
What I've learned sending proposals to conferences - valzevul
https://drobinin.com/posts/what-ive-learned-after-sending-147-proposals-to-36-conferences-in-a-year/
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Thorentis
A bit of a tangent, but am I the only one that thinks there are... too many
conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS
framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of
whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out
ticket invites and request for papers.

Conferences were originally for leading experts in a particular field to share
new research and present papers that were going to be published, and give
people the chance to ask questions and find out more from the authors.

Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality
writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised
easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck.

I recognise the networking aspect of them can be useful, but I couldn't
justify spending the ticket price of some of them, to go to a conf based
around one very narrow tech (unless it was a narrow but widely used and
lucrative tech, and I was looking for work in that area currently).

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LandR
>> Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality
writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised
easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck.

 _Exactly_ why I stopped going to conferences. The quality of the speakers is
mostly terrible. They choose a grand sounding topic then the talk turns out to
be incredibly shallow and pointless. I often wonder how many of them could
actually speak at depth, extemporaneously, about the subect of their talk or
if their actual knowledge collides with the end of their slides.

I think also it's just a way for the speakers to advertise the company they
work for.

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algorithmmonkey
For quite a few, it is a _main_ goal for the speakers to either draw attention
to their company's product or to provide an air of thought leadership on
behalf of their company.

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rstuart4133
Of course it is. Any conference being paid for in one way of another by
companies will do the companies bidding. He who holds the gold makes the
rules, as they say.

But trying going to a conference that isn't organised by a company, or as a
venue for companies to show their products. They exist. They are usually
associated with open source groups/meetups of some kind. In some ways they are
very vanilla - no fancy food or hotels, nobody actually pays for that crap out
of their own pocket.

But the talks - the talks are from a different world. Nobody is there to talk
about their company. It's engineers talking to other engineers. Some are
serious, some are playful, some are seriously nuts, but all know they are
talking to their peers and are not game to spout too much bullshit. If they
don't believe it, it doesn't get said. It's like comparing the comments on HN
to the journalistic output on a mass media site.

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RickJWagner
I've had about a half-dozen proposals accepted over several years. IMHO,
picking a 'hot technology' is the biggest factor that's seemed relevant to the
papers I had accepted.

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gumby
> ... conferences are not about talks, they are about the community

Definitely some of the best have been ones where I never made it to any
presentations but spent the whole time engrossed in the “corridor session”.

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j7ake
Unless there is some rigor in the selection of the speakers of the conference
(e.g., top CS conferences) they're mostly a scam and a waste of time.

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draw_down
I’ve rarely enjoyed conversations or networking at conferences I’ve attended.
It probably is a good use of the time, but man is it dreadful. I think a lot
of people must enjoy the opportunity to talk to others who work in the same
part of our field. I’d just rather talk about pretty much anything else.

Whatever value I’ve gotten from them has always been in the talks, so for me a
conference needs to have interesting speakers.

