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-COVID was not exactly easy, it was doable and familiar.
But now, 5 years after COVID, all the longstanding meetups are long enough gone that people nearly have to start from scratch. It's starting to happen, but is a huge uphill battle. For the most part, I suspect it will be a new generation of organizers, but they'll be learning all the same lessons again, in a much less interesting and more hostile tech environment.
> 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.
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.
* Come discuss problems you are having with your code
* Join in a Hackathon to see if the group can make progress on a predefined issue or project.
* Learn a new language, everyone pulls a language from a bucket and sees if they can make Game of Life. Limitations require that at least one person there that knows the language enough to help with getting someone going
We had one of those for about 6 months, and I loved it. However finding spaces that would host us was hard.
"Let's create something on the fly right now" events, just like the knitting group! Sounds like a winning plan. Just need to hook the local recruiting companies to fund the office space. :-)
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.
Many people who moved moved somewhere in the orbit of a large city. Less true in the Bay Area but a 60-90 minute radius of a large city usually has some relatively attractive real estate pricing. And many offices are out that way anyway.
But it does make driving in for evening events less attractive. I used to do it more but, for the most part, really cut back on driving in after work for social events, etc.
Yep, this is what I did. I made a point of not going too far out for exactly that reason. I wasn’t able to save as much money as some did, but CoL was still halved which opened immense breathing room with little risk.
> 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 head, this makes me quite wistful. I feel like I've missed out on so much of what these events had to offer and, as the post posits, that's largely/probably a world that I won't even have the chance to go back to and try again. That all combined with the rapid rise of "AI", "agents", etc. -- none of which interest me at all -- puts me squarely in the _just coast until retirement_ camp but ... I'm not in a position to do that. I'm actually quite concerned about what the future holds and I feel like a lot of the folks in tech who've comfortably kept their heads down are going to be in for a rough transition period over the next few years.
> 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 is not specific to just meetups and conferences. Business, love, friendship, war, peace, everything. In school, at jobs, in hobbies, etc. It's probably biological. Expecting the world to change and revolve instead around one's anxieties is futile.
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.
Sorry. I meant compared to 25 years ago when I was in school, there are now tons of programs and special statuses and institutional accommodations that students can be granted to level the playing field based on things like diagnosed anxiety.
In my day, I’d be called a little bitch and to put up with it.
This is a huge topic in itself but I think it is a net negative now. You can't change human nature. Of course bullying is horrible and help on that front is needed. But too much scaffolding and training wheels just make the transition to real life as much more painful. Setting up such expectations either leads to disappointment or a critical mass that also demands and succeeds in schoolifying life, with the shift in HR's role, or the grift of getting dubiously founded diagnoses to get extra exam time at universities etc.
This comment sort of smacks of the same complaints that older generations have been expressing for centuries: "kids these days have it so much easier than we did!"
I think the current day complaints seem to be the reverse. That kids are more anxious than ever, more lonely, more mental health problems, less freedom for unstructured play and independence, less "slack" in the system, strong expectations and competition and overscheduled life, helicopter parenting, etc. etc. Of course nobody has a comprehensive proposal to address it because it's all an aggregate effect of individually well-intentioned decisions to promote safety etc., and many of those decisions are interrelated with other consequences around this nexus.
I don’t think you’ve missed anything. I think these in-person events are declining because they aren’t as valuable as they purport to be, just like the the way in-office facade was destroyed during Covid.
Why is learning stuff in a dingy hotel conference center better than an online community? Face to face time? But tools like Discord can replace that and they cost a whole lot less than plane tickets and hotel rooms.
I can't imagine how you can consider Discord to eliminate the differences between face-to-face time and purely online interactions unless you think the selling point of face-to-face time is literally the faces.
Then what is the difference? Can we quantify it or is it just warm fuzzy feelings?
In a discord or other similar technology you can exchange text, video, audio, screen sharing, whiteboarding, collaborative editing, etc, in virtual environment with varying group sizes.
Is there something from a tangible and practical level that in person is getting you above and beyond that experience in terms of tangible skill or career growth?
I mean, here we are in a world where more newly married couples meet online than offline [1], 20 years after people started getting married on World of Warcraft and we're still acting like socialization online is impossible.
In terms of a learning environment, I can think of many reasons why an in-person conference is potentially less than ideal. Sitting jet-lagged in an uncomfortable conference center chairs juggling a laptop with its single 13" screen and dying battery connecting to janky public WiFi on your lap, sitting far away from a projector, with half of the interested people you're hoping to meet not able to attend at all because of cost or distance.
I have seen some events doing very well and some doing very poorly. There are some factors not mentioned here.
The biggest is cost. Travel, especially lodging, is very expensive right now in major cities, especially in the US. People just can’t afford hundreds per night. If an event has a larger population density within reach of walking, driving, and public transportation then more people turn up.
