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Are Tech Conferences Overrated? (cnn.com) 109

Posted by EditorDavid from the hello-my-name-is dept.
"The tech industry has reached a maximum saturation point for conferences, summits and forums," writes CNN's senior media reporter, sharing his general disillusionment after Recode's recent Code Conference: But even at their best, these events fail to generate truly significant news because executives have been media-trained to the point of impenetrability... [S]peakers like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek have mastered the art -- there should be a German word for it -- of speaking for 30+ minutes without saying much of consequence or going beyond their comfort zone... [I]n two days, nothing was said on stage that fundamentally changed the existing narrative for any of these companies... Business executives are more strategic and more cautious than ever in how they speak publicly. The business media needs to be equally strategic in pushing them to say more.
He argues that the best things about conferences happen offstage, when attendees network and talk among themselves. Is that your experience, Slashdot readers?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Are tech conferences overrated?
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Are Tech Conferences Overrated? More

Are Tech Conferences Overrated?

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  • Are you sure you're talking about tech conferences (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Sounds like the author means marketing conferences not tech conferences.

    I go to tech conferences to listen to senior developers and architects speak about exiting new technologies. I'm not looking for a scoop so I'm completely satisfied.

    • Bingo. Small tech conferences are definitely good. Meet up some other technical people, often there are focused workshops about something that is definitely of interest and these events are usually not too expensive.

      And often very well known techs or authors are keynote speakers. I have seen, and sometimes spoken to people like Richard Stallman, Stoyan Stepanov, Axel Rauschmeier, Peter-Paul Koch and Aaron Walters at such events. Maybe not people who will win the Turing award or manage trillion-dollar compan

      • Re:Are you sure you're talking about tech conferen (Score:4, Informative)

        by postbigbang ( 761081 ) on Sunday June 03, 2018 @09:22AM (#56719742)

        Conferences are about conferring. It's not a PR event where you get to blather about your own stuff endlessly, while making sure that the competition and the tough questions aren't within a thousand yards.

        It's a love fest. Kiss kiss. Pure vanity. Nothing else exists in the high-cost reality distortion field. The stench of bullshit is everywhere, and the fanbois are buying suitcase full loads of merch.

        The venues that used to talk real issues are gone. It's all about the lovefest. Kiss kiss.

        There were a lot of conferences, often the crux of independent financiers, that really evolved this industry. If it's a vendor show, however, it's a love fest. Nothing to see there, just a vacation with logo merch. Nothing controversial. Nothing to see there.

        Bottom line: it's who's financing it that dictates whether you'll be subject to actual conferring, knowledge transfer across a spectrum, and independent voices, uncontrolled by a PR machine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Octorian ( 14086 )

      Tech conferences often begin with big keynote presentations, at least part of which are full of marketing for whatever company is sponsoring. This is the part that all the tech reporters pay attention to, and want to write dozens of articles about.

      Once the presentations shift to the actual technical content people like us came for, those people tend to wander off and stop paying attention.

      So yeah, maybe tech conference no longer generate value for people who write articles on how tech conferences no longer

  • business executives? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jb_nizet ( 98713 ) on Sunday June 03, 2018 @03:46AM (#56718992)

    If the speakers are business executives and the target audience is CNN journalists, it's not a tech conference. It's a business/media/marketing conference.

    Techies speak at actual tech conferences. And I usually enjoy and learn quite a few things in the tech conferences I attend to.

    • Re:business executives? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swb ( 14022 ) on Sunday June 03, 2018 @07:20AM (#56719404)

      I think that's the problem generally, though. Most conferences that were once technology oriented have been taken over by business and marketing people who realize it's one more avenue to press their strategic message.

      I'm sure there still are conferences that still push the hands-on, more vendor-neutral technology. But aren't these also a lot of BS? There may be side panels or something that can be interesting, but I also find them to full of people I swear are just professional conference attendees, blowhards and schwag collectors.

