Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?
brentozar.com
brentozar.com
At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore. So while keeping an existing meetup running pre-COVID was not exactly easy, it was doable and familiar.
But now, 5 years after COVID, all the longstanding meetups are long enough gone that people nearly have to start from scratch. It's starting to happen, but is a huge uphill battle. For the most part, I suspect it will be a new generation of organizers, but they'll be learning all the same lessons again, in a much less interesting and more hostile tech environment.
This is what turned me off of the local meetups: They had become a means to an end for career advancement. Both for the organizers and presenters.
The meetups I enjoyed the most in the past were full of people who enjoyed the subject matter. In the 2010s it turned into a career building and networking exercise.
Every time a new technology started to become popular it became a war of the meetups: Organizers would try to start a Next.js meetup when it became popular instead of discussing it at the JavaScript meetup. One started a Rust meetup, then jumped to trying to run a Zig meetup when that started rising in popularity.
Going to a meetup was a gamble. It was hard to know if you were going to get a good presentation with discussion, or a half-baked set of slides from someone who heard on LinkedIn that presenting at meetups is good for your resume.
* Noob goes to event to learn and network.
* Journeyman goes for networking and hopefully learn a bit but mostly doesn't get much out of it.
* Expert learns nothing. Goes to network / advertise.
* Meetup is sponsored by local recruiting firm.
* Work on the project you'd've done alone on your couch
* Chat while you do it instead of alone on your couch
* When you get stuck, group encourages and guides in real time.
* Meetup is sponsored by the yarn and craft supply biz yer meeting in.
* Come discuss problems you are having with your code
* Join in a Hackathon to see if the group can make progress on a predefined issue or project.
* Learn a new language, everyone pulls a language from a bucket and sees if they can make Game of Life. Limitations require that at least one person there that knows the language enough to help with getting someone going
But it does make driving in for evening events less attractive. I used to do it more but, for the most part, really cut back on driving in after work for social events, etc.
As someone who's been to many meetups and conferences but who's generally unable to partake in "the hallway track" because of a potent cocktail of social anxiety, impostor syndrome and whatever else is going on inside my head, this makes me quite wistful. I feel like I've missed out on so much of what these events had to offer and, as the post posits, that's largely/probably a world that I won't even have the chance to go back to and try again. That all combined with the rapid rise of "AI", "agents", etc. -- none of which interest me at all -- puts me squarely in the _just coast until retirement_ camp but ... I'm not in a position to do that. I'm actually quite concerned about what the future holds and I feel like a lot of the folks in tech who've comfortably kept their heads down are going to be in for a rough transition period over the next few years.
Why is learning stuff in a dingy hotel conference center better than an online community? Face to face time? But tools like Discord can replace that and they cost a whole lot less than plane tickets and hotel rooms.
In a discord or other similar technology you can exchange text, video, audio, screen sharing, whiteboarding, collaborative editing, etc, in virtual environment with varying group sizes.
Is there something from a tangible and practical level that in person is getting you above and beyond that experience in terms of tangible skill or career growth?
I mean, here we are in a world where more newly married couples meet online than offline [1], 20 years after people started getting married on World of Warcraft and we're still acting like socialization online is impossible.
In terms of a learning environment, I can think of many reasons why an in-person conference is potentially less than ideal. Sitting jet-lagged in an uncomfortable conference center chairs juggling a laptop with its single 13" screen and dying battery connecting to janky public WiFi on your lap, sitting far away from a projector, with half of the interested people you're hoping to meet not able to attend at all because of cost or distance.
As someone to whom this also doesn't come naturally, I came to realize that this is simply how things are. Real life itself happens in the "hallway track", this is not specific to just meetups and conferences. Business, love, friendship, war, peace, everything. In school, at jobs, in hobbies, etc. It's probably biological. Expecting the world to change and revolve instead around one's anxieties is futile.
In my day, I’d be called a little bitch and to put up with it.
But I know this is a big controversy in our time.
So I think people are really eager for high quality talks and chances to gather with smart people.
What's more I think there are not enough meetups in almost any major city to satisfy the demand of speakers or attendees. For example, NYC Systems gets hundreds of people asking to speak (we have 12 speakers a year) and gets 2-3x as many attendees wanting to come as we have space for.