Another is industry presence. Big companies have found that showing up at conferences and conventions isn’t really worth it. In the video game industry E3 died and nothing replaced it. Companies just post their own direct videos to make announcements. Apple even stopped gathering everyone in an auditorium and just does videos now as well. When the industry presence at an event, like maybe CES, diminishes, then that means there will be less attendees as well.
Also, a lot of events don’t offer attendees anything they can’t experience at home. If it’s a bunch of talks, just watch video of them later. No need to be in-person unless you really need to do some networking. Some events are able to offer attendees a reason to be physically present, and they still draw a crowd.
Though conferences have ebbed and flowed since before I was in the industry which was... a while ago. COMDEX used to be about a 100K person conference. The big Unix conferences are long gone of course. I know one long-running mid-sized conference that I tended to speak at and just couldn't reboot itself after COVID.
I'm going to KVM Forum next week, and it's going to cost €1100 for 3 nights(!) Most is the cost of the hotel (€600). Europe doesn't do Japanese-style business hotels with single rooms with a compact bathroom and low prices, so you end up booking a big double room for each person.
To the contrary, when all the good New York meetups (Papers We Love, Linux User Group) didn't come back, and inspired by the continuously running Munich Database Meetup and TUMuchData, I started the NYC Systems Coffee Club and co-started NYC Systems (talk series) after which came Berlin Systems Group, Bengaluru Systems Meetup, San Francisco Systems Club, Systems from HEL, DC Systems, Vancouver Systems, South Bay Systems, and Seattle Systems.
So I think people are really eager for high quality talks and chances to gather with smart people.
What's more I think there are not enough meetups in almost any major city to satisfy the demand of speakers or attendees. For example, NYC Systems gets hundreds of people asking to speak (we have 12 speakers a year) and gets 2-3x as many attendees wanting to come as we have space for.
As mentioned in the article, I think the single biggest reason was that Covid largely showed us that it is not strictly necessary to physically be together for everything.
Conferences, announcements, etc all happened virtually and things were largely fine. Sure things like networking were lost (and the associated drinking), and while that was valuable was not necessarily the marketed reason for the events.
We see the same thing outside of the professional space. Video Game conventions for example never really bounced back because the larger companies found out they can do things on their own terms virtually. Those conventions are still happening but they are not the same.
I do sometimes miss the free traveling but I also find it far more convenient (and less of an impact on my life outside of work) to do these things virtually.
> Conferences, announcements, etc all happened virtually and things were largely fine. Sure things like networking were lost (and the associated drinking), and while that was valuable was not necessarily the marketed reason for the events.
I haven't heard anyone say that things were fine. I and colleagues have participated virtually in ML conferences during covid and people almost unanimously said it was mostly useless. You can't compare zoom rooms to poster sessions, real social events with GatherTown etc. For papers you can just follow arXiv and configure alerts or browse the conference website. The networking and shared fun is core. People make friends/acquaintances, have discussions about how it is to live in another country, their job, their takes on events, gossip, and just general human exchange over beers etc. I know many of us here are introverts, but I'm still seeing it like this. It can be a bonding experience with colleagues to go to the same conference for a week, multiple times a year, you can become friends that will last long. Or it can be hell if you hate them. Two sides to the coin, I admit.
There are many things that can't be said fully openly, e.g. that the main purpose of such conferences is social. Because fun can't be reimbursed, the cog in the machine must be productive and efficient and serious. Except if it's structured like daycare activities mediated by a primary school teacher, i.e. "team-building workshops", whose concept already makes my stomach turn. People can socialize much better if it's not some structured forced activity but happens naturally alongside some other (non-made-up) activity, such as going to a conference and listening to talks etc.
Another thing is that you change your location and life a bit for a week (or a few days), shift your working style. If you stay in the same home or the same office and tune in virtually, most people just going to be multi-tasking. That's already the case for many meetings. People turn off their cameras, their mics, eventually even attendance dwindles. Then if you propose in-person events again, people are disinterested because they associate it with that low-engagement boring stuff, except they now also have to travel to it etc.
In my experience, the in-person networking is absolutely the point. If you're a junior researcher, it's really valuable when your more senior collaborator introduces you to new people. Then that snowballs into more contacts. That can really only happen in a relaxed setting like the hallway or during lunch or over after-session drinks. If you try to do this virtually, you're just a random entity on a screen, not a real person. It's not about the exchange of words, but the reality of being around others that enables that kind of professional connection.
The problem with all this is that you’ve only shown that socializing is fun, not that the amount of ROI you or the company is getting from events is positive.
I’d rather have fun and socialize in ways that have nothing to do with work, and I think younger generations feel even more strongly about that.
