Guide to speaking at tech conferences

I'm an occasional lurker here but I created this account because of this comment as it represents what is so annoying about this community sometimes.

What exactly are you aiming to achieve with this comment? Sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all.

> In my early days, I had also this urge but it's wrong. The whole post is wrong. Ask yourself WHY you want to speak at tech conferences. What's the aim of your speech? Most of the times and most people don't have an answer.

Who are you to say it's wrong? Even if people are doing it for the wrong reasons, the fact that they are doing it means that this post is relevant to them. To call the post "wrong" is so arrogant and adds nothing to the contribution. All it does is give you a useless delusion of grandeur that makes you think you know better than this author, or those that find value in the post.

> - To increase your personal market value? You think one speech is enough? Not at all. You need so much more. A topic, more than your vim config or some Github repo which got five stars. You need achievements, first. You need a damn story, a sharp profile. Then go out and hold 10 talks/year, shotgun Google's video search with your talks.

This makes no sense. If you're still advocating for eventually going to give talks, why did you start off by calling this post wrong when it gives advice to people that want to speak?

> And be aware that public talks don't necessarily improve your market value. One so-so talk on Youtube about your vim config at some third-class conference is worse than nothing. Besides, most tech conference are third-class.

This sounds like a personal problem for you. And no, one so-so talk on Youtube about your vim config at some third-class conference isn't necessarily worse than nothing

> Public speaking skills are overrated. It's enough to be able to moderate a meeting/standup for 10-50 people. To do proper speaking, you need to do it frequently, you need to understand entertainment, sometimes you need script writers, media trainers, etc.

If you're moderating a meeting with 10-50 people, good public speaking skills will go a long way into making the meeting worthwhile for the attendees.

I have no relation to the author of this post, but it's jarring seeing comments like that throw away nuance and kindness, and let out arrogant statements all under the guise of intellectualism.

I'd fully expect "11 reasons people speak at conferences" to include a lot of reasons associated with personal benefits. (And I'd actually only count 3 of those as being vanity: the rush, promotion, and recognition.)

People sure don't speak at conferences so they can spend more time at airports and on planes.

Many do also enjoy it for altruistic reasons listed. But relatively few people are going to take on tasks that aren't also beneficial to themselves personally.

Whether or not it's vanity, there's an element of enjoying being in the public eye--at least in some contexts. If someone really doesn't like being publicly visible they're mostly going to self-select out of being a speaker unless they have some other compelling motivation for doing so.

Whether or not it comes naturally or it's a persona they've developed for professional reasons, most public speakers like the energy of the crowd or other audience. (Personally, I'm much more comfortable live than on video--which is a somewhat different skill.)

This is incredibly negative. You could make the same comment about any public form of communication. Speeches, articles, heck even a Twitter post.

This is an absolutely destructive viewpoint in particular for all those brilliant people who do interesting stuff but never think they are ready to share their story just because they are no Jimmy Fallon. Being bad at things in the beginning is part of every journey.

Honestly, that seems like an overstatement. The same could be said for anything finding its way onto the internet that doesn't represent you at your current best. Maybe if you're a really bad speaker/writer/etc. and, for whatever reason, think you will never get better you should be cautious about doing anything that will expose you online. But I'd suggest simply improving might be a better approach.

In the case of speaking specifically, if you don't start off giving maybe so-so talks at a Meetup, you're probably never going to get better.

ADDED: To your example. So if your first C++ code doesn't hit it out of the park, you should just give up?