Conferences don't exist to convey information. You can learn stuff from conferences, but I don't think I've ever been to one where people were talking about things that weren't already publicly available on the internet. (An exception might be conferences like Apple's WWDC, since that's a place for the company to announce proprietary info)
When people attend conferences, they're doing it to be seen. That's true whether you're on stage or off. Everyone thinks they're awesome, or if they don't then they probably want to be awesome. People with big egos, though we get jealous of them, get big attention. If you act important, chances are you'll make people think you're important. It's all business.
If you're at a talk that's truly unbearable, just tune out or walk out if it's that bad. I've done this a bunch of times when a person's egotism is too cringy or when some malcontent is being way too preachy. The latter seems to becoming more common. Barf. Sorry, you're not making me pay thousands for this shit so I can be told I'm dumb.
Check your egos? Why are you even going to conferences?
You are not wrong in your reason for why a certain type of person attends a conference: to satisfy ego or some other vanity, you are wrong in assuming all (or even a majority of) people attend conferences for this reason.
Conferences in my view exist for a variety of reasons outside of their most commonly associated purpose of existing to provide educational material that others have noted can be easily found other places online for most, but not all. There certainly exist conferences that are more social and some that are more informational where the information being presented is truly groundbreaking and the first time being conveyed to a wide audience is the conference video and transcription.
Conferences also allow you to engage and connect with your associated programming community in ways you can not have possibly fathomed outside of the conference. Having lunch with the language creators of Go, as an example, at Gophercon. Sitting through a community design discussion for the future of Rails at a Rails Conf with framework developers and language maintainers like Aaron Patterson.
Why the online programming community always seems to downplay the real human element of conferences is beyond me. We aren’t robots. Being around other people with the same interests of you acts in of itself as inspiring. I certainly get pumped for my given interests after I leave a conference for that interest, as most people do.
They also put you in an environment for being exposed to new thoughts and ideas and to have discussions with peers. Even to the degree you could block off time and do some of this online you probably won’t.
Anyone who approaches conferences as if they were a playlist of YouTube videos is probably going to be disappointed.
I go to conferences for two reasons: to meet people and learn stuff. And really, as I am generally poor at meeting people, the learning part is the bulk of it. So, really, I completely disagree with the foundation of your statement.
Whether or not information is technically available, there are any number of reasons why conference presentations are useful. They provide synthesis of information from multiple sources. They provide use cases and experiences. They dive into things that are poorly documented. They present information in a different mode. They highlight things you might have missed. They share with you the presenter's thinking about thorny issues.
After all, what publicly available resources on the Internet do you actually hunt down when you're researching something new? Chances are, posted conference decks and videos are a big part of them.
That's interesting and totally valid. My experience with conferences in multiple fields has been pretty lukewarm in terms of learning, but they're great for meeting people and networking.
When you say “meet people” - what does it mean? Does it mean - you just have a 1-time conversation with people or do you hope your conversation goes beyond the conference? If it is the latter, you are not going to “meet people”. You are actually trying to foster collaborations. “Meet people” is a broad phrase which encapsulates that concept.
I meet new people who I may or may not stay in touch with over time. I put names to faces of people I’ve met online and may have social time with. I get to spend time with people I’ve worked with in the past, have met previously, etc.
In my case they’re also the only chance I get to get together with a lot of co-workers F2F.
So a lot of things. In a nutshell, a combination of casual (but sometimes illuminating) conversations, begin new relationships, and extend/deepen existing ones.
And learning/new insights/stuff to look into as well.
I don't entirely agree with this. Many speakers talk about their experience with some technology or problem. If it's not presented as a sales pitch - which sometimes might happen -, it is definitely valuable to hear about real-world use cases. And then you even get to ask them questions at the end. It is an opportunity to share info and practices that you can hardly get in the same way from a non-interactive blog article or a forum thread.
> When people attend conferences, they're doing it to be seen
This might be true, and as you say, it's all business.
I don't think this is necessarily bad (I'm not saying that you think so). Conferences are useful to meet people in person and expand your network, which is also very valuable. Maybe some do this as a deliberate calculation, some others are genuinely interested in socializing. That's all very fine. And ultimately if speaking at a conference has chances to improve my resume, why would I not go for it? It's all business, right?
> If you're at a talk that's truly unbearable, just tune out or walk out if it's that bad.
This is good advice.
Overall I would say conferences are a decent tool for staying in touch with the community. Not all of them are bad, and not all speakers have inflated egos.
Conferences aren’t where you go for deep thinking, but you can at least learn about new things, even if you don’t have the time to get the details. A talk is basically an advertisement for some new thing, the goal of the talk being to get the viewer interested in learning more. The consumer of the talk is hoping to learn about new things, so when they get back from the conference they have more chew on for career/intellectual development.
A conference is a horrible place to be seen. Maybe a great place to see your colleagues/friends in industry, networking is definitely important.
This, for me, is the only reason to go to conferences. Watching presentation on YouTube is just not engaging enough and I drift away.
I don't care about being seen and I'm definitely not going there to "see" any specific persona.
All in all (I am talking about tech conferences here) they're a way for me to gauge the current development in my industry.
On top of that I specifically and without exception avoid all off-topic/non-technical talks. Maybe if more people did so we could have better conferences.