      I sometimes wonder if I'd just be better off checking into a hotel room for 3 days with a flash drive full of new ISOs and a stack of manuals and just using the relative isolation to have a crash course in something new.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by llamalad ( 12917 )

        That's my experience as well.

        The last few "tech" conferences I went to have been terrible.

        The last one, which may be the last one ever because of how horrible it was, had NO actual technical speakers, but I did hear talks about a group who wants to get ex-con's started in coding and someone's struggle with their eating disorder. Then there was a spiel by a headhunter and some more marketing blither that I thankfully can't remember. There's a venue for all of those topics somewhere, but a tech conference is

    • Yep. For me, the basic qualifier to make it a tech conference is, "Do they publish proceedings?" If not, then as you say, it's business/marketing/media.

  • What makes you think all other conferences are any different?

    At least in tech we also have contributors conferences where the speakers are talking technically about new stuff they are doing, or discussing new techniques, etc.

  • back in the day, conferences were smaller, less "markety" and you could actually meet and have good discussions with people who were the actual drivers of technology.

    The value of the networking done with people at the conferences meant you could actually directly contact people who could help you when you ran into a problem or found a bug in a new technology.

    Something changed and it became all about the product, not the people, and conferences got bigger and less personal, and with the exception of more pri

    • back in the day, conferences were smaller, less "markety"

      I don't think so. 20 years ago, Comdex had a quarter million attendees, and Cebit had twice that. The dotcom era marketing glitz was dazzling.

      Today, tech conferences are much smaller and nerdier.

  • That's for sure.

  • Most conferences are just a few days away from work. The ones that have a celebrity speaker are just a waste of time if you think you're going to learn any technical skills. At best they will give a techy an idea of which skills they should build up in order to get a better job. But most offer nothing more than a set of proceedings (that will probably never get read), a holiday camp for nerds and a hangover.

  • No (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday June 03, 2018 @06:37AM (#56719320) Journal

    Recode's Code Conference, which just wrapped up here in Palos Verdes, is the gold standard of US tech conferences.

    It's not the "gold standard" of tech conferences. What do you think tech is, a place where celebrities try to make news by drinking a lot?

    Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek fail to generate truly significant news

    Oh, yes, apparently that is what you think. Even though those are business leaders and not tech leaders, people don't go to these conferences to hear news, that's what a newspaper is for. They go to hear the ideas of the speakers, learn from the minds they presumably admire.

    A real tech conference is more like DEFCON or Abstractions.io or SIGGRAPH. People who speak actually understand tech, not how to market it.

    • Apparently this journalist never attended PDC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      Developers, developers, developers!

    • Conferences that require peer-reviewed acceptance of the papers are what I consider tech conferences. As someone that has ONE published IEEE paper [ieee.org] (NOT as the first author) and helped with another [sandia.gov], internal-reviewed, government, paper as an intern, there is literally no comparison between something like Collision Conference, or the local promote-tech conferences I go to in New Mexico, and an actually peer reviewed conference. None. They have literally nothing in common, except that they both are nominally

  • 1:1 wrong translated "steam talker"

    Like steam goes out off a steam engine .. every word vanishes into thin air. "Dampfplauderer" are also experts in bombarding others with buzzwords.

  • Are Ted Conferences Overrated?

    Really depends on who the orator is.

    • Re: Are Ted Conferences Overrated? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      TED Conferences are absurdly overrated. When I first became aware of them, I was eager to check out as many videos as I could...only to be repeatedly let down. I may have found one that had a single takeaway. But generally the speakers went into exhaustive detail about a small idea that is not noteworthy, unique, or new, while the audience oohed and aahed over it anyway.

