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> say, sponsoring your employees' visits to conferences shows that you treat them well, care about their personal learning and growth, and inturn motivates them to look for synergies between their interests and work

As much as I’ve enjoyed employer-sponsored conferences in the past, I have to be honest that it seems like very few people are there to learn and come up with ways to help their employers.

It feels like an open secret that people go to conferences primarily for networking and finding other job opportunities to trade up to.

It’s actually a common recruiting strategy to go to conferences and find people looking to find new jobs.

At one job I had in Sweden, conference trips abroad were a way to give engineers a reward that wasn't taxed at 60-80%.

I enjoyed my trips, but I learned very little.

What kinds of rewards were these that are not taxed?

Business travel is not taxable for the employee.

Okay, but how is that a reward? Maybe I wrongfully assumed we were talking about a money / material reward here.

If you consider going to a conference abroad like a mini-holiday with everything paid, and maybe even some fun activity, well, it can be seen as a reward.

I got to spend a week in a nice hotel in an exciting foreign location with (by Swedish standards) fantastic weather for free.

Personally I also enjoyed some of the C++ talks, but I had no obligation to attend them.

Many big tech companies treat business trips as rewards. Fly business, live in a nice-ish hotel, get meals and taxi comped. It's a little vacation.

One of my early managers (based in Asia) saw his annual two-week business trip to the Bay Area as one of the most valuable perks of the job. He even brought his family along a few times (he paid for their travel obviously, but they probably shared his hotel rooms).

Pretty much the only reason companies sponsor developer conferences is for the right to get a table on the floor, so they can recruit attendees.

These conferences are nothing but a waste of time. There is hardly any value to it. Instead go to USENIX, NDSS, all-systems-go, linux plumbers event, fosdem, and a bunch of other community driven confs

But then you're just nitpicking on which conference to go to. Places I've worked had a broad education budget that let the employee choose which conference they'd prefer to attend.

I agree that conferences like re:Invent are a waste of time and money on the HN crowd, who are anyway self-motivated continuous learner types.

But the vast majority of large company payrolls are stacked with 9-5 types who clock in, clock out, go home to spend time on anything not related to their job. These types don't read HN, don't watch engineering YouTube, don't read r/programming, don't read Slashdot, etc. If a company wants these people to skill-up, they need to do it on company time, and they need to bring someone from the outside to bring in outside knowledge.

Conferences are basically just an easy way for companies to outsource this, and companies will prefer to pay for conferences like re:Invent which will showcase vendors who got stuff like SOC2 to ensure they will pass Compliance, Legal, and Procurement, and not for conferences like FOSDEM which will help people build stuff that Only One Person Understands And Therefore We Can't Maintain It.

> These types don't read HN, don't watch engineering YouTube, don't read r/programming, don't read Slashdot, etc.

on the other hand, some read to distraction...

> 9-5 types who clock in, clock out, go home to spend time on anything not related to their job. These types don't read HN, don't watch engineering YouTube, don't read r/programming, don't read Slashdot,

I think you mix two types of employees. There is nothing wrong with being a 9-5 guy. Doesn’t mean they don’t inform themselves on HN etc.

Your example sounds more like the type who just does what they’re told and nothing more. I don't know if this type would benefit from a conference or if a learning course wouldn't be more suitable.

>I agree that conferences like re:Invent are a waste of time and money on the HN crowd, who are anyway self-motivated continuous learner types.

I assure you, HN has plenty of us stupid, lazy and incompetent people.

Having a healthy work life balance doesn't preclude self study. As a matter of fact, instead of losing a few family days for the privilege to clink with some tech bros, I rather prefer watching the recordings on fast forward past the useless banter and lame jokes until I get to the meat of the presentation - if any.

Totally agree about conferences.

I worked on a great iOS team at a FAANG where during WWDC we had scheduled time to watch as many talks as we wanted and then an EOW meeting to deep-dive into what we'd learned. It was our lead's idea and management was in full support, when I joined the team they'd been doing it for years. Shipping code was optional that week, the stated goal was just to absorb as much as possible.

The privilege was being able to use our good, fresh, caffeinated engineering time on real learning. When I was in college I could do 8h of homework and then watch lectures at 9pm, at this point, not so much :)

I would also add that people shouldn't overlook regional or local conferences. The big ones are a lot of fun and have a lot of benefits, but local or regional ones can often be way cheaper and also still have some great content and networking.

Conferences are often great places to receive better offers at other firms too. =3

My boss and I once justified a visit to one of the Autodesk conferences (which was, in my opinion, quite lavish and expensive) by my getting time with some of their API developers. It was maybe 15 minutes, but it was worth every second.

Can you say more about why this time was valuable?

I would say it depends on the content of the conference. I'm a EE but work on process controls systems.

If it's a specialized industry specific users group where people in the same type of role swap operating experience, that's worth it. I.e. a heavily regulated industry where the safety of the public is involved like nuclear power, air planes, oil, etc.

The other type of conference is if your plant is specifically on a certain vendor for your core process. So automation firms for industrial controls conferences fit this bill If you're a Honeywell shop, go-to Honeywell users group, Allen Bradley go to process solutions users group, or anything with aveva going to aveva world.

If the production of your plant is dependent on the lifecycle of a vendor for parts, support and licenses, this type of conference is a must.

For both of these types there is a smart option to save a ton, volunteer to present. Most of the time if you present something worthwhile at a conference they waive the fee.

> Conferences are expensive.

> AWS reinvent for example requires you to spend 2000 dollars on

That's an extreme example. There's thousands of other, more local, less expensive, less extravagant conferences. It's more for show than useful for the attendants, especially with the YouTube recordings. Anyone who can gain thousands or millions from new ideas in AWS also has TAMs ready to relay the interesting parts of reinvent during regular meetings.

I have to agree. And I’m all for “give everything to the engineers”, but I cannot rationally justify tech conferences. The only thing is that it creates cohesion among your team (if all of them go together to the same conference), but one could just as well organise a meet-up in the main office for a couple of days.

I think conferences are good for a few reasons, but agree they are expensive.

Things conferences are useful for:

- exposing you to new ideas

- letting you interact with others in your community

- carving out time to learn

The last one is really important. Sure, I can watch re:invent videos on YouTube, but will I? Having focused time that isn't interrupted by normal work (or, minimally) is a great luxury that conferences afford.

" travel to Las Vegas"

Yep, that's a paid vacation for SF engineers.

re:Invent sessions aside from chalk talks are useless. It's definitely a fun experience though.