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Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

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Re: Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

#41

Post by Aurornis »

juliansimioni wrote: post #16

In my social and meetup circle, COVID coincided with all the organizers of my favorite meetups reaching the age where one generally starts to slow down, have kids, and possibly move out of the city for more space and calm. At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore. So while keeping an existing meetup running pre-CO…

> At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore.

This is what turned me off of the local meetups: They had become a means to an end for career advancement. Both for the organizers and presenters.

The meetups I enjoyed the most in the past were full of people who enjoyed the subject matter. In the 2010s it turned into a career building and networking exercise.

Every time a new technology started to become popular it became a war of the meetups: Organizers would try to start a Next.js meetup when it became popular instead of discussing it at the JavaScript meetup. One started a Rust meetup, then jumped to trying to run a Zig meetup when that started rising in popularity.

Going to a meetup was a gamble. It was hard to know if you were going to get a good presentation with discussion, or a half-baked set of slides from someone who heard on LinkedIn that presenting at meetups is good for your resume.

Re: Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

#42

Post by Aurornis »

RajT88 wrote: post #12

I see two things which may have an impact: 1. Conferences require travel budget, which in tech companies (from what I hear) is being repurposed to build out AI capacity. Really, everything is being squeezed like this it seems. 2. A lot of folks only go to cons to network - which also means finding better jobs. There might be some connection between cons and turnover.

> 1. Conferences require travel budget, which in tech companies (from what I hear) is being repurposed to build out AI capacity. Really, everything is being squeezed like this it seems.

> 2. A lot of folks only go to cons to network - which also means finding better jobs. There might be some connection between cons and turnover.

1 and 2 are related, at least in my experience.

Sending people to conferences was really popular for a while, but companies began realizing that most engineers weren't actually learning much from the conferences. It was a way to travel and network and have your company pay for it.

At one company they had a problem where people would put in requests to attend conferences in good travel locations, but then not actually go to the conference. They'd bring their families along and have a little discounted vacation where the company paid for the hotel room, 1 plane ticket, and some of the expenses without having to take any PTO.

Re: Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

#43

Post by kridsdale1 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #37
tasa999nine9 wrote: post #9

> I think the biggest value, and the reason I personally get really excited to attend local and regional events, is the ability to have casual, non-rushed discussions outside of the session rooms. As someone who's been to many meetups and conferences but who's generally unable to partake in "the hallway track" because of a potent cocktail of social anxiety, impostor syndrome and whatever else is going on inside my he…

> As someone who's been to many meetups and conferences but who's generally unable to partake in "the hallway track" because of a potent cocktail of social anxiety, impostor syndrome and whatever else is going on inside my head, this makes me quite wistful. As someone to whom this also doesn't come naturally, I came to realize that this is simply how things are. Real life itself happens in the "hallway track", this i…

It seems like the education system is making a lot of progress there, though.

Re: Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

#44

Post by cosmic_cheese »

juliansimioni wrote: post #16

In my social and meetup circle, COVID coincided with all the organizers of my favorite meetups reaching the age where one generally starts to slow down, have kids, and possibly move out of the city for more space and calm. At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore. So while keeping an existing meetup running pre-CO…

Plenty of folks moved out for cost of living savings too, both organizers and attendees alike. With many roles having turned remote and rock bottom mortgage interest rates, mid-late pandemic was a rare window of opportunity and many recognized that.

Re: Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

#45

Post by inanutshellus »

Aurornis wrote: post #41
juliansimioni wrote: post #16

In my social and meetup circle, COVID coincided with all the organizers of my favorite meetups reaching the age where one generally starts to slow down, have kids, and possibly move out of the city for more space and calm. At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore. So while keeping an existing meetup running pre-CO…

> At that point they had all been running their meetups for 5-10 years, so they were also established in their careers and didn't NEED them anymore. This is what turned me off of the local meetups: They had become a means to an end for career advancement. Both for the organizers and presenters. The meetups I enjoyed the most in the past were full of people who enjoyed the subject matter. In the 2010s it turned into a…

Technology meetups are just going to inherently be about networking for jobs, IMO. The self-interest is just not alignable.