The biggest is cost. Travel, especially lodging, is very expensive right now in major cities, especially in the US. People just can’t afford hundreds per night. If an event has a larger population density within reach of walking, driving, and public transportation then more people turn up.
Another is industry presence. Big companies have found that showing up at conferences and conventions isn’t really worth it. In the video game industry E3 died and nothing replaced it. Companies just post their own direct videos to make announcements. Apple even stopped gathering everyone in an auditorium and just does videos now as well. When the industry presence at an event, like maybe CES, diminishes, then that means there will be less attendees as well.
Also, a lot of events don’t offer attendees anything they can’t experience at home. If it’s a bunch of talks, just watch video of them later. No need to be in-person unless you really need to do some networking. Some events are able to offer attendees a reason to be physically present, and they still draw a crowd.
Honestly, brands like Yotel (compact smaller rooms) aren't really much cheaper if any.
Because companies used to host event spaces for Meetups, and between them scaling this back (my opinion) and event space being expensive, it's harder for work-related Meetups to meet. (Non-work-related Meetups seem to be doing okay though!)
Because companies are also getting stingier about flying rank-and-file engineers out to events, even if it's part of their training budget.
Because --- and this might be a stretch --- free food and drinks was a major draw for these events, and people (especially the youngs) are drinking less.
Saying that COVID was simply "a factor" in causing this is a dramatic undersell. COVID was THE factor. It opened peoples' eyes to work from home. That changed literally everything.
As for me: these events were all about the drinks and late nights _after_ (and sometimes during) the event. I don't enjoy drinking late at night, I'm usually on a meal plan and prefer to stick to it, and I generally go to sleep earlier these days. All of these things have made tech events harder to enjoy. Also, everything's about AI now, which couldn't be more depressing IMO.
I do expect the space issue has also become a bigger issue in general. For non-tech get-togethers, people's houses are a much lower barrier.
Conferences, announcements, etc all happened virtually and things were largely fine. Sure things like networking were lost (and the associated drinking), and while that was valuable was not necessarily the marketed reason for the events.
We see the same thing outside of the professional space. Video Game conventions for example never really bounced back because the larger companies found out they can do things on their own terms virtually. Those conventions are still happening but they are not the same.
I do sometimes miss the free traveling but I also find it far more convenient (and less of an impact on my life outside of work) to do these things virtually.
But it did show me that a lot of things were unnecessary to travel too and were just fine virtually.
It isnt go back to how it was before or all virtual, there is a middle ground of traveling and in person when it is actually valuable instead of just being yet another conference.
I like social events well enough, but Christ, I'd rather go to some other profession's conference than a tech conference. If I started showing up at them it'd be a sign of distress, that I was desperate for a job and my existing network had failed me.
I expect this, or lackthereof, is actually the biggest single reason. Which is to say that people aren't wanting to drink much anymore, so by extension they aren't going out to drink. Alcohol is known as the "social lubricant" for good reason. Despite a rise in use during the early stages of COVID lockdowns/restrictions, consumption of alcohol has dropped precipitously since — now at the lowest rate on record.
I haven't heard anyone say that things were fine. I and colleagues have participated virtually in ML conferences during covid and people almost unanimously said it was mostly useless. You can't compare zoom rooms to poster sessions, real social events with GatherTown etc. For papers you can just follow arXiv and configure alerts or browse the conference website. The networking and shared fun is core. People make friends/acquaintances, have discussions about how it is to live in another country, their job, their takes on events, gossip, and just general human exchange over beers etc. I know many of us here are introverts, but I'm still seeing it like this. It can be a bonding experience with colleagues to go to the same conference for a week, multiple times a year, you can become friends that will last long. Or it can be hell if you hate them. Two sides to the coin, I admit.
There are many things that can't be said fully openly, e.g. that the main purpose of such conferences is social. Because fun can't be reimbursed, the cog in the machine must be productive and efficient and serious. Except if it's structured like daycare activities mediated by a primary school teacher, i.e. "team-building workshops", whose concept already makes my stomach turn. People can socialize much better if it's not some structured forced activity but happens naturally alongside some other (non-made-up) activity, such as going to a conference and listening to talks etc.
