
Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences - walterbell
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/companies-should-pay-for-conferences.html
======
seizethecheese
> The benefits to both the employee and the company are indirect, hard to
> measure, and long term. They can't be measured in dollars.

There are many things that employers could provide that "can't be measured in
dollars" that would result in bankruptcy. In order to back up the claim
implied by the headline, this article really would need some sort of
cost/benefit analysis, which is not provided.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
Your employees could quit when they get other offers from businesses that care
about professional development. You will have higher turnover and
institutional knowledge will constantly be leaving and having to be relearned.
Onboarding new employees more often has a direct, measurable cost but is
obviously different for every business and position.

Your employees could learn advantageous and/or competitive information from
talking with people at the conference. They will bring this back to you and
ask for a raise when it turns out it's a bonus for everyone, but that's what
we want, right? Maybe it's important enough that you get to pitch the new
thing to the CEO and you get a raise as well. Everybody wins.

~~~
icelancer
This really doesn't have anything to do with what the person you replied to
said. He merely asked for some sort of cost/benefit deal, rather than
handwaving away the analysis.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
And I plainly told him that conferences are a perk and perks play into job
decisions and that there is a direct cost to losing your employees.

------
swanson
Just to flip it around, for the fully-loaded cost of sending 2 people to 1
conference that requires travel by plane, you can hire the keynote speaker to
come to your office and train 40 people for 2 days. This kind of arrangement
is generally more cost-effective and inclusive since it doesn't require multi-
day travel commitments.

~~~
daveguy
But a single keynote is far less effective than a 2 day conference in terms of
what you learn. Send 2 people. Have them prepare conference notes and present
to the 40 when they get back. It will be keynote x 10 (things you learn
outside a single keynote) x 40 (all the employees that get to learn from the 2
that went).

Keynote is such a minor part of attending a 2 day conference that 10x is a
conservative estimate.

Edit: And that's just "things learned" that doesn't even count the 20-30
conversations had that can spark collaborative efforts.

Keynote is minimal.

~~~
untog
Sending two people and having them paraphrase the talks they saw based on the
partial notes they took doesn't exactly sound like an efficient process.

I don't think the OP was suggesting you hire the keynote speaker to come,
deliver their keynote and leave. The point is that you could do a lot more
than that.

~~~
killjoywashere
> Sending two people and having them paraphrase the talks they saw based on
> the partial notes they took doesn't exactly sound like an efficient process.

Don't think of it as education. Think of it as spies debriefing the station
crew at the embassy.

~~~
tnecniv
This is the right way to think about it. The talks are probably recorded
anyway. Really, you want to get some people to go out, see how others are
doing things and solving problems, and bringing back the parts that are
relevant to your current problems ("Oh, this guy solved problem X, which is
really similar to what Ted was stuck on when we left!")

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mac01021
I generally opt to abstain from conferences, even if my employer is willing to
foot the bill.

I'm unlikely to learn anything from the conference that I couldn't learn on
the web, and almost certainly not enough to justify the expenditure of time.

Plus, a round-trip flight crossing a couple of time zones would probably
double my carbon footprint for the year.

~~~
daveJSF
I can't speak to the carbon footprint, but there is so much value in attending
conferences if you are connecting with new people.

~~~
ams6110
That's a big if. I don't go to a lot of conferences, but I've never been to
one where I ever maintained contact with anyone I met there, after the
conference was over.

~~~
dkersten
As a counterpoint: I have. I've also used conferences as a means of getting
face-time with people I otherwise only interact with online. There are also
people I share information with, but only interact with once a year at a
conference (that is, the conference is the means of staying in touch).
Sometimes its also about meeting people who, while you might not stay in touch
with them, if for some reason you end up interacting with them in the future,
they remember you and you have a head start (last year I almost got a job (I
turned it down only because it would have increased my commute beyond what I
was willing and I wasn't prepared to relocate) because I met the CTO at a
conference 5 years ago). The value of these things varies, of course, so I
won't say that conferences are definitely and always worthwhile, but they
definitely can be.

~~~
caseydurfee
I've had similar experiences, but I also think your answer could be
paraphrased as "conferences are good because extroverts like them." Some
people who are otherwise really good developers aren't going to get much value
from a bunch of forced socialization.

Also, in context of "companies should pay for their employees", none of the
experiences you note benefitted the company. If you had left the company
because you met a new connection at a conference, not only would the employer
be out $3K to send you to the conference, they'd be out $50K or more to hire
your replacement.

