+1 to this, and it does sound like the rationale behind unconferences. Like her commenter Weronika Ł, I agree there’s a lot of value in Hello World talks that introduce a topic, especially if you can reserve a bit of time for Q&A. Other genres of conference talk I like include non-technical ones that cover culture, history, or speculative predictions, and provocations or propositions that advocate for change.
Were we ever going right in the first place? I’ve always found conferences (not just in tech) to be at best an opportunity for networking, and for too many attendees just a way to be paid to not work for a few days.
Conferences are a useful barometer for company culture. If the company pays for conferences like it’s supposed to, that’s a good sign. If it doesn’t pay, it’s a company that you should avoid. If it makes people use vacation days for conferences, run like hell because that company is run by human garbage and will waste your talent and time. You have to choose for yourself which conferences will move your knowledge and network forward, but you should run like hell from a company that won’t pay for 3-4 per year at a minimum.
Some conferences are very useful, but many are not. Every functional programming conference that I’ve gone to has had a high signal-to-noise ratio, but in the R/statistics world you do get a sense that 75% of the talks are product pitches, and light on information. Right now, unfortunately, “data science” is so saturated and full of charlatans and corporates that there isn’t much meat at those conferences.
One of the things that surprised me was learning that many of the conference celebrities aren’t as wealthy or far ahead professionally as one might think. Plenty of them are underpaid because their employers take advantage of their desire to work on “cool stuff” that’s presentable to the public. It’s shitty and wrong that it is that way, and disappointing, but I guess it also puts into perspective the post-conference envy (“everyone’s working on cool stuff but me”) that a lot of people get.
Sounds like much of the rationale behind unconferences.
+1 to this, and it does sound like the rationale behind unconferences. Like her commenter Weronika Ł, I agree there’s a lot of value in Hello World talks that introduce a topic, especially if you can reserve a bit of time for Q&A. Other genres of conference talk I like include non-technical ones that cover culture, history, or speculative predictions, and provocations or propositions that advocate for change.
Were we ever going right in the first place? I’ve always found conferences (not just in tech) to be at best an opportunity for networking, and for too many attendees just a way to be paid to not work for a few days.
Conferences are a useful barometer for company culture. If the company pays for conferences like it’s supposed to, that’s a good sign. If it doesn’t pay, it’s a company that you should avoid. If it makes people use vacation days for conferences, run like hell because that company is run by human garbage and will waste your talent and time. You have to choose for yourself which conferences will move your knowledge and network forward, but you should run like hell from a company that won’t pay for 3-4 per year at a minimum.
Some conferences are very useful, but many are not. Every functional programming conference that I’ve gone to has had a high signal-to-noise ratio, but in the R/statistics world you do get a sense that 75% of the talks are product pitches, and light on information. Right now, unfortunately, “data science” is so saturated and full of charlatans and corporates that there isn’t much meat at those conferences.
One of the things that surprised me was learning that many of the conference celebrities aren’t as wealthy or far ahead professionally as one might think. Plenty of them are underpaid because their employers take advantage of their desire to work on “cool stuff” that’s presentable to the public. It’s shitty and wrong that it is that way, and disappointing, but I guess it also puts into perspective the post-conference envy (“everyone’s working on cool stuff but me”) that a lot of people get.