    * Noob goes to event to learn and network.
    * Journeyman goes for networking and hopefully learn a bit but mostly doesn't get much out of it. 
    * Expert learns nothing. Goes to network / advertise. 
    * Meetup is sponsored by local recruiting firm.
Meanwhile the local knitting group is

    * Work on the project you'd've done alone on your couch
    * Chat while you do it instead of alone on your couch
    * When you get stuck, group encourages and guides in real time.
    * Meetup is sponsored by the yarn and craft supply biz yer meeting in.
The latter group is entirely self-sufficient, self-sustaining, and self-managing. The former is a slow-burn tutorial that you can now do more efficiently via YouTube and chatbot.

Re: Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

#46

Post by dangus »

dheera wrote: post #28

People are going to in-person events. The difference is now everyone and their grandmother just learned to code and there's a shitton of noise in tech meetups. The only in-person events worth going to are those that have some kind of a filter on attendance, e.g. ones friends, investors, or employers invite you to. I'm not interested in your Arduino project that detects pigeons with AlexNet.

This seems like BS gatekeeper logic. You think that nobody “just learned to code” in the conferences of old?

How do you expect people to get better at their craft if you want to lock them out of the conversation?

Re: Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

#47

Post by bonoboTP »

Aurornis wrote: post #31

COVID was a tipping point, but the decline was many years in the making. Meetups and conferences in my area were becoming less enjoyable year over year for several reasons: - They became targets for networking and resume building. Meetups that were previously small groups of highly engaged people were now full of attendees who were looking for job opportunities because LinkedIn told them that was how to do it. - Sele…

I wonder if it's me simply getting older and naturally jaded, or a real change in the world, but tech / software is just getting less personally exciting for me. Things are getting mature, they are on high version numbers, the innovators replaced by committees. Enshittification rampant. I used to be excited for things like new features in Python, but maybe related to the switch to design-by-committee model, I'm less so now. ML and AI was exciting, surprising. Today, there are still cool things like the new Gemini image editor or Genie 3, or Veo 3, but it's hard to ignore how its use is also mostly feeding the monetized enshittification metric-gaming slop-production that displaces genuineness from the net. At this point, none of these advances are jaw-dropping. They just built a bigger datacenter, curated their data better, trained a bigger model, etc. And what's the endgame? Real-time photorealistic 24/7, photorealistic VR experiences? Probably doable, but dystopian. New phones used to be fun, new OSs used to be fun, now things are somehow simultaneouly stale and too-fast-moving. The same category of things, but with churn that doesn't make one interested in putting in the time.

Re: Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

#49

Post by dheera »

dangus wrote: post #46
dheera wrote: post #28

People are going to in-person events. The difference is now everyone and their grandmother just learned to code and there's a shitton of noise in tech meetups. The only in-person events worth going to are those that have some kind of a filter on attendance, e.g. ones friends, investors, or employers invite you to. I'm not interested in your Arduino project that detects pigeons with AlexNet.

This seems like BS gatekeeper logic. You think that nobody “just learned to code” in the conferences of old? How do you expect people to get better at their craft if you want to lock them out of the conversation?

> How do you expect people to get better at their craft

Reality check: I don't. Educating the masses for free is not my duty and I don't have space and time for that. If I host a tech-related event it's for a group of people I care about, including myself, to mutually benefit from each other.

Re: Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

#50

Post by bonoboTP »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #43
bonoboTP wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who's been to many meetups and conferences but who's generally unable to partake in "the hallway track" because of a potent cocktail of social anxiety, impostor syndrome and whatever else is going on inside my head, this makes me quite wistful. As someone to whom this also doesn't come naturally, I came to realize that this is simply how things are. Real life itself happens in the "hallway track", this i…

It seems like the education system is making a lot of progress there, though.

I have no idea what you even mean. Education system in what sense? What do you mean by "progress"? What do you mean by "there"? Do you mean teachers somehow making sure that kids socialize in ways that aren't "hallway-track-y"? I genuinely can't decipher this comment.
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