own initiative. Speakers want to share their ideas, increase their brand, and connect with others (speakers and attendees).

It's tough to put on a community conferences without all three of these actors being present.

25 years ago, we'd go to programming language and hacking conventions mostly to socialize, meet our peers. See the people you only talked to online, meet some new folks. If you were brand new, you were interested in the talks, but if you got to chat up some people about your favorite subject, that was probably your favorite part of the con. We're not there for business, we're there to be nerdy with fellow nerds.

So, what are some software engineering conferences with a good "hallway track"? What are you excited for this year?

Vegas baby

The point is the coffee breaks and networking. Not the talk themselves.

Conspicuous consumption. To see and be seen as one of the group.

To travel at company expenses duh.

> Cons become worth it from the conversations that happen between folks who otherwise might not have met, that endure beyond the event itself. [..] Occasionally, people refer each other for jobs or kick off meaningful collaborations

And that's the real answer I would give to this question, too. The conf is a reason to go but the function of tech confs is to be a catalyst for meeting people.

In my experience those who get the least out of conferences are the groups of two to ten colleagues that just go to a few talks and otherwise hang around always in their own group, possibly even in a language different from the event's.

Instead I recommend the same advice I found helpful when I went to my first tech event: try to talk to at least one new person during each break, leave room for at least one extra person when standing in a group, always talk English (or whatever the event's main language is) even when the other person speaks your native language (if you're a non-native speaker) and if the sessions are recorded, prioritize talking with people over attending the talks.

And of course, cheesy as it may feel, bring business cards and exchange them liberally, even if it's just an easy way to look up the other person's name without having to stare at their chest to read the badge. If they didn't bring any, this also gives you an excuse to stare at their badge to "make sure you get the spelling right" as you write their name and contact details (GitHub, Twitter, e-mail, website, whatever) down. And yes, introducing yourself will feel increasingly rehearsed over time but that's because you're literally practicing it. It's a good skill to build either way.

The most fruitful conference I ever attended had amazing talks but I didn't attend more than a handful of them because I spent the entire time talking to other attendees, speakers and vendors. It's a bad time to ask your tech support questions (except as an opener if they're the kind of person that enjoys that and the problem is sufficiently interesting) but it's a great way to meet people, even if the benefits may not be immediately obvious until you run into each other again (e.g. I met one guy from Facebook early into his career and after running into each other for several years in a row he heavily tried to recruit me because he had changed into management by that point -- which I declined on ethical grounds, but still). It's an easy "in" even with bigger companies, especially if you wouldn't normally have access to those people.

Oh, and of course it's also an easy way to talk to other people in your field and find out both about the cool things other people are doing and also about how everyone else seems to run into similar problems as you and you're not actually that incompetent after all, because the boring problems are legitimately difficult to solve.

In summary, this is why "remote conferences" do nothing for me and largely seem to just be a way to charge people for video access that used to be free pre-pandemic.

Networking

Field trips for adults

  The first CES was held in June 1967 in New York City. It was a spinoff from the Chicago Music Show, which, until then, had served as the main event for exhibiting consumer electronics.

A trade show is where you hawk your wares. A tech conference has sponsors, these are companies that want to sell you things. From their perspective, KubeCon for example, is where they try and convince you that their monitoring and alerting software is the best one. So that's what it is for.

Have a free t-shirt why dontcha, you look like a person of good taste who also needs something to wear. Don't even have to pay you like the guy in the chicken suit spinning a sign outside the venue.

From your perspective, if your employer is sending you on a fact finding mission, it is a free vacation away from the office and the ol' ball and chain. So that is what it is for also.

If you go to a tech conference with expensive tickets and pay out of pocket and aren't buying or selling anything contemplate what you are doing with your life. This article opens like so:

  New Orleanians are just as likely as not to offer you a drink within sixty seconds of greeting you. Eighteen hours after leaving there, I walked into the Salt Palace Convention Center and made a joke about still needing my caffeine to almost-certainly-a-mormon.

That's why the guys with the beer bellies wearing Hawaiian shirts at these shindigs are often well-to-do fountains of knowledge who just want to have fun. They have been around long enough.

>If you go to a tech conference with expensive tickets and pay out of pocket and aren't buying or selling anything contemplate what you are doing with your life.

If you can get a free pass as a speaker or otherwise and the conference is somewhere you'd like to spend some time anyway, it can make sense to spend a day or two at an event if it's something you're really interested in. But I agree in general that I'm not going to spend $1K+ out of my own pocket to attend a big commercial conference for fun.

> That's why the guys with the beer bellies wearing Hawaiian shirts at these shindigs are often well-to-do fountains of knowledge who just want to have fun. They have been around long enough.

Hey that's me (aside from the fountains of knowledge part... and the well-to-do part...).

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