The way I see it is that corporate cultures have completely given up on investment in employees. No more tuition reimbursement, no more certification reimbursement, you’re a hired mercenary. They are telling employees straight to their face that they are replaceable temp workers who had better start using AI as much as possible or else they’ll get fired and be replaced with AI anyway.
Why would I want to spend my time going to an industry conference when the industry treats me like shit?
And on this note, how many companies are actually investing in sending employees to conferences? My company even gave up on any sort of team building budget to have my team meet in person, they’re not even willing to pay to have us meet in person once a year. Never mind paying for conference fees and sponsorships.
Conferences that aren’t sales tools have no value to the modern corporation.
From the article:
> I’ve actually talked to folks who decided, “I’ve only got a few years left – I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, the same way, at the same company, until they let me go or until I decide to quit.” LLMs like ChatGPT made it easier to get by without actually knowing what you’re doing – at least in the short term – and that’s all these kinds of people care about.
This is what has been incentivized by companies. Again, they have told us to our face that we are throwaway employees who are not worth investment. We should just use AI and work faster, please.
Where does socializing fit into that world view? Hell, employees who socialize do pesky things like unionize.
I think it's a broader social problem. People also socialize less in private as well. Atomization, mobile entertainment etc.
> The way I see it is that corporate cultures have completely given up on investment in employees. No more tuition reimbursement, no more certification reimbursement, you’re a hired mercenary. They are telling employees straight to their face that they are replaceable temp workers who had better start using AI as much as possible or else they’ll get fired and be replaced with AI anyway.
Chicken-or-egg of course, but employees also tend to job hop much more than before (again, understandable if they can't get a raise otherwise), making investment less rational for companies. It's a self-feeding cycle. People used to work for multiple decades in the same place before that. But probably some MBA books derived that this is bad, because they become too crucial and too unique, bus factor things, you need more fungible cogs than that.
Even in friend groups people are flakier, romantic relationships are treated as more disposable etc. Of course all these have a flipside, they didn't happen without reason. A general shift away from a "high-trust society" model.
I suspect that outside of executive ranks and probably some other exceptions, staying with the same company mostly didn't result in huge year-to-year raise. BUT jumping companies mostly didn't either. The tech job hop for 2x the money after a couple years is a relatively recent phenomenon for the most part.
It was also never a move that did anything beyond early career even back in the “good old days.”
The whole benefit is that you could convince your next employer that you had senior level experience after spending a short few years as a practitioner.
Almost no one in my field goes to conferences to "learn" anything. Panels don't say anything controversial it's all a giant marketing presentation. Two or three years in you hear the same shit again and again and zone out.
What people do go to conferences for is networking and meeting people. It's often the only time some folks are in the same spot for a face to face dialog. That is 100% not replicable online.
Panels are (mostly) useless unless you have a good moderator and panelists a little controversial. Crowded breakout rooms (or keynotes with 10,000 of your closest friends), I'd mostly rather watch the video or a good stream--though I may not take the time. As mentioned somewhere upthread, conferences can also have value in somewhat focusing your attention for a few days.
I expect this, or lackthereof, is actually the biggest single reason. Which is to say that people aren't wanting to drink much anymore, so by extension they aren't going out to drink. Alcohol is known as the "social lubricant" for good reason. Despite a rise in use during the early stages of COVID lockdowns/restrictions, consumption of alcohol has dropped precipitously since — now at the lowest rate on record.
Opinions are split on this take because people attend conferences for different reasons.
The group who attend conferences to view the talks and absorb material can mostly accomplish the same thing remotely without dealing with travel, hotels, and being away from family. Remote conferences are great for them.
Another group doesn't really care about the content all that much. They went to conferences to walk around, see things, bump into people, go to parties, and have an excuse to travel. This group feels a big loss because the parts they enjoyed the most have been taken away.
But it did show me that a lot of things were unnecessary to travel too and were just fine virtually.
It isnt go back to how it was before or all virtual, there is a middle ground of traveling and in person when it is actually valuable instead of just being yet another conference.
I still go to some events; I'm in a part-time role these days on my own as well. But I'm much more selective than 10 years or so when I was constantly putting out speaking proposals and shooting off to conferences pretty casually.
For better or worse, it’s kind of the double-edged sword of ICs insisting that WFH is fine and they don’t need to see other people in the office. Once you’ve made that argument, it’s hard to find a principled objection when management says “OK, no more conferences on our dime then.”
I can't imagine wanting to go to even a local conference unless it's a paid alternative to doing real work in a shitty office. Like sure, it's better than that. But certainly not wanting to travel for it. Like if it's just "getting me out of" WFH, lol, no, I'll pass.