Another thing is that you change your location and life a bit for a week (or a few days), shift your working style. If you stay in the same home or the same office and tune in virtually, most people just going to be multi-tasking. That's already the case for many meetings. People turn off their cameras, their mics, eventually even attendance dwindles. Then if you propose in-person events again, people are disinterested because they associate it with that low-engagement boring stuff, except they now also have to travel to it etc.
I’d rather have fun and socialize in ways that have nothing to do with work, and I think younger generations feel even more strongly about that.
The way I see it is that corporate cultures have completely given up on investment in employees. No more tuition reimbursement, no more certification reimbursement, you’re a hired mercenary. They are telling employees straight to their face that they are replaceable temp workers who had better start using AI as much as possible or else they’ll get fired and be replaced with AI anyway.
Why would I want to spend my time going to an industry conference when the industry treats me like shit?
And on this note, how many companies are actually investing in sending employees to conferences? My company even gave up on any sort of team building budget to have my team meet in person, they’re not even willing to pay to have us meet in person once a year. Never mind paying for conference fees and sponsorships.
Conferences that aren’t sales tools have no value to the modern corporation.
From the article:
> I’ve actually talked to folks who decided, “I’ve only got a few years left – I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, the same way, at the same company, until they let me go or until I decide to quit.” LLMs like ChatGPT made it easier to get by without actually knowing what you’re doing – at least in the short term – and that’s all these kinds of people care about.
This is what has been incentivized by companies. Again, they have told us to our face that we are throwaway employees who are not worth investment. We should just use AI and work faster, please.
Where does socializing fit into that world view? Hell, employees who socialize do pesky things like unionize.
> The way I see it is that corporate cultures have completely given up on investment in employees. No more tuition reimbursement, no more certification reimbursement, you’re a hired mercenary. They are telling employees straight to their face that they are replaceable temp workers who had better start using AI as much as possible or else they’ll get fired and be replaced with AI anyway.
Chicken-or-egg of course, but employees also tend to job hop much more than before (again, understandable if they can't get a raise otherwise), making investment less rational for companies. It's a self-feeding cycle. People used to work for multiple decades in the same place before that. But probably some MBA books derived that this is bad, because they become too crucial and too unique, bus factor things, you need more fungible cogs than that.
Even in friend groups people are flakier, romantic relationships are treated as more disposable etc. Of course all these have a flipside, they didn't happen without reason. A general shift away from a "high-trust society" model.
The whole benefit is that you could convince your next employer that you had senior level experience after spending a short few years as a practitioner.
What people do go to conferences for is networking and meeting people. It's often the only time some folks are in the same spot for a face to face dialog. That is 100% not replicable online.
The group who attend conferences to view the talks and absorb material can mostly accomplish the same thing remotely without dealing with travel, hotels, and being away from family. Remote conferences are great for them.
Another group doesn't really care about the content all that much. They went to conferences to walk around, see things, bump into people, go to parties, and have an excuse to travel. This group feels a big loss because the parts they enjoyed the most have been taken away.
- They became targets for networking and resume building. Meetups that were previously small groups of highly engaged people were now full of attendees who were looking for job opportunities because LinkedIn told them that was how to do it.
- Selecting good presentations became harder. Once speaking at a meetup or conference became a resume badge of honor, it became a competition to secure the speaking slot at all costs. The previously interesting local talks were getting replaced with entertainment spots, where presenters spent more time showing funny video clips, memes, or even performing live musical pieces to entertain the audience. Discussing the subject matter wasn't a priority.
- Conferences started catering to lowest common denominator attendees to broaden their appeal. Interesting deep dives into highly technical topics started disappearing. They were replaced with basic topics that have been covered to death, such as "How to supercharge your development process with continuous deployment"
- The people I most want to meet up with started transitioning to other activities. Instead of spending my evening on a meetup where the speaker isn't interested in anything other than adding a line to their resume, we now meet up for big group lunches or do outdoor activities together.
- Conference costs kept rising. Organizers realized attendees were expensing the tickets, so they tried to set prices based on what they thought they could get away with charging companies. It became a machine for extracting those personal development budget dollars, not for getting people together efficiently.
