[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.