I like social events well enough, but Christ, I'd rather go to some other profession's conference than a tech conference. If I started showing up at them it'd be a sign of distress, that I was desperate for a job and my existing network had failed me.
Conferences aren't always a great use of our time, but it allowed us a social escape valve, and it seems to me that just isn't the case anymore. 10 years ago, you'd go to a conference and there would be a massive group conversation about it on Twitter. Not just sessions, but people wanting to get together, eat, drink, and be merry. A simple hashtag search pretty much gave you a quick avenue to meet new people. Now that's pretty much dead, probably due to how people use Twitter and social media, but also the backlash toward it and its owner. Nothing has really replaced that, and most potential replacements either lack the network effects or are essentially restricted in access (requiring a signup or invite).
You're right - Twitter used to generate FOMO amongst those not attending, plus make it easier for attendees to coordinate after-hours events. Both of those factors are diminished.
Twitter used to be a huge conference backchannel. But, as far as I can tell, that's largely gone and neither Mastodon nor Bluesky have really recreated the Twitter of old. I have accounts on all three and I barely look at them and many others I know are the same.
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.
- Selecting good presentations became harder. Once speaking at a meetup or conference became a resume badge of honor, it became a competition to secure the speaking slot at all costs. The previously interesting local talks were getting replaced with entertainment spots, where presenters spent more time showing funny video clips, memes, or even performing live musical pieces to entertain the audience. Discussing the subject matter wasn't a priority.
- Conferences started catering to lowest common denominator attendees to broaden their appeal. Interesting deep dives into highly technical topics started disappearing. They were replaced with basic topics that have been covered to death, such as "How to supercharge your development process with continuous deployment"
- The people I most want to meet up with started transitioning to other activities. Instead of spending my evening on a meetup where the speaker isn't interested in anything other than adding a line to their resume, we now meet up for big group lunches or do outdoor activities together.
- Conference costs kept rising. Organizers realized attendees were expensing the tickets, so they tried to set prices based on what they thought they could get away with charging companies. It became a machine for extracting those personal development budget dollars, not for getting people together efficiently.
- Conference drama. Maybe this is local to me. Every conference seemed to attract a lot of drama: Someone's talk didn't get accepted and they turned it into accusations of bias or favoritism. Conference organizers would have a falling out and try to split into two conferences with a lot of finger-pointing to make people pick a side. Someone was bad with money and ran out of cash, so a conference would be cancelled at the last minute with drama around getting refunds. Someone would try to stir up drama with their presentation or an attendee would accuse someone of a code of conduct violation, turning in months of debate. It all gets so exhausting that I just don't want to be anywhere near it.
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.
Your point about resume badges of honor is what really jaded me leading up to their decline around covid.
Even before all the LLM nonsense as of late I saw way too many events which had speakers that honestly just had nothing interesting to say who just seemed to be regurgitating 3rd hand information. Just the bare minimum to have gotten in front of people.
Imho the reason is that the value of the events has reduced.
Attendance costs keep rising (including commute and stay).
The content will be on YouTube within a few weeks.
With the popularity of zoom, discourse, discord, slack, I’m socializing with the community more regularly. Also where you’d see a lot of content early.
If I need to network, I can organize a much cheaper dinner and drinks instead of paying for larger events.
International conferences make more sense from a business ROI to intermingle , but local ones are a losing battle of value.
Cost. I run a small Chicago area “private” meetup (in the sense that one needs to be invited, it’s not publicly advertised) for small business owners. We do workshops on how to advertise using Google ads, do basic web analytics, etc. The skyrocketing cost of meeting rooms and basic catering have gone through the roof. I’m not talking about catering as in lobster and steak; even just getting Panera Bread level food has been ridiculously expensive.
I love conferences and talks and wish I could go to them more — what stops me is the sudden drop in corporate sponsorship of them. It’s been nearly impossible to convince leadership to spend money to train their employees or to socialize within their own discipline, and while I’d love to go to conferences, taking time out of my own PTO and my own wallet to see them isn’t worth it.
> while I’d love to go to conferences, taking time out of my own PTO and my own wallet to see them isn’t worth it
I’ve been using PTO and my own dime for conferences this whole time! It’s been super worth it career-wise especially as a speaker. Lots of fun, meet great people, have a bunch of “sawdust” to show for it.
The biggest impact has been that people in the industry generally know of me and that lends itself to creating opportunities / opening doors that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
> what stops me is the sudden drop in corporate sponsorship of them.
That's true in two ways: not only are less companies paying to send their attendees to training, but less companies are paying to sponsor these events as well.
Even at AI research conferences the trend seems to be such (also fewer industry exhibits), though I'm not perfectly up to date on this, might have turned around very recently. The reason seems to be that they are not hiring as much right now.
