[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.