Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
davidbisset.com
Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
#2Huh. Is it just me? I couldn't make it through more than a screen of this post because of the author's ego that seemed to be spilling out the sides of their mouth.
I didn't "read to the end" like admonished, so not sure if it was meant to be humorous.
Re: Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
#3Blog Writers, Check Your Egos
Re: Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
#4Conferences don't exist to convey information. You can learn stuff from conferences, but I don't think I've ever been to one where people were talking about things that weren't already publicly available on the internet. (An exception might be conferences like Apple's WWDC, since that's a place for the company to announce proprietary info)
When people attend conferences, they're doing it to be seen. That's true whether you're on stage or off. Everyone thinks they're awesome, or if they don't then they probably want to be awesome. People with big egos, though we get jealous of them, get big attention. If you act important, chances are you'll make people think you're important. It's all business.
If you're at a talk that's truly unbearable, just tune out or walk out if it's that bad. I've done this a bunch of times when a person's egotism is too cringy or when some malcontent is being way too preachy. The latter seems to becoming more common. Barf. Sorry, you're not making me pay thousands for this shit so I can be told I'm dumb.
Check your egos? Why are you even going to conferences?
Re: Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
#5Well, I dare to say that almost every conference speaker has at least a "sufficiently sized" ego. Otherwise they won't be speaking at a conference about $topic.
Re: Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
#6Conferences don't exist to convey information. You can learn stuff from conferences, but I don't think I've ever been to one where people were talking about things that weren't already publicly available on the internet. (An exception might be conferences like Apple's WWDC, since that's a place for the company to announce proprietary info) When people attend conferences, they're doing it to be seen . That's true whet…
Maybe public conferences, the public side of them. But at the invite-only events on really does get to shake hands and chat with people about not-public stuff that isnt availible by other means.
Re: Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
#7Conferences don't exist to convey information. You can learn stuff from conferences, but I don't think I've ever been to one where people were talking about things that weren't already publicly available on the internet. (An exception might be conferences like Apple's WWDC, since that's a place for the company to announce proprietary info) When people attend conferences, they're doing it to be seen . That's true whet…
You are not wrong in your reason for why a certain type of person attends a conference: to satisfy ego or some other vanity, you are wrong in assuming all (or even a majority of) people attend conferences for this reason.
Conferences in my view exist for a variety of reasons outside of their most commonly associated purpose of existing to provide educational material that others have noted can be easily found other places online for most, but not all. There certainly exist conferences that are more social and some that are more informational where the information being presented is truly groundbreaking and the first time being conveyed to a wide audience is the conference video and transcription.
Conferences also allow you to engage and connect with your associated programming community in ways you can not have possibly fathomed outside of the conference. Having lunch with the language creators of Go, as an example, at Gophercon. Sitting through a community design discussion for the future of Rails at a Rails Conf with framework developers and language maintainers like Aaron Patterson.
Why the online programming community always seems to downplay the real human element of conferences is beyond me. We aren’t robots. Being around other people with the same interests of you acts in of itself as inspiring. I certainly get pumped for my given interests after I leave a conference for that interest, as most people do.
Re: Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
#8Conferences don't exist to convey information. You can learn stuff from conferences, but I don't think I've ever been to one where people were talking about things that weren't already publicly available on the internet. (An exception might be conferences like Apple's WWDC, since that's a place for the company to announce proprietary info) When people attend conferences, they're doing it to be seen . That's true whet…
I generally agree with your sentiment. However, there are a small percentage of talks that are exceptional and that probably wouldn't have gotten the same resonance if they were released as a paper or blog post. I also think this is slowly changing, due to Youtube, podcasts etc.
Re: Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
#9Conferences don't exist to convey information. You can learn stuff from conferences, but I don't think I've ever been to one where people were talking about things that weren't already publicly available on the internet. (An exception might be conferences like Apple's WWDC, since that's a place for the company to announce proprietary info) When people attend conferences, they're doing it to be seen . That's true whet…
I think this is true for 99% of conferences if we include non-technical conferences, making almost all of them a waste of time outside outside of the networking/hiring stuff.
However I will make a plug that the AI community has very informative conferences with proceedings and poster sessions at NeurIPS, AAAI, CVPR etc... all presenting new SOTA to the community.
I'd say it's similar with Chaos Congress and DEFCON, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent.
Re: Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
#10I'm a conference organizer, and I'm not sure what I just read. I feel there must be some angry emails or negative interactions that led to this blog post.
I'd encourage the author to consider if there is anything they can do to attract different kinds of people to their CFP or perhaps manage expectations better?
One thing we did with our most recent CFP [1] was to reply individually [2] to each person who submitted with constructive feedback on their submission. I think transparency and respect goes a long way.