Lets be honest: conferences exist to waste time. Nothing productive gets done on conferences and best thing you can take our from them is to socialize with like-minded people.
Sure, why would anyone want to waste time lifting their nose briefly from their employer's grindstone to get exposed to new colleagues, new ideas, and new business opportunities?
I tentatively agree with the idea that conferences reduce the amount of work that someone gets done for a few days (you can see this by how much work free software maintainers like myself generally get done during conferences), but I absolutely disagree that it is a net negative for your employer.
In my view, as someone who contributes to free software as my job (though the rest of this is somewhat related to proprietary developers too), conferences are a great opportunity to have IRL discussions over current development topics as well as meet people from other free software communities (who might work for proprietary software companies). And arguably that is getting work done (and I have written patches side-by-side with someone while at conferences quite a few times).
Having connections in your field, as well as being well-known by your field (perhaps by submitting talks to conferences) is very useful for both you and your employer. In most cases, a lack of conference attendance by a company is seen as a "bad smell" in some communities (it indicates that they don't have an interest in the community around something they use -- maybe because they think that interacting with their community through conferences is a waste of time). It also potentially gives you access to more recruits, because people looking for work often attend conferences to expand their connections.
Not to mention that most medium-and-larger companies can spare a few thousand dollars a few times a year to send their employees to a conference to act as both a marketing tool and as a form of training at conferences. I'd bet that medium-sized companies spend more on stationary and tea+coffee supplies yearly.
If you’re looking at conferences from the point of view of “a way to improve programming skills” it really isn’t. It’s the equivalent of workforce training in other fields.
It's because non-monetary benefits are a good way to attract talent in a tight labor market, which is more or less how the software developer market has been for the past twenty years. Developers like going to conferences, so they like working for employers who pay for them to go.
Think about why tech companies provide ping-pong tables and nap-chambers (obviously unproductive) and yet Wal-Mart isn't sending its warehouse workers to warehousing industry conferences (presumably at least somewhat productive).
Sometimes a 30 min conversation with an experienced developer can save you 3 months of work. Conferences can be extremely productive, but it's just like everything else, it depends on how you personally do it. For some developers its "nothing productive gets done after lunch" and for some like you it's "nothing productive gets done on conferences" but that's a very individual thing and definitely not true in general.
1. Decide up front what sessions I am going to attend. All of these things should be stuff that I know very little about or take my knowledge from 200 to 300. Don't go to sessions that you know the answer to. Be super selective on sessions as well: skip vendor shills and affirmative action placements.
2. Look AND SCHEDULE casual between-session coffee meetings with folks I know are attending. This both deepens my relationships with them and you also tend to meet people most effectively this way that happen to be with that person.
3. Go to birds of a feather (if possible). People are much more likely to want to meet other people at these things.
4. Ask everyone you can "How their conference is going?" and "What are you working on in this space?". I make it a goal to ask at least ten people this a day between the coffee station lines, lunch, happy hour. At a great conference people love talking about what they are passionate about.
5. Drop out of late night events and drinking sessions if you are just there for the music or the beer and not getting knowledge or connections out of it. This is business, not party time.
If you can't do these things, yes, it is a waste of time.
But if you can, I find that I can leverage all of the info and contacts out of this relentlessly at my $DAY_JOB to get a lot done the rest of the year.
Lets be honest: lunch exists to waste time. Nothing productive gets done at lunch and best thing you can take out from them is to socialize with like-minded people.
Can you back this up? This doesn't seem to be as true as your "Lets be honest" introduction claims it is. Even more, it seems like a needlessly polarizing cynical opinion to me.
In theory, I can get from watching the recordings most of the value I get from attending. CPPCon's YouTube channel is excellent.
In practice, I just don't seem to get round to watching them. Going to the conference means watching a whole bunch of them with no distractions. Very useful.
They do? I didn't think they'd be holding workshops and answering SDK questions at other conferences. Certainly Apple devs attend conferences like any other engineer.
If you think that making connections with people working on same things you do is waste of time you’ve got another thing coming. But yeah nobody writes code at conferences, I thought that was pretty obvious.
I've absolutely seen people from well-known companies and consulting groups sitting in a conference talk hacking on their work projects. Very frequently. For the past decade, easily. And as recently as last week, at RubyConf.
I was mentally distinguishing between "code that gets written at a conference because it's a conference" and "code that gets written at a conference because the person is bored/on a deadline/unable to persuade their employer that they need to have time to learn".
I think we can safely say that 'conference' means different things to different people and all conferences are very different. Some involve highly specialized academics pontificating on highly esoteric subjects, some are places where people go to do million dollar deals, some are just thinly veiled excuses for people to expense their holiday to their company and some involve half dozen hackers sitting around a table knocking out code. And at some conferences all these things are going on at the same time.
Basically any statement to the effect of "everybody does/nobody does X at conferences" is almost certainly false.
To be clear, I mean both. IMO, the "social" work is the more valuable work that gets done, things like discussing proposals, working on new ideas, coordination between different projects, that kind of thing. Code happens too, of course, and sometimes, the ability to pair in person with someone you're not usually located near can be invaluable.
No. Conferences will have learning and training sessions. Conferences will have reps from customers, partners and vendors you work with or are thinking of working with. And yes, you can use this time to also connect with like-minded people.
For a while we had some quality conferences around topics such as Ruby, Javascript etc. with great technical talks that were open to anybody who had an interest and wanted to attend. These days many, if not most of them are thinly veiled political/social justice action get togethers that actively ban people who do not share in the ideology.
