

What is your company's policy on engineers attending conferences? - lancepantz

The most popular seem to be one per year, or 'only if you're giving a talk'.
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mjn
I'm guessing this varies by sector. I've been involved with trying to recruit
people from the videogame industry to academic and academic/industry crossover
conferences, and companies tend not to be happy at all with their engineers
attending. Afaict none in this sector have any sort of explicit policy; it's
more a matter of trying to convince your boss that this somehow benefits the
company and isn't going to leak secrets all over. I've heard much more
positive stories from other areas of computing, though.

(Shameless plug: if you're a game dev doing anything with a researchy or
applied-researchy angle, esp. if located in Europe, consider submitting a demo
or paper or panel, and coming to Crete next May: <http://www.fdg2013.org>)

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achompas
At Knewton, we'll cover expenses for anything that might be useful for getting
your work done. In my case, that means attending SciPy 2012 last week and
learning about tools (scikit-learn, Cython, Numpy/Scipy) that will help me
prototype and explore various models, as well as speed up our production
Python code.

That's just one example, of course. Our head of infrastructure (@dzwieback)
attends various systems engineering and DevOps conferences, and other members
of the adaptive learning team attend data conferences (Strata, for example).

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bartonfink
I'm working with my boss right now on attending a conference, or at least some
sort of training. He wants me to do something RDBMS related, whereas I've been
pushing for something a little fresher. As best as I know, we don't have a
policy, but regardless, I'm being heavily encouraged to find a conference and
go.

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benzesandbetter
Our policy is: if the conference is beneficial for either building skills or
gaining clients, go.

You're obviously not going to attract A-players by setting arbitrary limits on
your developers and not trusting them to make good decisions.

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Toph
It was always base on if we felt there was something that would either help
the company, help the engineer themselves, or of value in some other way. No
set limits but usually no more than a couple conferences per year either way.

