[yndoendo]

Traveling to conferences allows a person to get OUT of the same old day-in-day , while also allowing to network. This can help fight burn out. Changing up your environment, even temporary, can lead to better problem solving, often during vacation, because you remove the tunnel vision.

Would like to see number of psychology and socially studies around it.

My opinion of why Meta-verse will fail is because you are using their technology in the same environment. A bad environment is a bad environment no mater how expensive the VR/AR tech your using. And also lacks body language communication.

[ultrasaurus]

For a small company, networking can be the first time people hear of the company. For a company like Google, I wonder how often networking translates instead into chances for other companies to hire away their people (without really helping much vice-versa, everyone knows about Google's hiring process)

No matter how much that actually happens, I wouldn't be shocked if it gets echoed and magnified internally as a problem.

[aetch]

The benefits you described are the same as a vacation.

[zinclozenge]

Except the employee is paid for travel, transportation, food, and lodging.

A while back when I was working at a company that had significant spending in GCP, we'd get free tickets to Next. My director basically said that there wasn't any expectation for the employees he was sending to learn or network, it was basically a semi-vacation. Kind of makes sense honestly.