Of Booze and Brogrammers
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It's a seemingly legitimate way for companies to give their employees a perk. Sure, some people are actually there to learn things for work purposes, but the vast majority are simply happy to have a few days off work to relax (and maybe learn a bit) on the company dime. It's America's (crappy) solution to our relatively low number of vacation days.
It shouldn't be any surprise that people drink and party a lot at conferences. People tend to do those things while on vacation.
I don't see them often enough and while I certainly love my co-workers, I try to pack as much face time in whenever I'm on their side of the country as I'm able.
If I'm there for a conference, it's because I want to learn, or be enriched by whatever the conference is offering -- but I can bet that for certain I'll be hanging out late with the peeps I don't get to see enough as well.
This would suggest that you'd find less conference participation in places with more generous vacation policies, like Western Europe or Australia. Anecdotally I haven't seen any evidence that that is true, although it might be.
On a related note: alcohol laws may also make a big difference. Europeans have pretty much grown out of the "awesome, I can drink legally now" phase by the time they hit 25, Americans in that age group tend to have a slightly immature alcohol culture.
I think there is a much more mature view of alcohol consumption. On the other hand, many Europeans seem to have a much more hard-line view on drugs (even marijuana).
But when you consider the history of the US, it is not surprising. We are still less than 100 years away from Prohibition.
At some events (especially smaller ones), "parties" can seem to be at the expense of things like BoFs (as he mentions), lightning talks, hackathons, etc, and when you have so much talent all in one place, it seems a shame to waste opportunities for it to come together productively.
Some of my best conference moments have been sitting around with 10-20 people in hotel lobbies talking or in empty conference rooms coding. The worst have been crammed into a bar and having to shout at strangers. As the author suggests, let the partiers party, but give some space to the squares too ;-)
Give me quality liquor, music a bulk of the people actually like, played low enough that no one has to yell. Then fill the room with passionate thinkers. Heaven.
Better than playing music from the early to mid 90s... ;)
(Don't tell me it's an American thing. I know it isn't as simple as that.)
"Drinking Alcohol May Significantly Enhance Problem Solving Skills" http://medicaldaily.com/news/20120411/9496/alcohol-solving-s...
I guess for me, alcohol promotes the open mode, but pretty completely wrecks the closed mode.
[1] https://twitter.com/#!/Renessa47/status/190802692245950464
-john furrier palo alto
And so, I concur: All my happiest conference memories are about hotel lobbies. If you want to run a good conference, give those of us who enjoy conversation the option of dropping by a 24-by-7 lobby. (Drupalcon actually tends to do this; they call it the "hacker lounge". Just another thing to like about the Drupal folks.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
Excluding academic conferences, I don't think programmers drink and more or less than other professionals at conferences.
Also it has not been established that changing things would be an improvement.
Use an ambisonic rig and have tunable quiet spots for all the half-deaf rocket scientists.
Could even be completely ambitious and plan to have it internationalised from the start with video conferencing devices of various scales and other assorted comms stuff connecting different venues around the world, then it's a lot easier to raise money globally.
I'm too busy to actually organise anything, but should you (or anyone else) do anything with this, I'd love to hear about it, so feel free to email me (email in my profile).
[edit] The team representing the traders were in an early lead, but they all got disqualified after testing positive for cocaine. The doctors and authors should have been disqualified as well, but the doctors all said they had a sore leg and none of the substances in the authors' blood showed up on any known test. As far as anybody can tell, the journalists were just drunk, but no-one really knows what happened to them in the end, although there are some unconfirmed reports of one being eaten by a leopard.
As an academic, I'm curious in which direction you're implying academic conferences deviate. :)
It may be a side effect of the increased popularity of the dev/OSS/startup industry as a whole over the last few years, but I've certainly seen (purely anecdotal, I know) a decrease in productivity and an increase in hangovers & 'remember when bob fell in the fountain' stories the next day...