- Conference drama. Maybe this is local to me. Every conference seemed to attract a lot of drama: Someone's talk didn't get accepted and they turned it into accusations of bias or favoritism. Conference organizers would have a falling out and try to split into two conferences with a lot of finger-pointing to make people pick a side. Someone was bad with money and ran out of cash, so a conference would be cancelled at the last minute with drama around getting refunds. Someone would try to stir up drama with their presentation or an attendee would accuse someone of a code of conduct violation, turning in months of debate. It all gets so exhausting that I just don't want to be anywhere near it.
Even before all the LLM nonsense as of late I saw way too many events which had speakers that honestly just had nothing interesting to say who just seemed to be regurgitating 3rd hand information. Just the bare minimum to have gotten in front of people.
Attendance costs keep rising (including commute and stay).
The content will be on YouTube within a few weeks.
With the popularity of zoom, discourse, discord, slack, I’m socializing with the community more regularly. Also where you’d see a lot of content early.
If I need to network, I can organize a much cheaper dinner and drinks instead of paying for larger events.
International conferences make more sense from a business ROI to intermingle , but local ones are a losing battle of value.
That's true in two ways: not only are less companies paying to send their attendees to training, but less companies are paying to sponsor these events as well.
I think this is a shorter-term trend in the economy though, it doesn't necessarily hold as much inertia as other factors. Unless the AI job replacement really works out the way many companies hope.
I’ve been using PTO and my own dime for conferences this whole time! It’s been super worth it career-wise especially as a speaker. Lots of fun, meet great people, have a bunch of “sawdust” to show for it.
The biggest impact has been that people in the industry generally know of me and that lends itself to creating opportunities / opening doors that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
1. Conferences require travel budget, which in tech companies (from what I hear) is being repurposed to build out AI capacity. Really, everything is being squeezed like this it seems.
2. A lot of folks only go to cons to network - which also means finding better jobs. There might be some connection between cons and turnover.
> 2. A lot of folks only go to cons to network - which also means finding better jobs. There might be some connection between cons and turnover.
1 and 2 are related, at least in my experience.
Sending people to conferences was really popular for a while, but companies began realizing that most engineers weren't actually learning much from the conferences. It was a way to travel and network and have your company pay for it.
At one company they had a problem where people would put in requests to attend conferences in good travel locations, but then not actually go to the conference. They'd bring their families along and have a little discounted vacation where the company paid for the hotel room, 1 plane ticket, and some of the expenses without having to take any PTO.
Realistically, conference attendance is a perk, and should be understood as such and accepted. Of course to a shareholder breathing down the neck of the business admins, it's unsqueezed slack in the system that has to be better justified than that. And realistically the employee would go, attach a few extra days, maybe skip a day of the event, but still feel some kind of duty (what a quaint word) to make use of the actual conf too.
It's an arms race where both sides are saying, if you don't give a shit, we don't give a shit.
This really seems to be the clincher here -- COVID surely contributed, but "post"-COVID if there's not much to talk about, why make the trip?
I'd be curious to hear how often newbies showed up to these SQL events pre-COVID. Was there interest from people outside the regulars? Were people truly excited to learn about SQL technologies?
Large SQLSaturday events used to regularly get 300-400 attendees, and a good 10-20% of them were new to the field. I would regularly do a show-of-hands in my session asking how many of them were attending a SQL Saturday for the first time, and it wasn't unusual to see half the hands go up.
People learn SQL every day, believe it or not.
>>"because everybody is BROKE?!?!"
...but I didn't want to offend anybody with `whining` [I'm an average net-worth, for my age, US blue collar worker].
----
Here are my whines of thought:
I think the thing many of my brothers (three multi-millionaires, I am not) fail to see at the moment is that the "bottom majority" is having an increasingly "really bad time" existance. Myself, I have zero dependants, and zero desire to reproduce in this world. e.g. I have savings, but no healthcare (why?) and plenty of debt.
When I start seeing "struggling majority" grow from simple 51% to increasingly-closer-to "bottom 90%" lately... I start getting really concerned. I don't giveAF about almost anything, but whatever this majority's percentage: they're not wrong (life is getting too difficult for majority).
¢¢
I supply a low cost alternative software option so cost pressures on customers tends to improve sales so that helps a bit with recession resistance up to a point. Though more customers are choosing to do without any alternative which means it must be really rough out there as such software is pretty essential to their work.