I think this is a shorter-term trend in the economy though, it doesn't necessarily hold as much inertia as other factors. Unless the AI job replacement really works out the way many companies hope.
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.
Yes, it boils down to a trust issue. People on both sides of the table pressing the defect button over and over.
Realistically, conference attendance is a perk, and should be understood as such and accepted. Of course to a shareholder breathing down the neck of the business admins, it's unsqueezed slack in the system that has to be better justified than that. And realistically the employee would go, attach a few extra days, maybe skip a day of the event, but still feel some kind of duty (what a quaint word) to make use of the actual conf too.
It's an arms race where both sides are saying, if you don't give a shit, we don't give a shit.
> But after the pandemic, the release schedules slowed dramatically to once every 3 years, and the new features weren’t really groundbreaking, not requiring deep education to keep up.
This really seems to be the clincher here -- COVID surely contributed, but "post"-COVID if there's not much to talk about, why make the trip?
I'd be curious to hear how often newbies showed up to these SQL events pre-COVID. Was there interest from people outside the regulars? Were people truly excited to learn about SQL technologies?
> I'd be curious to hear how often newbies showed up to these SQL events pre-COVID.
Large SQLSaturday events used to regularly get 300-400 attendees, and a good 10-20% of them were new to the field. I would regularly do a show-of-hands in my session asking how many of them were attending a SQL Saturday for the first time, and it wasn't unusual to see half the hands go up.
I'm in several local groups. The hardest part to keep a community going is that someone needs to step and be the consistent force to keep engaging in conversations. At some point, it ends up being a full-time job.
I mean, there are so many factors. The piece covers many but I think there really are a few more that I've personally noticed:
- Companies have generally tightened belts on discretionary spending, which means fewer people are being paid to go to conferences and events. Many workplaces offered a relatively free hand when it came to company-sponsored conference trips, but now you're not only looking at paying your own way but taking PTO to do it!
- As someone who still makes an effort with in-person meetups: space is so hard to get unless you're well-funded. There used to be a plethora of startups around here that were happy to let you use their office after hours, but the end of ZIRP and the ensuing belt-tightening has taken a lot of these places off the list.
- AI has sucked so much air out of the room. AI-related meetups around here are still pretty common, lots of VC-funded AI startups lending their space to AI-related meetups. Heck, many even have a food and drinks budget. But if you're in any space that isn't AI this kind of support is basically completely non-existent.
Also, I think a major factor that can't be discounted are incentives for speakers. For the same reason most companies have switched to recorded announcements vs. live stage announcements, speakers are incentivized towards remote/recorded events vs. in-person since the content has much wider reach. It may be less useful for the in-person participants but you're optimizing for the long tail of people viewing remotely/viewing later.
Just got back from an In-Person conference, as a vendor the cost was $8K, up from $6K for the same thing last year so a 30% YoY increase. The $6K last year already felt like we were being gouged. I may end up cutting back and going every second year. For 3 days if we rented a 30" screen and a stand it would have cost $2.2K and $350 respectively - I brought my own monitor and stand. Other vendors buy monitors each year and donate it to charity and there is a charity rep that goes around collecting monitors and other 'single use' items. It was a very large conference and I understand the need for an actual hotel / conference venue but the hotel costs were rough as were the built in food / drink options. Since these are often a bit out of town we have to get Ubers to leave and that costs at least $20 each way. I think next year we'll go grocery shopping first thing and avoid the restaurants. Vendors are expected to shout a round or two at the end of the day at the hotel bar. Simple cocktails like an Old-Fashioned were $25. It's likely that the conference will still be a net-positive for us but we're hearing a lot of other vendors complain about the costs and suggest that they too will switch to alternate years.
...but I didn't want to offend anybody with `whining` [I'm an average net-worth, for my age, US blue collar worker].
----
Here are my whines of thought:
I think the thing many of my brothers (three multi-millionaires, I am not) fail to see at the moment is that the "bottom majority" is having an increasingly "really bad time" existance. Myself, I have zero dependants, and zero desire to reproduce in this world. e.g. I have savings, but no healthcare (why?) and plenty of debt.
When I start seeing "struggling majority" grow from simple 51% to increasingly-closer-to "bottom 90%" lately... I start getting really concerned. I don't giveAF about almost anything, but whatever this majority's percentage: they're not wrong (life is getting too difficult for majority).
As inequality grows, regardless of the mechanism, the proportion who benefit will decrease. The top 10% that benefited from the initial increase will find themselves on the wrong side of it as the process continues.
I supply a low cost alternative software option so cost pressures on customers tends to improve sales so that helps a bit with recession resistance up to a point. Though more customers are choosing to do without any alternative which means it must be really rough out there as such software is pretty essential to their work.
