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Comment by juliansimioni | Hacker News Reader

In my social and meetup circle, COVID coincided with all the organizers of my favorite meetups reaching the age where one generally starts to slow down, have kids, and possibly move out of the city for more space and calm.

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.

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> 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.

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.

Technology meetups are just going to inherently be about networking for jobs, IMO. The self-interest is just not alignable.

    * 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.

Meanwhile the local knitting group is

    * 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.

The latter group is entirely self-sufficient, self-sustaining, and self-managing. The former is a slow-burn tutorial that you can now do more efficiently via YouTube and chatbot.

You basically want a makers meetup.

  * 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

We had one of those for about 6 months, and I loved it. However finding spaces that would host us was hard.

"Let's create something on the fly right now" events, just like the knitting group! Sounds like a winning plan. Just need to hook the local recruiting companies to fund the office space. :-)

Plenty of folks moved out for cost of living savings too, both organizers and attendees alike. With many roles having turned remote and rock bottom mortgage interest rates, mid-late pandemic was a rare window of opportunity and many recognized that.

Yes, though many are now stuck with a deteriorating situation in a place with not a lot of actual career options.

Many people who moved moved somewhere in the orbit of a large city. Less true in the Bay Area but a 60-90 minute radius of a large city usually has some relatively attractive real estate pricing. And many offices are out that way anyway.

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.

Yep, this is what I did. I made a point of not going too far out for exactly that reason. I wasn’t able to save as much money as some did, but CoL was still halved which opened immense breathing room with little risk.

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