[driverdan]

Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's.

They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship. The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance. They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches.

If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

[CapmCrackaWaka]

So many conferences are like that, even local ones. I just went to a conference in Richmond, VA (RVATech Summit). The first keynote spent his entire time selling his company, and barely mentioned machine learning. His presentation was called "Building a Company around Machine Learning".

The year before, the head of machine learning at amazon spent his 45 mins talking about the advantages of AWS over Azure. The more money someone manages at these companies, the worse their presentation is going to be, in my experience.

[vlod]

I don't understand why more people don't just get up and leave. Yeah, it can be perceived as being rude, but I view someone bait and switching me to listen to a 45 min sales pitch as rude. If the majority of people did this presenters/conference planners would get the point.

I DO realize that some of these pay the bills so I give them 10 mins tops. If you don't start talking about meat-and-potatoes after that, I'm outta there.

[true_religion]

Some people are interested in the sales pitch, especially if they can ask questions directly afterwards.

For me, a lot of times I go to conferences about subjects I already have expertise in, so it’s hit or miss if I can learn anything. So having a talk about someone’s product or personal experience can be better than a lecture over knowledge I already have.

[VectorLock]

I went to a "DevOps Days" local conference and it was exactly like this as well.

[PaulHoule]

It's tough.

I think some people get sent to conferences for the wrong reasons: the company has some money for some reason so they send them.

Other people should go but they can't get the money.

Many times the companies that get booths and sponsor the conference press a lot of flesh and get a lot of business cards but no sales. Sometimes you will see a conference sponsor smiling afterwards, but often they end up spending the last day doing a seminar on some product to a bunch of tired defense contractors who flew across the country to read stuff on their laptops -- if you get in free as a speaker it is probably worth the airfare to commiserate about it with the head of marketing for the sponsor afterwards in the hotel bar.

A nearby city has been thinking about building a conference center, consultants are telling them that most conference centers don't make a profit. Many cities subsidize them because they hope that it will bring in more traffic to other businesses in the area.

However, with conferences being as expensive as they are, I wonder how it is they don't make a profit? Who does?

[bluGill]

Don't confuse the conference center for the conferences inside. The conferences can make money (though they often don't) while the center loses money. Either because they can't book enough, or because there is enough competition that you have to lower prices.

Remember that there are only so many businesses (including non-profits) in town that want to rent the place. When people are coming from out of town what difference does the town make? Thus it is hard to fill your conference center.

[Retric]

It’s the same issue as sports stadiums, once local governments frequently subsidies something it stops being a competitive market with healthy profit margins.

[hinkley]

I remember having to justify (if my boss was kidding, he's not good at jokes) a $3k ticket for JavaOne several times.

Both times I came back with a handful of tidbits that would have saved either myself or an entire team weeks of frustrating debugging or research work. So yeah, you got your money's worth.

[bsder]

This is one of the issues I have with conferences--I have to sit through hours of stuff I don't care about to find the nuggets that are useful.

This is NOT confined to software conferences. I have been to semiconductor conferences and injection molding conferences and the phenomenon is the same.

[koolba]

If you’re only there to watch and listen you’re doing it wrong. It’ll be faster, cheaper, and more effective watching videos offline.

Conferences are for networking and interacting with like minded people. It’s for asking questions that are not part of the presentation, learning about something interesting someone is doing that’s not in some slides, or just bouncing off your own crazy ideas on a new audience.

[bsder]

> If you’re only there to watch and listen you’re doing it wrong. It’ll be faster, cheaper, and more effective watching videos offline.

IF they are videoed for offline. Not all conferences are high tech conferences.

> Conferences are for networking and interacting with like minded people.

Sure, but the injection molding conference I went to was a good example of "It really is about the speakers".

One of the speakers was the first one in North America to get one of the new Japanese 3-D metal printers which include a precision 3-D milling head in the envelope so that they can 3-D print injection molds with conformal cooling for prototype runs. So far, so normal--and not terribly useful to an electrical engineer.

However, he had a throwaway line that their previous solution was to use a Form 2, 3-D print an injection mold in the high-temp plastic, put that mold in an aluminum carrier, and inject 25-50 units before the plastic mold breaks down.

THAT got my attention on a LOT of different dimensions:

1) SLA was good enough for real work with a company doing injection molding whose time is money

2) SLA had good enough surface finish to do injection molding.

3) The high-temp resin was robust enough to hold up to a real injection molding machine

That simple throwaway line was THE nugget of the conference. We bought an SLA printer the next week and the thing hasn't been idle since.

[bartread]

> Conferences are for networking and interacting with like minded people.

Granted.

But my ability to effectively network is severely ablated when I've been de-energised by being bored out of my skull by crappy content.

Great content energises and sparks conversation. Bad content does the absolute opposite: it's exhausting and mindnumbing. It puts me in a mindset where what I want to do is not talk to people, but get away and get some fresh air.

[thaumasiotes]

> I have to sit through hours of stuff I don't care about to find the nuggets that are useful.

> This is NOT confined to software conferences.

It's not confined to anything. This is a problem any time you want knowledge of any kind. Nobody in the past wrote a book thinking of you specifically having whatever problem in the future.

Consider Ben Waggoner's answer here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-equivalent-of-the-names-of...

Imagine the question is "what were the Norse constellations?" (It's not the question originally asked, but it is the question being answered.) This is the type of thing that might have been formally documented. But if it was, all such documentation was lost. Instead, the knowledge is distributed through every cultural artifact ever produced by the Norse:

> Here's the thing. We do have some astronomical manuscripts written in Iceland, in Old Icelandic. However, they're translations of Greek or Latin works

> Most of these are found in Icelandic treatises on computus, the medieval art of reckoning the calendar and determining the dates of Christian holy days; these also contain some astronomical lore. But they're not useful guides to what the pre-Christian, pre-book culture Norse would have thought about the stars.