~~~
dkersten
_but I also think your answer could be paraphrased as "conferences are good
because extroverts like them_

Sure, except that I'm far from an extrovert and that's exactly why I like
conferences: I find it incredibly difficult to network and a conference
provides a nice, safe, closed environment for me to do so regardless.

 _Also, in context of "companies should pay for their employees", none of the
experiences you note benefitted the company_

Absolutely. I wasn't really relying in the context of the article but rather
as a counterpoint to not finding personal value in conferences. I've went to
almost all conferences I've been to on my own dime, so I obviously wasn't
there to benefit my employers.

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dcw303
Let's assume we're talking about developer conferences. Because that seems to
be the only kind where we get contention about the value of attending.

Entrepreneurs conference? Can't build that start up on your own. Sales
conference? You'd be derelict in your duties if you are not networking over
every possible shill you can.

But programmers? Well. We're just expected to glom into some dark corner and
crank out code, right?

~~~
_cairn
Coding for programmers [nerds] is fun, we should do it all the time [nights
and weekends] and magically improve/learn new tech by osmosis. /s

I genuinely think this is how many people outside dev think.

~~~
dcw303
To be fair, conferences are not _always_ the best way to learn new things.
It's variable depending on the conference, and there are some at the lower end
that are glorified trade shows.

But for me, the obvious reason to attend is to network with other developers.
Whether your company sees that as useful or not will probably determine if
they spring for it.

~~~
ghaff
I don't do a lot of development these days but IMO it's mostly a mistake to
conflate conferences with deep-dive training (except to the degree that some
conferences come with workshops attached). In addition to the
networking/hallway track, conferences are useful to exposing yourself to new
ideas, concepts, projects, etc. that you can then look into in greater depth
after the event.

------
jplahn
I know Amazon gets a generally bad rap around HN, but my organization at least
pays for all SDEs to attend one conference a year. While not everybody takes
advantage of it, those that have typically provide several brown bag sessions
to disseminate their learnings to the team.

I've found it very useful both to attend and to learn from those that
attended, particularly when I can get the highlights (and potentially new
ideas!) of a conference I'd never attend personally.

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gumby
I agree but most conferences are a waste. The ones that have good "corridor
sessions" are the best, and you need some experience to get value out of those
(so send the new kids along with someone who has a bit of experience)

~~~
daheza
I'm not familiar with that term. What is a "corridor session"?

~~~
pronoiac
It's when you talk to people in the hallway in between or instead of talks;
also known as "the hallway track."

~~~
daveJSF
This is where I've made some of my best friends from conferences. Hallways,
restaurants, and bars. :)

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synicalx
From a purely "stuff learned" perspective, conferences are a huge waste. You
could furnish an entire team with several years worth of Pluralsight
subscriptions for the cost of sending a couple of them to a conference in
another state. Having said that I more or less make it a condition that my
employer will send me to at least one relevant conference each year.

IMO, the value of conferences is:

\- It's a work-related break from work (read; easy to justify). Most
conferences are pretty fun to go to, assuming you don't just rock up for the
talks and then hide in your hotel afterwards.

\- Networking. If you're at a conf, go and talk to people. It's amazing what
you can get done just with a few conversations.

\- You WILL learn stuff, and not necessarily JUST what you came there to
learn. I'm yet to come back from a conference without at least 4 or 5 new
ideas.

\- You'll have the chance to talk to people who know a hell of a lot more
about product/tech XYZ, and there's a good chance they're being paid to stand
around and answer your questions.

\- If you want certs, exams are often cheaper at conferences and there's
nearly always some cram/lab sessions being run beforehand.

Ultimately, the value of a conference is somewhere between buying ping pong
tables and Xboxs for the break room, and hiring a guest speaker for a few days
- it's as much of a hearts and minds exercise as it is a learning and
development one.

EDIT: Formatting

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mador
In my personal experience at places I've worked, there has been a strong
negative correlation between conference attendance and overall quality and
productivity of the staff. Conferences offer such an easy out for people who
want to waste a week while pretending to work and taking a quasi-vacation on
the company dime that if you're careless in permitting conference attendance,
it can easily turn into a free-for-all.

At one small conference I attended, most companies were represented by one or
two people, maybe a CXX and a bizdev guy. Our company had a couple dozen
people there. The attendee list was published, and it was kind of embarrassing
when they acknowledged our presence during the intro remarks because it
basically told everyone what a joke of a company we were. The only reason my
team was there was so that my boss could add more make-work to put in his
quarterly report while earning points from his team for being that "good boss"
that supports employee development. It was such a mismanaged mess at that
company that they even paid for a team of contractors to take a paid week off
to attend a conference, mostly so that they could pad their resumes, since
none of that knowledge was actually applicable to the project they were on.