It’s hitting the top end of the market as well, the large staffs and debts mean they have to extract more money from a declining customer base that is less able to pay. It’s bad enough even these big multinationals can’t afford to build new features and are choosing to instead exit various markets to focus on their most profitable products. This will only work short term as the less profitable parts were effectively a loss leader for the profitable ones and shouldn’t really be considered a separate offering. They appear to have entered a terminal decline, and it seems that some of them know this and are gouging on their way out.
Multiply this across N industries and it looks like this stagflation / recession is just getting warmed up.
For a meetup hosted in my city, I used to stay in the city after work one day a month to attend. Now that I work from home, there is zero chance I am commuting into the city at rush hour to go to a meetup.
I miss going to some conferences, but I dislike being "on duty" as a representative of my employer, and the travel / hotel / away-from-home hassles just aren't worth it any more for going on my own dime to attend presentations.
No corporate travel budgets any more ever since the Russians sent the worldwide economy tanking. If you're not a C-level, you're on your own. Same for "20%" agreements and the likes - companies across the board have fully gone on to "squeeze mode" when it comes to staff. Everyone and their dog is cutting expenses where they can.
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.
> 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.
In this case you’re just talking about a completely unrelated and irrelevant subject. This article and discussion isn’t about private gatherings hosted by you.
Do you know the reasons why people (including you) don't want in-office jobs? Now multiply these reasons by 10.
Instead of 1 hour commute, have an airplane travel or a couple hours drive. Instead of hours in a cubicle, have an hotel. And now add more expenses and crappy food.
Sure, the "social interactions" in a pub might be more pleasant than the "water-cooler side chat" but they won't be much more productive.
I myself am full time remote
and look forward to attending one annual tech conference.
For me it feels like a nice event. Being related to my career, learning something new from passionate people and stepping out of my comfort zone a bit, all while not having to think much about work.
Since covid required/allowed/enabled it, people want to hide out in their houses. They get takeout or delivery and watch streaming and go online instead of getting out in the world as often. We've started down the path to being the Wall-E society.
As someone who likes getting out of the house, I don't understand the why.
My take is less "the mindless hordes crave darkness and ennui" and more "the owner class is squeezing the working classes harder than ever, and so those people optimize things to be lower cognitive overhead or less effort, that they otherwise would like to do the slower but more fulfilling way, in an attempt to eke out any semblance of freedom or free time."
Being able to just "get out of the house" implies you're not crushed by just the facts of trying to exist. I'm glad, for your sake, that you don't understand why. But don't mistake your own lack of understanding for there not being a root cause that's not just writing off most people as inherently seeking out isolation.
This is the easy explanation, but doubtful. Similarly people blame costs for having fewer children. Except people aren't objectively worse off than before. People in poor countries manage to socialize just fine.
I think it's more a mismatch with subjective expectation. Combined with news, social media, plenty of infinite entertainment on tap tailored to you, apps for food delivery, etc. It's a better bet on the day to day timescale than even talking to neighbors (for free), who likely don't align with your interests and online bubbles. And anyway everyone is likely to move soon, no sense in investing time. The benefits would only accumulate slowly over a long time, so people don't bother. Feedback cycles must be quick. And social media also turns hobbies and hanging out into competition. You can and often feel like you're supposed to obsess over the details of the hobby, see better gear on YouTube, people doing it much better than you ever will, so watching is just good enough.
Personally, as a former meetup organizer, my health has not been good post-COVID. I have a lot less energy to do extra-curricular work or go out and socialize after work.
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-COVID was not exactly easy, it was doable and familiar.
But now, 5 years after COVID, all the longstanding meetups are long enough gone that people nearly have to start from scratch. It's starting to happen, but is a huge uphill battle. For the most part, I suspect it will be a new generation of organizers, but they'll be learning all the same lessons again, in a much less interesting and more hostile tech environment.
> 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.
Technology meetups are just going to inherently be about networking for jobs, IMO. The self-interest is just not alignable.
Meanwhile the local knitting group is 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.You basically want a makers meetup.
We had one of those for about 6 months, and I loved it. However finding spaces that would host us was hard."Let's create something on the fly right now" events, just like the knitting group! Sounds like a winning plan. Just need to hook the local recruiting companies to fund the office space. :-)
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.
Yes, though many are now stuck with a deteriorating situation in a place with not a lot of actual career options.
Many people who moved moved somewhere in the orbit of a large city. Less true in the Bay Area but a 60-90 minute radius of a large city usually has some relatively attractive real estate pricing. And many offices are out that way anyway.
But it does make driving in for evening events less attractive. I used to do it more but, for the most part, really cut back on driving in after work for social events, etc.
Yep, this is what I did. I made a point of not going too far out for exactly that reason. I wasn’t able to save as much money as some did, but CoL was still halved which opened immense breathing room with little risk.