> Most of the constellation names are direct translations of the Latin names. Aquarius is Vatnkarl (“water-man”), Pisces is Fiskarnir (“the fish”)

> Some of the texts refer to constellations that I don't think are even visible from Iceland, such as Centaurus and Ara, so clearly they're not "native Norse" texts.

> And yet. . . every so often, one of these translations will slip something in that's not in the original.

>> Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus, wife of Perseus, sits in the Milk Ring [Milky Way], there where we say "wolf's jaws", in between Pisces and Cassiopeia and Aries

> And boom, there's a constellation name that has nothing to do with Greek mythology: in normalized spelling, úlfs kjöptr, "wolf's mouth" or "wolf's jaws."

If you want to answer this simple question ("What were the Norse constellations?"), you need to read... everything. We got lucky in this astronomical treatise -- it included information that wasn't supposed to be there. Epic poetry isn't unlikely to make some kind of reference to the stars. Maybe we could tease something out of a folk song. Maybe there's a picture somewhere with a caption on it. Maybe there's an ancient anthropological study of the Norse by some other culture, that happens to mention a constellation of theirs.

Everything is like this. Try studying any language independently and then sitting in on a class. It will either be mostly stuff you already knew, with stuff you didn't know scattered randomly through, or it will be mostly stuff you didn't know, with stuff you learned long ago scattered randomly through, presented as new and challenging. It probably is new and challenging -- to the students in the class, who have been through a curriculum designed to lead them to this one.

There is no way to make the world give you only information that you think is relevant, because "information you think is relevant" is a concept that only exists in your mind.

[michaelbuckbee]

A presentation delivered live doesn't convey information faster than a YouTube video - that's just inherent in the message.

[matchagaucho]

Dreamforce hit this tipping point around 2015 where it just became too big for any practical purposes.

Most people are there for the free swag, parties, and booze.

The sessions have increasingly sensationalized titles with hollow delivery.

The local hotels charge $500 night. Uber and Lyft drivers converge on Moscone center like bees to honey.

Local traffic in SF comes to a halt.

Sounds fun. Right?

[andrepd]

Sounds like websummit to me.

[jen20]

Having been to WebSummit and Dreamforce (2014, admittedly, but I doubt it’s changed that much), I’d have to disagree. Dreamforce is huge and likely too big to be useful, but at least it’s a conference that pretends to have technical content and not a multi-level marketing scam like WebSummit and it’s “thought leaders” is.

[duxup]

There's a weird sort of what I feel like is sort of skewed psudo world of conferences that don't fit right in line with ... what I do even if the topic of the conference is right on target.

Conference speakers have some patterns of topics and they're useful and I appreciate them, but they often touch on some topics / have their own way of looking at things.

Other speakers seem to be all about spelling out a laundry list of platitudes topics that are even more disconnected ... I appreciate those less.

Sales pitches ... not interested.

Not to say they're useless but there are a huge variety of workplaces, developers, and all sorts of things that work differently, and conferences tend to be very focused on their general POV about how things work and are done.

I'm not sure I worded anything right but the conference culture always seems a bit 'off' for me.

[frandroid]

Local events won't pull in luminaries from around the continent/world spending serious time preparing their presentation, though...

[akozak]

Is that really worth an in-person ticket and hassle? It's not like they mingle anyway.

[daotoad]

I think it depends on the culture of the group. If the group isn't cohesive enough to have a culture, you're doomed. I've been to conferences where if you didn't know someone important, you were just another mark.

My experience at YAPC, now "The Perl Conference" has been different. The culture there is very open. I made it one time, I'm no luminary in the Perl community, but Larry Wall invited me to lunch. The other speakers were also very open and approachable.

[driverdan]

You can watch videos of these people online for free. And yes, many of them do speak at smaller events, especially in the Bay Area.

[redis_mlc]

Every word you said is true. Yet you entirely missed the point of O'Reilly conferences.

> Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's.

It's not all about you, and you're not the center of the universe.

This isn't commonly known, but the O'Reilly Open Source Conference was specifically glitzy so the global press had a good experience broadcasting it, and promoting Open Source, since around 2000. They also had about 10 simultaneous tracks, which requires a large venue. That costs real money.

> They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship.

Their prices are clearly posted on their registration pages, and they offer generous alumni discounts. And most IT people work for ... wait for it ... corporations.

> The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance.

Companies pay for those booths. If you don't like their pitch, you can ask for a technical contact to followup. Or not visit them.

Personally, I walked around to each booth and ask for an overview of their products and asked detailed questions, then blogged about it for others who couldn't make it to the conference.

So they are valuable, if you're in the right frame of mind.

> They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches.

The larger sponsors have the chance to do a keynote. That's how it works. A small percentage of keynotes at O'Reilly conferences are outright sales pitches. The rest aren't. The most valuable ones I saw were the 451 Group market analyses of upcoming trends, which I wasn't expecting to be valuable initially.

Ironically, I heard the most complaints about a keynote delivered by a world expert on HA from VMware - the problem wasn't the talk, the problem was he was a decade ahead of most of the attendees. lol.

The Percona Conference does it right: they have a track with a dedicated room for vendor-sponsored talks. So everybody knows what to expect before sitting down. Yet they still get plenty of attendees.

> If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

Or, you know, you could just go to a bar. But I'm sure you would gripe about the wallpaper color they chose, right?

[pengaru]

> If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

An added bonus to strictly attending local conferences is less harmful emissions from frivolous air travel.

[aguyfromnb]

>They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship.

I think that's mostly their point. It's a getaway "perk" for office drones.

Conferences are fun to attend once a year, but personally I never did much "business" at them. It was a work vacation. YMMV.