Hacker News London meetup, Thursday 16th May
meetup.com
meetup.com
I don't think the amount being asked for is unreasonable, considering the speakers, the beer and pizza, and I agree with why it was introduced, but is the new system still filing up the venue in the end? Before the sign-up fee, a week before a meetup, it wouldn't be uncommon to see most/all of the 4-500 slots already filled up.
Sanderson is hilarious though. A great addition! Something to look forward to, since sometimes some of the talks can get a little... less interesting.
Having said that the attendance does seem to be declining. I suspect one factor is that there are so many great events happening in London these days and busy folks only have so much time to spare.
If anyone has suggestions on where the event may be falling short and could do with some improvement, I'd love to hear it.
I don't know, I think the reaction to the last one was that the speakers didn't really provide anything of use for most of the audience just sadly weren't interesting enough.
Whilst it is easy for me to be an armchair critic in the audience I do remember remarking at one point that we were witnessing the worst, most boring explanation of hill climbing / optimisation I've ever seen. It was sufficiently lacking in background to be of no merit to someone who'd never come accross the concept before, but far too basic for anyone who had. I appreciate the guest speakers don't get paid, but I know I wasn't alone in finding them a distraction from talking and drinking with the interesting people in attendance.
I can't imagine a £6 fee would put people off, most would have paid that just to travel there.
The numbers did drop dramatically when the fee was introduced - it used to fill up well ahead of time, and now it regularly doesn't reach capacity at all.
I don't know the reasons why fewer people are coming, and whether it's a good or bad thing, but the numbers definitely dropped due to the £6 fee.
Now one of my primary reasons for attending was to check out possible job openings, and as expected, there were a few I was interested in.
I had what I thought were useful conversations with the people that had advertised said jobs, and came away with a couple of email addresses.
Unfortunately, despite repeated emails, I didn't hear back even once. Not even with a "thanks, but no thanks" sort of response. This strikes me as quite unprofessional, especially from a community that supposedly looks down on this sort of behaviour.[1] Given that I also experienced this for most of the approaches I made to organisations at previous Silicon Milkroundabout events, I have to conclude one of either two things about the "hacker community":
1) My abilities/skills are really quite ordinary at best, and not a good fit for pretty much any technocrat organisation. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5664839
2) Most people are simply paying lip-service to transparency and "the right way to do things".
FWIW, in my job search efforts, Big Companies have been far more transparent and forthcoming with their communication than absolutely any startup I've applied to. And that is depressing as hell.
/end self-flagellation.
[1] It's quite possible that I just got unlucky and stumbled onto precisely the few orgs that do, in fact, follow these practices amidst the remaining shining paragons of virtue.
What was hard for me, was simply trying to say no. It took me about 1.5 hours of research and help from some of the more experienced people around me, I felt like I was writing a dear John letter. I wanted to explain why it wasn't just a no, that it was due to the fact we needed someone who had more experience in the kind of thing we were doing, as sadly we didn't have time to train within (our normal method at that place).
When going the conventional route, I can simply email something along the lines of "failed all questions, got nothing correct simple SQL, couldn't write a for loop." even tell the agency not to waste my time, or large HR firm that we need to have better screening.
If they are a small startup, it might be as simple as you didn't gel with them. A friend of mine puts the success of his team down to the fact they all meet up in person, every friday at 11am, at their favourite bar, if people are really stressed with each other about work they drink and play table football until they are friends again. He commented how he couldn't work with a mutual friend because they don't drink and refuse to go to pubs. Obviously you can't say that to the person.
So if you've got someone who is busy or who hasn't got very good reasons for saying no to you, then they might simply ignore you. Don't let it get you down, try to understand its not an easy situation for them either and try to be much more detached about applying for roles, it is as they say, just business.
Good luck out there.