> 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 head, this makes me quite wistful. I feel like I've missed out on so much of what these events had to offer and, as the post posits, that's largely/probably a world that I won't even have the chance to go back to and try again. That all combined with the rapid rise of "AI", "agents", etc. -- none of which interest me at all -- puts me squarely in the _just coast until retirement_ camp but ... I'm not in a position to do that. I'm actually quite concerned about what the future holds and I feel like a lot of the folks in tech who've comfortably kept their heads down are going to be in for a rough transition period over the next few years.
> 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 is not specific to just meetups and conferences. Business, love, friendship, war, peace, everything. In school, at jobs, in hobbies, etc. It's probably biological. Expecting the world to change and revolve instead around one's anxieties is futile.
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.
Sorry. I meant compared to 25 years ago when I was in school, there are now tons of programs and special statuses and institutional accommodations that students can be granted to level the playing field based on things like diagnosed anxiety.
In my day, I’d be called a little bitch and to put up with it.
This is a huge topic in itself but I think it is a net negative now. You can't change human nature. Of course bullying is horrible and help on that front is needed. But too much scaffolding and training wheels just make the transition to real life as much more painful. Setting up such expectations either leads to disappointment or a critical mass that also demands and succeeds in schoolifying life, with the shift in HR's role, or the grift of getting dubiously founded diagnoses to get extra exam time at universities etc.
But I know this is a big controversy in our time.
This comment sort of smacks of the same complaints that older generations have been expressing for centuries: "kids these days have it so much easier than we did!"
I think the current day complaints seem to be the reverse. That kids are more anxious than ever, more lonely, more mental health problems, less freedom for unstructured play and independence, less "slack" in the system, strong expectations and competition and overscheduled life, helicopter parenting, etc. etc. Of course nobody has a comprehensive proposal to address it because it's all an aggregate effect of individually well-intentioned decisions to promote safety etc., and many of those decisions are interrelated with other consequences around this nexus.
I don’t think you’ve missed anything. I think these in-person events are declining because they aren’t as valuable as they purport to be, just like the the way in-office facade was destroyed during Covid.
Why is learning stuff in a dingy hotel conference center better than an online community? Face to face time? But tools like Discord can replace that and they cost a whole lot less than plane tickets and hotel rooms.
I can't imagine how you can consider Discord to eliminate the differences between face-to-face time and purely online interactions unless you think the selling point of face-to-face time is literally the faces.
Then what is the difference? Can we quantify it or is it just warm fuzzy feelings?
In a discord or other similar technology you can exchange text, video, audio, screen sharing, whiteboarding, collaborative editing, etc, in virtual environment with varying group sizes.
Is there something from a tangible and practical level that in person is getting you above and beyond that experience in terms of tangible skill or career growth?
I mean, here we are in a world where more newly married couples meet online than offline [1], 20 years after people started getting married on World of Warcraft and we're still acting like socialization online is impossible.
In terms of a learning environment, I can think of many reasons why an in-person conference is potentially less than ideal. Sitting jet-lagged in an uncomfortable conference center chairs juggling a laptop with its single 13" screen and dying battery connecting to janky public WiFi on your lap, sitting far away from a projector, with half of the interested people you're hoping to meet not able to attend at all because of cost or distance.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1908630116
I have seen some events doing very well and some doing very poorly. There are some factors not mentioned here.
The biggest is cost. Travel, especially lodging, is very expensive right now in major cities, especially in the US. People just can’t afford hundreds per night. If an event has a larger population density within reach of walking, driving, and public transportation then more people turn up.
Another is industry presence. Big companies have found that showing up at conferences and conventions isn’t really worth it. In the video game industry E3 died and nothing replaced it. Companies just post their own direct videos to make announcements. Apple even stopped gathering everyone in an auditorium and just does videos now as well. When the industry presence at an event, like maybe CES, diminishes, then that means there will be less attendees as well.
Also, a lot of events don’t offer attendees anything they can’t experience at home. If it’s a bunch of talks, just watch video of them later. No need to be in-person unless you really need to do some networking. Some events are able to offer attendees a reason to be physically present, and they still draw a crowd.
Though conferences have ebbed and flowed since before I was in the industry which was... a while ago. COMDEX used to be about a 100K person conference. The big Unix conferences are long gone of course. I know one long-running mid-sized conference that I tended to speak at and just couldn't reboot itself after COVID.
I'm going to KVM Forum next week, and it's going to cost €1100 for 3 nights(!) Most is the cost of the hotel (€600). Europe doesn't do Japanese-style business hotels with single rooms with a compact bathroom and low prices, so you end up booking a big double room for each person.
$300-$400/night is pretty normal in a lot of large US cities these days. Nothing luxurious, nothing really downscale, but pretty average.
