Huh. Is it just me? I couldn't make it through more than a screen of this post because of the author's ego that seemed to be spilling out the sides of their mouth.
I didn't "read to the end" like admonished, so not sure if it was meant to be humorous.
I thought the author was sincere after the first read. I read it after reading your comment and respectfully disagree about the author's ego. I have never been a conference speaker so perhaps I am not the best judge.
I skipped the rest after his trying to equate concluding you're not going to get accepted to a particular conference with 'ego'.
Having self-respect and deciding not to keep uselessly abasing yourself to a clique that's never going to anoint you is perfectly reasonable. As the previous poster said the article author seems over-blessed with ego thinking he knows enough to hand out blanket advice putting the fault on others.
I felt like it was a bit preachy and "only listen to me" kind of a tone. I agree with you. If he had articulated his point better I would have liked it. I really hate the ego of the author to suggest that you shouldn't speak on something and should "mentor someone 'underrepsented'." Sigh. If you put the work into the talk, know it really well, and you're enthusastic, that's what's important. Be there to help others and help them prep. Give talks on how to give a talk.
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?
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
> 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.
Well, I dare to say that almost every conference speaker has at least a "sufficiently sized" ego. Otherwise they won't be speaking at a conference about $topic.
I'm a conference organizer, and I'm not sure what I just read. I feel there must be some angry emails or negative interactions that led to this blog post.
I'd encourage the author to consider if there is anything they can do to attract different kinds of people to their CFP or perhaps manage expectations better?
One thing we did with our most recent CFP [1] was to reply individually [2] to each person who submitted with constructive feedback on their submission. I think transparency and respect goes a long way.
Replying to each submission is very impressive! Looks like last year you had ~24 speakers, so I assume you had ~100+ submissions. That's definitely dedication!
Have you run into speakers responding negatively to your (constructive) feedback before?
Not really. But to be honest, I think people who are upset with the rejection or the feedback are not likely to share that with me.
I like to think that how we message the CFP and how we manage the process and communication with submitters decreases the chance of people being overly upset with the outcome.
I really don’t understand this preoccupation with policing “humility” in others... Some seem to think that if you don’t have impostor syndrome you’re a scumbag or something... Can anyone explain?
> if you ARE the only person capable of giving the talk then is there is a diversity issue. Can you take an honest look at the diversity of your industry and perhaps mentor new ones – especially those from under represented groups – to be able to speak on such topics?
This seems a bit bizarre to me. Sure, they're the only one who knows right now, but they are giving a talk at a conference, which is supposed to have the purpose of educating a large number of people.
I got the feeling the author was saying: "Step out of the way for what ever group we feel is marginalized today"
It's such a regressive statement. If you know what you're talking about and are excited about it. YOU ARE THE RIGHT PERSON. The people who are at the conference and speaking are people who stepped up to do it. You don't just get this granted pass to be up there.
Some of the best talks I've seen are along the lines of "nobody cares about X but me, and here's why _you_ should care about it" or "I'm the only person who has attempted Y (and lived/succeeded) and here's what happened".
If a lot of people could give the talk, it wouldn't be that interesting. Giving talks is often the first step at getting the message out.
My spouse plans conferences. Her event planning team is mostly women. Most of the speakers at their conferences are men - the main reason why is because many women candidates refuse the opportunity. An attendee who loudly complained about diversity became more understanding after being invited to help recruit speakers.
The ego shouldn't be checked - it should be encouraged if you want more people to want to be conference speakers.
Your ego isn't something you just "check"
People toss around the word ego with zero understanding of what ego is and how it functions.
YOUR VERY SURVIVAL IS AT STAKE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8NNtpzYQx8
But how developed does your consciousness have to be to even begin to grasp it?
I hate the phrase, "check your [facet of personality]." I have asked people to examine their motivations, and I always will - because saying, "why do you believe you are the most qualified person to give this talk?" should really be answered before the person gets up to speak.
And if the answer is, "I'm not, but the person who is doesn't want to evangelize", fine. But yes, consider why you're speaking. That's fine. Otherwise, the message is a load of drivel.
I've been to a few developer conferences in the UK over the years with "famous names" on the bill. But I don't remember detecting any of the speakers having overly burgeoning egos. In fact I got to speak to a quite a few of these folks at lunch time (most, if not all, ate lunch with the attendees as well), breaks and post conference; and in these encounters so none of these folks made me feel "they were too important" to speak to me.
Sure some of the folks have a certain "showmanship" on stage such as back in the day Don Box (and his bath full of SOAP) and these days Scott Hanselman at NDC or Build. But that's fine, they make what could be a dull presentation highly entertaining and you're learning some stuff as well.
Maybe this is a US thing (seeing as the author seems to be based in the US) or certain types of conferences (WordPress conferences?)?
46 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadI didn't "read to the end" like admonished, so not sure if it was meant to be humorous.
Having self-respect and deciding not to keep uselessly abasing yourself to a clique that's never going to anoint you is perfectly reasonable. As the previous poster said the article author seems over-blessed with ego thinking he knows enough to hand out blanket advice putting the fault on others.
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?
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.
Anyone who approaches conferences as if they were a playlist of YouTube videos is probably going to be disappointed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A conference is a horrible place to be seen. Maybe a great place to see your colleagues/friends in industry, networking is definitely important.
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.
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.
They exist exactly for the purpose of conveying information, though it's generally commercial vendors trying to make known their product & services.
Prior to the internet, this was one of the few venues for professionals to congregate and share.
I'm not sure if this is more security-related, but many of the top security conferences have lots of useful stuff there.
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.
---
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.
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 would say you have a very limited idea of what teaching encompasses. It's not synonymous with "training".
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'd encourage the author to consider if there is anything they can do to attract different kinds of people to their CFP or perhaps manage expectations better?
One thing we did with our most recent CFP [1] was to reply individually [2] to each person who submitted with constructive feedback on their submission. I think transparency and respect goes a long way.
[1] https://2019.cascadiajs.com/cfp
[2] https://twitter.com/crtr0/status/1156602180763152385
Have you run into speakers responding negatively to your (constructive) feedback before?
I like to think that how we message the CFP and how we manage the process and communication with submitters decreases the chance of people being overly upset with the outcome.
This seems a bit bizarre to me. Sure, they're the only one who knows right now, but they are giving a talk at a conference, which is supposed to have the purpose of educating a large number of people.
It's such a regressive statement. If you know what you're talking about and are excited about it. YOU ARE THE RIGHT PERSON. The people who are at the conference and speaking are people who stepped up to do it. You don't just get this granted pass to be up there.
If a lot of people could give the talk, it wouldn't be that interesting. Giving talks is often the first step at getting the message out.
The ego shouldn't be checked - it should be encouraged if you want more people to want to be conference speakers.
And if the answer is, "I'm not, but the person who is doesn't want to evangelize", fine. But yes, consider why you're speaking. That's fine. Otherwise, the message is a load of drivel.
Sure some of the folks have a certain "showmanship" on stage such as back in the day Don Box (and his bath full of SOAP) and these days Scott Hanselman at NDC or Build. But that's fine, they make what could be a dull presentation highly entertaining and you're learning some stuff as well.
Maybe this is a US thing (seeing as the author seems to be based in the US) or certain types of conferences (WordPress conferences?)?