At my next job, people were too busy trying to hit their goals to pitch their
boss on conferences in Vegas.

Conference attendance can provide benefits to employers under the right
circumstances, but if I had my own company and an employee initiated a request
to attend a conference, I'd insist that he have some skin in the game--he'd
either have to take vacation days, or if it counted as work days, he'd have to
pay for a significant part of the travel/registration costs himself. If he's
not willing, then it probably wasn't worth much to him anyway.

~~~
convolvatron
here's how its supposed to work:

you have a great contributor. someone who does a substantial amount of work
and has come up with enough novel stuff to get a paper published in the field.

they go to the conference, and no you don't get their output for a few
days...except some work on the plane and some nights at the hotel

but they give a great talk, and learn about a bunch of new exciting things in
their field to bring back with them. every time someone talks to this person
and is impressed by their work, the name of your company gets associated
transitively

when the people at the conference think about a new job, or using a product in
your space, they implicitly think 'foo co - thats a great place doing really
cool stuff'

------
lgleason
The biggest problem with a large number of tech conferences is that the
speakers are not qualified to speak and, as a result, have lower quality
attendees, but often charge $700+ for tickets, hotels, time off etc.. Some
egregious examples include a speaker who can't code giving keynotes at
multiple tech conference about how to mentor junior developers, soft talks
that have nothing to do with the subject of the conference, talks about mental
health by people who are not mental health professionals, thinly veiled talks
pushing political agendas that have a (loose at best)relationship to tech and
"Bootcamp Grads Have Feelings Too" which was at a major tech conference for
one of the big communities. We don't see nurses aids fresh out of school
keynoting medical conferences, but somehow in tech this has become a thing.

Someone else was saying that they are stealth trade shows but I'm not sure
even that is true for a lot of conference because honestly I don't think that
many of these events do either very well. There are some that still focus on
quality content where the material and the attendees are much more beneficial,
but the conferences with the weak speaker line ups are a waste of money and in
some communities it feels like we have too many conferences, many of which are
not providing real value to companies for the money and time spent.

It's one thing to have a conference with intense technical material that has
some interesting hallway convos during breaks and socialization in the
evening. But many of these lower quality events feel like we have a bubble in
this space. I'm saying this as someone who has spoken at a decent number of
conferences and as an organizer 3 community based (not for profit)
conferences. Or put another way, there are some that are worth it, but a lot
more that are a waste of time.

~~~
infosecdude64
I've been to a few Security conferences to maintain "points" to maintain a
certification. The last conference I was at there was a guy talking about how
to be a newbie. Nothing technical about the talk, and was basically just
common sense stuff that most adults should already know. But hey I got
"points".

------
YZF
The company I work for typically pays for one conference a year per dev (and
obviously this is on "company time"). After 3 years I'm just about to take
advantage of this for the first time (heading to GopehrCon!).

\- It's a perk.

\- It's a chance to clear your head.

\- You get to meet a lot of interesting people, chat to them about what
they're doing.

\- It's not the same as watching the videos. You can interact with the
presenters after their talk. You can discuss the topics with others. Your time
is 100% on the topic at hand.

\- It shows the company really cares about professional development. They're
putting their money where their mouth is.

\- It shows trust in employees not to abuse this.

\- Conferences help create a sense of community in the industry.

It's not something I do often, go to conferences, but it's nice to have the
company's support if you want to.

------
tarr11
If employers offered either a cash comp increase, or a conference, which would
employees choose?

Tanstaafl...

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
If you count the tax benefit (that is, for W-2 employees who couldn't
otherwise get a write-off on the conference), I'd really prefer something like
one or two conferences a year. That is, the company could spend $2k to send me
to a conference, but if they just paid me an extra $2k I'd only have $1500
after taxes.

~~~
daveFNbuck
Most employees regularly choose not to go to conferences without having the
option of taking $1500 instead. I'd gladly take a $3000/year raise to continue
not going to 2 conferences every year. If I was instead told that I was going
to go to 2 conferences every year as part of my compensation, I'd start
looking for new employment.

~~~
ghaff
There are a whole lot of companies you don't want to work for then. Few
employers will word it quite so explicitly. But I'd say event attendance is an
implicit perk at lots of places. Its considered mutually beneficial.

~~~
daveFNbuck
I'm fine with it being a perk, I meant I'd leave if it became mandatory like
those awful company retreat perks.

