What is your company's policy on engineers attending conferences?

I'm guessing this varies by sector. I've been involved with trying to recruit people from the videogame industry to academic and academic/industry crossover conferences, and companies tend not to be happy at all with their engineers attending. Afaict none in this sector have any sort of explicit policy; it's more a matter of trying to convince your boss that this somehow benefits the company and isn't going to leak secrets all over. I've heard much more positive stories from other areas of computing, though.

(Shameless plug: if you're a game dev doing anything with a researchy or applied-researchy angle, esp. if located in Europe, consider submitting a demo or paper or panel, and coming to Crete next May: http://www.fdg2013.org)

At Knewton, we'll cover expenses for anything that might be useful for getting your work done. In my case, that means attending SciPy 2012 last week and learning about tools (scikit-learn, Cython, Numpy/Scipy) that will help me prototype and explore various models, as well as speed up our production Python code.

That's just one example, of course. Our head of infrastructure (@dzwieback) attends various systems engineering and DevOps conferences, and other members of the adaptive learning team attend data conferences (Strata, for example).

I'm working with my boss right now on attending a conference, or at least some sort of training. He wants me to do something RDBMS related, whereas I've been pushing for something a little fresher. As best as I know, we don't have a policy, but regardless, I'm being heavily encouraged to find a conference and go.

Our policy is: if the conference is beneficial for either building skills or gaining clients, go.

You're obviously not going to attract A-players by setting arbitrary limits on your developers and not trusting them to make good decisions.

It was always base on if we felt there was something that would either help the company, help the engineer themselves, or of value in some other way. No set limits but usually no more than a couple conferences per year either way.