I work in a role (Developer Relations) that involves a lot of conferences. Business travel, especially to conferences, has to be one of the biggest wastes of money and resources in corporate America today.
People spend thousands to go to a conference and the stated benefit is to hear a few talks that are definitely recorded and to have a handful of useful conversations.
Let's be honest: many people at conferences just see them as a way to have the company pay for you to get out of the office and go on a semi-vacation. I know I've gone to things with that mindset before.
Don't get me wrong it's not the events that are the issue, it's how far we travel to them. I'm sure 90% of the benefit could be had by going to local meetups and watching the big conferences online.
Conferences don't exist for the majority of the people who attend them. They're a sales tool for converting B2B decision makers, usually C- or VP-level, for which the acquisition cost helps justify the conference expenditures. This is from all sides, whether hosting or sponsoring the conference.
Developers and 'practitioners' are typically background noise to the main purpose, unless of course they have influence on the decision makers.
That’s the real answer. Even as a mere self employed consultant I’ve been to conferences where I’ve gotten deals worth many time the cost of attending (e.g. spend $2k to land a $120k contract).
This is even truer in the scale of the really big players closing deals in the millions+.
Could you elaborate on this a bit please? How, when, which sector, is this specific to that sector/field of IT, how hard it is, who are the usual suspects, what's the success rate, do you have to pre-arrange meetings, book a room where you showcase your whatever...?
Why? The only way to replicate it is basically "do good work and network". I'm not going to be able to give you any secret sauce (because there is none, not because I don't want to).
Quite often it's not the deals that are made in conferences but the relationships (the "network" part). You hang out with a lot of people in the same industry as you, you get to know & be known by them.
And invariably when you know dozens/hundreds of people in the same field somebody usually needs some work done & is more likely to give that work to somebody they met in person vs someone anonymous off of the internet.
The "do good work" part is where you turn this into a snowball & get recommended around.
Thank you for saying this, before I had a chance to. And to add to it - many companies also make vendor purchase decisions for tools/technologies not on a strategic vendor analysis, but on which ones they see at conferences.
The clearest benefit of conferences for developers is networking and the "hallway tracks" -- the emergent discussions that arise after talks. The social processes of these are hard to replicate online. The asynchronous nature of online text chat, perhaps the most apt widely-deployed alternative, already lessens the urgency and spontaneity of the discussion. There are people who don't take advantage of the opportunities to insert themselves into emergent conversations, and unless their presence alone is a positive signal for the company, they're largely wasting their company's money.
The clearest benefit of conferences for sponsors is the potential lead between frontline-but-backoffice workers who work on a particular topic to the decision-makers behind them who can influence purchasing. Being present at conferences fosters passing familiarity of developers with the product, which helps conversations that occur between those developers and their bosses later: the emails from the higher-ups that ask "what do you think about Product?", and the off-the-cuff gut assessments that follow. Irrespective of the developer's initial reaction, name recognition of the product sticks around and often makes it to later rounds of evaluation and assessment.
Absolutely! 'LobbyCon' (colloquial name for any 'Con discussions in hallways or lobbies) is a thing. I can't really get anything like that online, regardless the platform. The closest, which is a longshot, has been IRC.
Sure, you can attend talks... However "magical" things happen when you get people with different skills all talking as equals. It's the opposite of mob mentality, where each person in a group adds to the collective intelligence and power to see further.
And yes, I just got back from Circle City Con in which I gave a talk about "SigInt for the masses: Building and Using a Signals Intelligence Platform for Less than $150". For me, it was a 1hr drive. But still, watching a video or making one online != in person.
I've heard this at times but maybe I'm visiting the wrong (right?) kind of events, I've seen mostly people excited to talk about the subject of the conference, or related subjects or meet new people. But I have to say I'm more used to community-run events, smaller events or barcamps - not stuff like excessively large conference frequented mostly by enterprise people who seem a tad less excited .. Java One comes to mind from what I heard...
So yeah, networking plays such a big part that I really prefer to meet people from all over the world (or at least all over Europe) once per year and not from the same pool of ~1000-5000 in my area.
Meetups are usually a lot better for avoiding sales-related phenomena. And they are pretty topical, so you are almost sure to find a few good talks, they are not too long, and very much open ended, so if you bump into someone interesting you don't have to choose between skipping many talks or continue talking.
Most meetups here are 20-50 people (only DevOps Munich usually breaks 100 afaik) so that's not the type of event I meant - but barcamps with up to ~300 are still conference-like without the downsides, imho :)
Let's be honest: many people at conferences just see them as a way to have the company pay for you to get out of the office and go on a semi-vacation.
You're saying that like it's a bad thing. I find that these "semi-vacations" do a lot to recharge my batteries, which is very helpful to my productivity in the long run.
I'm sure 90% of the benefit could be had by going to local meetups and watching the big conferences online.
I would say more like 50 percent. The other 50 percent comes in the form of (vitally important) F2F interactions. Which are why, time and time again -- remote interactions are found to be "just not the same" as in-person interactions.
> You're saying that like it's a bad thing. I find that these "semi-vacations" do a lot to recharge my batteries, which is very helpful to my productivity in the long run.
Nothing's wrong with semi-vacations. But we might as well be open about it and provide an actual vacation and do it in a less carbon intensive way.
Let's say if a company instead of paying for a conference, just gave you a few days off and cash in hand. How would you spend it?
Anecdotally it seems to me that not only is most business travel wasteful, but the people who do it the most are the most wasteful (e.g. a junior dev won't make a trip unless it's really needed where an exec won't think twice). Thus the people who fly the most use are the most thoughtless about it, and certainly at their level the cost of air travel is an insufficient reason to modify behavior. It seems like a progressive carbon tax would be good: a light load on the poor schmuck who flies with great deliberation once a year, whereas the private-jet C-exec should have to pay such an large amount in carbon tax (more than a linear function of CO2) that it causes them to actually sit up and take notice.
For me (a nearly full time open source developer) the more technical conferences are a way to stay inspired, resolve /dissipate conflicts and try to figure out hard plans. I've yet to find anything that comes close, especially with people otherwise distributed across all timezones. And yes, I find the hallway track more important than the talks.
None of that is served by local meetups / watching talks online.
People spend thousands to go to a conference and the stated benefit is to hear a few talks that are definitely recorded and to have a handful of useful conversations.
Let's be honest: many people at conferences just see them as a way to have the company pay for you to get out of the office and go on a semi-vacation. I know I've gone to things with that mindset before.
Don't get me wrong it's not the events that are the issue, it's how far we travel to them. I'm sure 90% of the benefit could be had by going to local meetups and watching the big conferences online.