~~~
ghaff
I doubt all that many consider company retreats a perk :-)

As for events, it really depends on the event and your role. If your job in
part involves working with partners, communities, etc. then F2F interactions
with many of those people may be important. Many people also enjoy attending
such events but they're usually not (and shouldn't be) complete boondoggles.

------
SkyMarshal
Some constraints need to be applied to this advice, otherwise the conference
circuit becomes a huge waste of time that could easily be spent more
productively in the office:

1\. Always support your employees speaking at conferences if they've been
invited/selected, and make sure they rep your company on conf materials (which
is usually the norm).

2\. For merely attending the conference but not speaking, make sure there's a
concrete justification. Examples:

\- Someone you know will be at the conference is on your med-long term
recruitment list, but no one at your company knows them in person yet. An
impromptu meeting at the conference or afterparty along with a discussion of
(and demonstration of your appreciation of) their work gets you on their radar
much more effectively than a recruiter could.

\- Similar rationale for people or companies you think might be valuable to
collaborate or partner with.

\- The conference presentations and/or workshop sessions deep dive into some
topic of direct relevance to your core business, and provide enough info that
employees who attend can apply it immediately upon returning.

3\. Make sure the people you send are appropriate for the conference. Send
your engineers to highly technical/academic conferences but not the business-
oriented ones. Send your sales people to sales conferences. Etc. Be on the
lookout for conferences that look highly technical but aren't actually.

4\. Consider limiting the number of non-speaking conference attendances per
year per employee that the company will pay for, around 2 to 4. This forces
employees to choose carefully, prioritize the most valuable ones, and get as
much out of them as possible.

5\. Consider requiring the attending employees to provide a post-conference
writeup detailing and informing other employees what they learned. Again this
keeps them focused on extracting value rather than having a mini-vacation.

------
Swizec
Heh, paying. I'd be pretty happy if I didn't have to use PTO to attend
conferences.

Or at least I'd attend way more of them.

~~~
dentemple
Same here. I'd be perfectly happy not being paid to attend conferences, as
long as I don't have to use up vacation time to do it.

------
danblick
Companies have an incentive to make their employees more productive, but other
things being equal, you'd prefer to teach your employees _non-transferable_
skills rather than _transferable_ ones, since _non-transferable_ skills can't
be used on the job market to bid up wages.

There's a comment here about how conferences are great to help your developers
make connections in industry. That seems like a mixed bag -- why should
companies help their best developers to find their next job somewhere else?

There's an interesting Econtalk episode on the book "Learning by Doing" where
this came up:

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.html)

[To summarize: when the textile mill was invented, skilled individual labor
became much more _valuable_ (because skilled workers were much more
productive), but wages didn't rise much over a period of 50 years. This
finally changed with the introduction of _interchangeable parts_ in machines,
which made job skills _transferable_ , which allowed skilled employees to
demand higher wages from their employers.]

------
zitterbewegung
I agree with the statement but I think it should be stronger. Companies should
pay and encourage their employees to learn. Obvious inefficiencies and
productivity would be created.

------
madengr
I tried attending the IEEE IMS conference in Hawaii this year; my company said
not to even ask.

------
RichardHeart
I've known many the employee who's learned nothing, and achieved nothing
attending conferences. The presupposition that conferences are instawin
somehow is flawed methinks.

~~~
daveJSF
This is exactly why I launched an online course. So people can set goals and
know how to meet new people. It's not pushy, traditional networking stuff
either. It's to build true relationships with cool people who can lead you to
new business opportunities later. Networking is about helping others first.

------
accountyaccount
In my experience conferences are just a huge waste of money. I can leisurely
read everything covered at a 2-day conference in half a day, and I don't have
to suffer through people trying to pepper in memes.

I only go to them because my company pays for them and I can find conferences
in cities I want to visit. As an industry we're likely wasting billions on
conferences where people just hang out and network with people who can find us
better jobs.

I actually tried to stop going to them, but my boss insisted because he
doesn't want the budget to get cut.

~~~
jjmorrison
I could not agree more.

------
mdns33
Capital one takes it a notch higher and Sponsors their employees to attend two
conferences. I agree with all the points noted by article. Even though
majority of conferences are a waste of time if you already read hacker news.
They still do help as noted.

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honestoHeminway
Conferences prevent paradigm inbreeding and developers stuck in companys
frame-work mikrobubbles. Thats how we always did it! ->Employee Thats how
everyone else did it, and what worked and what not! ->Conference