[1] european. not US.
The best time I've ever had at a conference was at TechEd New Orleans. It was fantastic just to buddy around with the same people making the programming languages and tools that I love. I made a ton of connections and some conversations even turned into opportunities down the road.
I'm an introvert by nature, but exhausting as it is, it really pays to put yourself out there.
Another example was at PDC. They had a big party with arcade games and VR simulators. Sure, there was beer, but tons of folks were throwing down on some Street Fighter as well. If you don't like partying, and you don't like video games are there any social activities that you enjoy at all?
There's opportunity here to start another movement at conferences like how the unconf stuff popped up at the larger ones. Why not start a 'ModerateConf' unafterparty at these things? Have hacking spaces, name tags, light music and a small bar. All the 'brogrammers' (how I hate that term!) will go to the other places and do their shots of absinthe.
If you don't like 'parties' that's fine, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with them.
Nope, we're trying to show people that being geek, doesn't mean being socially awkward.
So you're classifying yourself as a Brogrammer, or you're saying that people going to parties aren't Brogrammers--they're just socially aware geeks?
Geeks are awkward b/c by definition we are obsessive, and our passions tend towards topics that non-geeks don't understand.
It can be tough for some people, but once you're aware that you can't speek geek to a non-geek, the social awkwardness goes away (or at least fades a little).
So, all programmers are geeks?
If you find yourself in a peer group who still stigmatizes being a geek, just wait until you're a few years older and money becomes the primary status symbol.
"Brogrammers" often try very hard to distance themselves from "geeks" by adopting non-geek hobbies, but still tend to approach them with geek-like obsession. Someone who obsesses over cars, or sports, or beer is still a geek--just a different kind of geek.
I'm sure you've met plenty of fantasy football geeks, car geeks, and beer geeks who would emphatically reject the geek label.
PyCon has some great ones although they were a little disappointing this year. A combination of the hotel layout and placement of the openspace proposal (sign up) board was not great.
PyCon 2012 was my first geek conference and left me a little disappointed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge_drinking#Cause
"I forget my problems (41%)"
41% only tracks the number of people who admit this to themselves. If there is a systematic problem of alcohol abuse and uncontrolled excess, we have to ask what is so horrible in the life of a programmer that so many of them would prefer to forget themselves entirely?
Of course I don't really know if there is a legitimate binge drinking problem, or if people are just loud and drunk. I'm not usually at these conferences.
"Don't have parties at your confs! You're not being serious enough!"
I sometimes skip the parties at confs, but I sometimes go, and I've been to a few which were great. I think attempting to come up with some kind of Canonical Seriousness Level for all developer gatherings is doomed anyway. This is a matter of personal taste.
All you can do as a conf organizer is decide what kind of conf you want to run, and make sure people know before they buy their tickets. Or, if you're running a very large conf, set up loud options and quiet options.
There's also a flaw in his argument here, one which I hope is not significant:
"It's easier for overworked conference organizers to arrange a party than other evening activities which actually require planning."
On its own, this sentence is so dementedly off-target that it initially made me wonder what other wildly inaccurate assumptions he might be making. However, later in the blog post, it turns out that he might mean it's easier because all you do is hand it off to some company who wants to organize the party for you.
Of course, not doing anything is easier than doing something. Can't argue with that. However, if he really thinks parties require no planning, he either has no experience throwing parties, or the parties he throws are not good.
I've planned quite a few parties. In fact, I used to plan them professionally for the San Francisco Opera, and that's about as high-maintenance as a party gets. I've also helped organize a dozen open source conferences.
My point is not that planning parties is easy, but rather that planning a boring party (i.e. hotel ballroom or bar, bad DJ and some free booze) is easier than planning alternative activities. Scheduling BOFs, game nights, or the kind of party at LinuxCon are all significantly more work than that.
And, in my experience, the majority of parties at confs are, in fact, bad parties which require little planning.