  • That's not how conferences work.
    Imagine this. What would be missed if those kind of Tedx-type of conferences never happened? probably nothing.
    Instead it's a completely waste of time.
    Those companies have much more skillful employees than some random *berg executive, that even if that *berg went missing, the operations and services won't be disrupt.
    And I will conclude with this: Why would you want to hear someone which has a meaningless position in such a big company? "...b..but he/she/it is the COO"... yeah

  • Yes, and they promote imposter syndrome also (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Sunday June 03, 2018 @08:23AM (#56719560)

    There's two general types of conferences I can think of, and I think both are overrated for different reasons:

    The big flashy vendor conferences like MS Ignite, Citrix Synergy, VMWorld, etc...these are just holdovers from the era where the only way to learn anything new about a product was a conference or having a sales guy come talk to you. Think CES or Comdex. They do have some useful content, but everything is basically a marketing spin. It's all about dragging thousands of people to a convention center once a year as the only sales opportunity, plying them with food/alcohol/marketing cheerleaders, and getting them to buy something. Every time I go into a big city convention center, I can almost see the ghosts of the junior sales and marketing people in line at the onsite office place waiting to fax their big career-making order to headquarters. That's what those venues are set up for.

    And on the smaller side...every DevOps tool, new language, new JavaScript framework, etc. has its own conference. It seems like it's the way to legitimize that tool's use. DockerCon, RubyCon, JenkinsCon, ChefCon, etc. (yes, I made some of those up but you get the point.) You may get way less marketing at a conference like this, but IMO it's just a way for the truly laser-focused among that conference's tool's users to promote their personal projects or "get on the speaking circuit."

    I also think this is partially what's driving a lot of the imposter syndrome [wikipedia.org] in tech. We all know there are plenty of people who thought they could keep the same skillset for 20 years and be OK...but if you listen to all the conference speakers, bloggers, Twitterers and open source contributors, it's very easy to feel like you know nothing. This (IMO) is because a lot of these blogs, speaking engagements, etc. are self-promotion and people with very little going on outside of their work worlds are cultivating the image that they're super rockstar geniuses. For those of us who do keep up, but have to choose very carefully what we spend our time learning, it's tough to not feel like you know nothing compared to someone who appears to know all the buzzwords. I've had to tell myself and others I know who experience this more than once that no one knows everything and unless you're willing to spend all your off-work time reading, you're not even going to get to a fraction of it.

  • Executives (Score:4, Insightful)

    by chill ( 34294 ) on Sunday June 03, 2018 @10:22AM (#56719942) Journal

    If the "tech conference" is centered around CEOs and COOs, then it isn't a "tech conference", it is a PR conference. Exciting news comes from companies doing something CREATIVE, not trying to ensure stable returns and a predictable dividend for investors by playing it safe.

  • Depends on the conference (Score:3)

    by johnlenin1 ( 140093 ) on Sunday June 03, 2018 @12:02PM (#56720366)
    It definitely depends on the conference. I attend an annual conference for a niche open source project. As is typical of many open source projects, documentation tends to not be the strongest suit. But sessions at the conference are almost always full of great information and real-world examples. Plus the networking and face time with others youâ(TM)ve known only from email or IRC...it all adds up to a worthwhile trip each year. Keynote speakers, on the other hand, are almost universally worthless.

  • In order to answer the question of whether a conference is overrated it is first necessary to know what the rating is.

    Lots of posts have already made the valid point that if the main speakers are CEOs and other execs then it's not a tech conference, but attendees with brain cells already know that so it wouldn't figure into the rating.

    So what are the ratings of IETF, IEEE, PyCon, OpenStack PTG (not summit; PTG is the tech event, summit is the marketing event), and other tech conferences? Without being speci

  • Keynote speeches always were just candy to draw people in, to pay the entrance fee. They were never the substance of what goes on at a (good) tech conference.

    Tech conferences provide two main functions:
    1) Connect vendors with customers and vice versa (i.e., exhibit hall)
    2) Provide education in the form of breakout sessions

    Yes, quality varies greatly, but the lack of "big announcements" at "tech conferences" really has nothing to do with whether tech conferences are overrated.

  • There are four types of tech conferences: https://momjian.us/main/blogs/... [momjian.us] Only some of them are useful to specific groups.

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