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Guide to speaking at tech conferences

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Re: Guide to speaking at tech conferences

#61

Duplicating a comment I posted on a previous conference thread that is even more relevant here: "... am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out ticket invites and request for papers.…

> Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. I mean - this shouldn't come as a surprise. Any sufficiently large community is going to self-organize and attempt to be self-sustaining (there's a named law about this self-perpetuation, I forget the name). I suspect your mental model of conferences infers too much decorum: there's a whole bunch of conferences for compute…

"(there's a named law about this self-perpetuation, I forget the name)"

Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy:

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle

Re: Guide to speaking at tech conferences

#62

Duplicating a comment I posted on a previous conference thread that is even more relevant here: "... am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out ticket invites and request for papers.…

I have never been to an academic conference where I have gotten anything from the talk that I couldn't have gotten from reading the paper. The advantage to a conference is that I have easy access to the author so that I can ask questions, discuss similar ideas or even just network. Non-academic conferences serve a similar purpose. Yes, you could just read a blog post. However, if you are looking to explore ideas with…

This is a fair point. But I think, and this is a large generalisation, that the answers to questions at an academic conference will be far more in-depth and interesting than those at other confs.

Not only that, but the calibre of questions asked is likely to be higher, resulting in better answers too. If the answer could be given as a comment reply on an equally banal blogpost level talk, then was the ticket price really worth the opportunity to ask the question face-to-face? I'd pay money to ask the leading expert at x university in machine learning a question. The leading "expert" in ClownJS? Not so much.

Re: Guide to speaking at tech conferences

#63
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's your only motivation, I'm guessing you're not going to do a great job. There are exceptions of course.

Although there are many people out there who do good jobs based only on their love of what they are doing I believe this number is dwarfed by the number of people doing good jobs for money. I bet the number of people doing bad jobs based only on their lover of what they are doing is also dwarfed by the number of people doing bad jobs for money, but it would be nice to see stats on these things. Still, since I only do…

There's a vast gulf between being motivated only by money and being motivated only by love of what you're doing. I enjoy my work, including speaking, most of the time. But if someone weren't paying me to do it I would be--at a minimum--much much more selective about what I took on.

Re: Guide to speaking at tech conferences

#64
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although there are many people out there who do good jobs based only on their love of what they are doing I believe this number is dwarfed by the number of people doing good jobs for money. I bet the number of people doing bad jobs based only on their lover of what they are doing is also dwarfed by the number of people doing bad jobs for money, but it would be nice to see stats on these things. Still, since I only do…

There's a vast gulf between being motivated only by money and being motivated only by love of what you're doing. I enjoy my work, including speaking, most of the time. But if someone weren't paying me to do it I would be--at a minimum--much much more selective about what I took on.

sure I like programming also, but I realized some years ago when I got my first really big consultant paycheck that a lot of the stuff I used to hate about working just flew out the window.
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