| I think a lot of advice here implicitly assumes the following: 1: You are invested in the company in a serious way. 2: Your company is invested in you and wishes the best for you. However, I think those are quite optimistic assumptions. There's a inherent tension between what you want and what the company wants. The company wants to invest into you the minimum required to both keeping you as an employee as well as allowing you to function as an employee. However, you have an incentive to keep learning as much as possible and broadening your horizons. A manager's task is (at least in part) to try to resolve this tension. Your manager, however, has apparently decided to side with the company on this. There could be several reasons for this. It's possible that he's a through and through company man, who believes that the company will do right by him and all other employees and that it would not be beneficial for the company (and thus not for any of the employees of this company) were you to go give this talk. Another possibility is that he believes that you will not complain when being told that your wishes do not matter. This is quite common in IT related businesses, since in general these people are more agreeable and less likely to voice their opposition to someone they believe to have authority over them. A third option will be is that he is afraid that if you are to give this talk and network at the event, you may find out that you're not being respected properly in your current company and may try to find your luck elsewhere. I'd say that if you want to have a chance to establish a long-term working relationship with this manager, you need to find out what your manager's motivation is from keeping you from such events and based on that formulate a strategy for dealing with him/her. |
That's a pretty adverserial approach. Why not understand the manager's motivation and then work with him/her?
The "adverserial-ness" is also apperant in the possible causes you raised for the manager's decision (he's a company man / he's taking advantage of the fact that you're agreeable / he doesn't want you to work elsewhere). There can be other reasons, even with a manager that's 100% on your side. For example, maybe he worked hard to get approval for you to go to that conference, even fought his supervisors, but at the end he lost? That's why the best advice is to ask him to explain the decision, and not to come to the conversation with any assumptions.