In this I agree with you. I have yet to give a talk where the technical content couldn't be better conveyed in text. Different people comprehend information at different rates. Some people like to pause here and there and think about what they've just read. People read faster than they listen to the spoken word. Blog posts can organize content with footnotes and links to allow people to explore.
I can go on and on. A spoken talk does exactly two things a blog post cannot do:
1. I can communicate emotion--like enthusiasm--better in person than on video, and better on video than in teh written word.
2. A bunch of people watching a talk together spill out into the hallway together.
The point of most conferences is the "hallway track." If a talk motivates people to be interested in something (point 1) and to talk to others who are also motivated (point 2) while the iron is hot, then the ideas can become sticky.
All I try to do in talks is convey enough information to let people decide if they want to research the topic on their own. My job is to sell them on how interesting it is, and then the audience can use the hallway track to follow up.
I am NOT trying to teach anything in a conference talk.
I agree with all that. It’s also the reason I think most conference talks should be 30 minutes or so. There are exceptions and people are different but mostly by 30 minutes I’m either meh or I want to take a look at this at my own pace under better conditions.
DEF CON has a lot of informational talks where research is presented. Going to villages also sometimes gives you the opportunity to join a team and learn new stuff. Research is also presented at black hat (though not necessarily as much, it's more for "suits"). Shmoocon and bsides, too.
I'm not sure if this is more security-related, but many of the top security conferences have lots of useful stuff there.
> When people attend conferences, they're doing it to be seen.
Not when I do it. I go to the conferences to learn. To learn what's out there, to see what people are working on, what they're excited about, what they want to talk about, what they want to hear about. Sometimes I give talks too, but that's usually not the fun part of a conference to me.
I don't go to conferences to be seen. I go to conferences to see friends and if I'm lucky make new ones. Friends from all over the world, and from previous jobs, show up the conference. I could care less about "being seen".
I give talks at conferences for the same reason I write blog posts. A talk or a post gives me a reason to get my thinking straight about something. There's nothing like trying to explain something to force you to figure out how it really works and identify the places where you are hand-waving over gaps in your understanding.
Fame/ego _sounds_ like a nice side-effect of this activity, especially when you succumb to survival bias and look at people who have been writing for a while or speaking for a while.
But to get here, I had to give some talks that were soundly (and rightly) criticized. That can be humiliating, and more than once I have vowed never to give another talk. Many others followed through and gave one talk, or maybe two, and then never gave another.
Same for blogging. Today I'm supposedly a good writer. But 3/4 of my posts generate crickets. Writing is a terrible way to try to build your ego, it's either criticism or the resounding impression that nobody cares about you and your writing.
Sure, I guess some people want to be famous and have people applaud their talk and are willing to plug away at it to get there for that reason, but in all honestly, if fame is what you seek, writing code is a far easier path to that fame.
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Summary:
To get to the point where you get your ego stroked, you have to endure a lot of your ego being totally destroyed. Most people don't make it past that, therefore if we are to postulate a reason for giving a talk, "ego" is not a good reason for most people, because most people never get that ego boost.
If that's all you're getting out of conferences then it sounds like a waste of time and you should probably stop going.
The real reason is to meet and get to know people in person that you may want work with or collaborate with. Maybe they're a speaker, or not. Also, in the sciences at least, some conferences are for the presentation and in-person discussion of new breakthroughs. The in-person part is frequently invaluable.
Maybe public conferences, the public side of them. But at the invite-only events on really does get to shake hands and chat with people about not-public stuff that isnt availible by other means.
I think this is true for 99% of conferences if we include non-technical conferences, making almost all of them a waste of time outside outside of the networking/hiring stuff.
However I will make a plug that the AI community has very informative conferences with proceedings and poster sessions at NeurIPS, AAAI, CVPR etc... all presenting new SOTA to the community.
I'd say it's similar with Chaos Congress and DEFCON, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent.
This is so incorrect and for some mainly subtle reasons. Many times companies (and people) don't publicly want to expose the details of what they're doing or working on. That said, at conferences many "off-the-record" conversations happen that are extremely valuable. How often can you spend days together with peers from other companies? That IMO is the real value of going.
I generally agree with your sentiment. However, there are a small percentage of talks that are exceptional and that probably wouldn't have gotten the same resonance if they were released as a paper or blog post. I also think this is slowly changing, due to Youtube, podcasts etc.
I've noticed that most speakers don't actually convey any information, instead just exploring some very basic idea in way too much depth. Just lots of fluff really.
Also agree with others though, that conferences have their uses for meeting people which does result in knowledge exchange.
When people attend conferences, they're doing it to be seen. That's true whether you're on stage or off. Everyone thinks they're awesome, or if they don't then they probably want to be awesome. People with big egos, though we get jealous of them, get big attention. If you act important, chances are you'll make people think you're important. It's all business.
If you're at a talk that's truly unbearable, just tune out or walk out if it's that bad. I've done this a bunch of times when a person's egotism is too cringy or when some malcontent is being way too preachy. The latter seems to becoming more common. Barf. Sorry, you're not making me pay thousands for this shit so I can be told I'm dumb.
Check your egos? Why are you even going to conferences?