It’s hitting the top end of the market as well, the large staffs and debts mean they have to extract more money from a declining customer base that is less able to pay. It’s bad enough even these big multinationals can’t afford to build new features and are choosing to instead exit various markets to focus on their most profitable products. This will only work short term as the less profitable parts were effectively a loss leader for the profitable ones and shouldn’t really be considered a separate offering. They appear to have entered a terminal decline, and it seems that some of them know this and are gouging on their way out.
Multiply this across N industries and it looks like this stagflation / recession is just getting warmed up.
Absolutely. Outside of software, here is my simple dietary POV:
Last year, I gave up beef (chicken is less expensive).
Last spring, I planted my first garden (cucumbers, squash, peppers, strawberries).
Last week, I gave up chocolate (no alternative, so far).
I am a fat native blue-collar Texan, so this is ultimately a good dietary change — but terrifying for a consumer-based economy / society.
Instead of 1 hour commute, have an airplane travel or a couple hours drive. Instead of hours in a cubicle, have an hotel. And now add more expenses and crappy food.
Sure, the "social interactions" in a pub might be more pleasant than the "water-cooler side chat" but they won't be much more productive.
Socializing is overrated.
For me it feels like a nice event. Being related to my career, learning something new from passionate people and stepping out of my comfort zone a bit, all while not having to think much about work.
But changes in life trajectory almost always happen through in-person socializing.
The only in-person events worth going to are those that have some kind of a filter on attendance, e.g. ones friends, investors, or employers invite you to.
I'm not interested in your Arduino project that detects pigeons with AlexNet.
How do you expect people to get better at their craft if you want to lock them out of the conversation?
Reality check: I don't. Educating the masses for free is not my duty and I don't have space and time for that. If I host a tech-related event it's for a group of people I care about, including myself, to mutually benefit from each other.
There used to be a point in time ~15 years ago when the public gatherings were mostly high-quality talent of highly motivated people and you were sort of connected with all such people in your city.
There are a lot of low-motivation "hey I just learned to code 5 lines of Python with ChatGPT and therefore I should get attention" type people now.
I.e. I think it’s more likely that you’re noticing the inexperience of others because you yourself have gained experience.
At some point in your life you yourself were the “hey I just learned to code 5 lines of python” person at those conferences.
As another analogy, someone driving on the highway can’t complain about the traffic, they are traffic.
- Companies have generally tightened belts on discretionary spending, which means fewer people are being paid to go to conferences and events. Many workplaces offered a relatively free hand when it came to company-sponsored conference trips, but now you're not only looking at paying your own way but taking PTO to do it!
- As someone who still makes an effort with in-person meetups: space is so hard to get unless you're well-funded. There used to be a plethora of startups around here that were happy to let you use their office after hours, but the end of ZIRP and the ensuing belt-tightening has taken a lot of these places off the list.
- AI has sucked so much air out of the room. AI-related meetups around here are still pretty common, lots of VC-funded AI startups lending their space to AI-related meetups. Heck, many even have a food and drinks budget. But if you're in any space that isn't AI this kind of support is basically completely non-existent.
Also, I think a major factor that can't be discounted are incentives for speakers. For the same reason most companies have switched to recorded announcements vs. live stage announcements, speakers are incentivized towards remote/recorded events vs. in-person since the content has much wider reach. It may be less useful for the in-person participants but you're optimizing for the long tail of people viewing remotely/viewing later.
As someone who likes getting out of the house, I don't understand the why.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michellebruton/2023/02/28/outdo...
People are just going to fewer events together, likely due to price and economic factors, but are very much still going out and socializing.
Being able to just "get out of the house" implies you're not crushed by just the facts of trying to exist. I'm glad, for your sake, that you don't understand why. But don't mistake your own lack of understanding for there not being a root cause that's not just writing off most people as inherently seeking out isolation.
I think it's more a mismatch with subjective expectation. Combined with news, social media, plenty of infinite entertainment on tap tailored to you, apps for food delivery, etc. It's a better bet on the day to day timescale than even talking to neighbors (for free), who likely don't align with your interests and online bubbles. And anyway everyone is likely to move soon, no sense in investing time. The benefits would only accumulate slowly over a long time, so people don't bother. Feedback cycles must be quick. And social media also turns hobbies and hanging out into competition. You can and often feel like you're supposed to obsess over the details of the hobby, see better gear on YouTube, people doing it much better than you ever will, so watching is just good enough.