Honestly, brands like Yotel (compact smaller rooms) aren't really much cheaper if any.
To the contrary, when all the good New York meetups (Papers We Love, Linux User Group) didn't come back, and inspired by the continuously running Munich Database Meetup and TUMuchData, I started the NYC Systems Coffee Club and co-started NYC Systems (talk series) after which came Berlin Systems Group, Bengaluru Systems Meetup, San Francisco Systems Club, Systems from HEL, DC Systems, Vancouver Systems, South Bay Systems, and Seattle Systems.
So I think people are really eager for high quality talks and chances to gather with smart people.
What's more I think there are not enough meetups in almost any major city to satisfy the demand of speakers or attendees. For example, NYC Systems gets hundreds of people asking to speak (we have 12 speakers a year) and gets 2-3x as many attendees wanting to come as we have space for.
As mentioned in the article, I think the single biggest reason was that Covid largely showed us that it is not strictly necessary to physically be together for everything.
Conferences, announcements, etc all happened virtually and things were largely fine. Sure things like networking were lost (and the associated drinking), and while that was valuable was not necessarily the marketed reason for the events.
We see the same thing outside of the professional space. Video Game conventions for example never really bounced back because the larger companies found out they can do things on their own terms virtually. Those conventions are still happening but they are not the same.
I do sometimes miss the free traveling but I also find it far more convenient (and less of an impact on my life outside of work) to do these things virtually.
> Conferences, announcements, etc all happened virtually and things were largely fine. Sure things like networking were lost (and the associated drinking), and while that was valuable was not necessarily the marketed reason for the events.
I haven't heard anyone say that things were fine. I and colleagues have participated virtually in ML conferences during covid and people almost unanimously said it was mostly useless. You can't compare zoom rooms to poster sessions, real social events with GatherTown etc. For papers you can just follow arXiv and configure alerts or browse the conference website. The networking and shared fun is core. People make friends/acquaintances, have discussions about how it is to live in another country, their job, their takes on events, gossip, and just general human exchange over beers etc. I know many of us here are introverts, but I'm still seeing it like this. It can be a bonding experience with colleagues to go to the same conference for a week, multiple times a year, you can become friends that will last long. Or it can be hell if you hate them. Two sides to the coin, I admit.
There are many things that can't be said fully openly, e.g. that the main purpose of such conferences is social. Because fun can't be reimbursed, the cog in the machine must be productive and efficient and serious. Except if it's structured like daycare activities mediated by a primary school teacher, i.e. "team-building workshops", whose concept already makes my stomach turn. People can socialize much better if it's not some structured forced activity but happens naturally alongside some other (non-made-up) activity, such as going to a conference and listening to talks etc.
Another thing is that you change your location and life a bit for a week (or a few days), shift your working style. If you stay in the same home or the same office and tune in virtually, most people just going to be multi-tasking. That's already the case for many meetings. People turn off their cameras, their mics, eventually even attendance dwindles. Then if you propose in-person events again, people are disinterested because they associate it with that low-engagement boring stuff, except they now also have to travel to it etc.
In my experience, the in-person networking is absolutely the point. If you're a junior researcher, it's really valuable when your more senior collaborator introduces you to new people. Then that snowballs into more contacts. That can really only happen in a relaxed setting like the hallway or during lunch or over after-session drinks. If you try to do this virtually, you're just a random entity on a screen, not a real person. It's not about the exchange of words, but the reality of being around others that enables that kind of professional connection.
The problem with all this is that you’ve only shown that socializing is fun, not that the amount of ROI you or the company is getting from events is positive.
I’d rather have fun and socialize in ways that have nothing to do with work, and I think younger generations feel even more strongly about that.
The way I see it is that corporate cultures have completely given up on investment in employees. No more tuition reimbursement, no more certification reimbursement, you’re a hired mercenary. They are telling employees straight to their face that they are replaceable temp workers who had better start using AI as much as possible or else they’ll get fired and be replaced with AI anyway.
Why would I want to spend my time going to an industry conference when the industry treats me like shit?
And on this note, how many companies are actually investing in sending employees to conferences? My company even gave up on any sort of team building budget to have my team meet in person, they’re not even willing to pay to have us meet in person once a year. Never mind paying for conference fees and sponsorships.
Conferences that aren’t sales tools have no value to the modern corporation.
From the article:
> I’ve actually talked to folks who decided, “I’ve only got a few years left – I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, the same way, at the same company, until they let me go or until I decide to quit.” LLMs like ChatGPT made it easier to get by without actually knowing what you’re doing – at least in the short term – and that’s all these kinds of people care about.
This is what has been incentivized by companies. Again, they have told us to our face that we are throwaway employees who are not worth investment. We should just use AI and work faster, please.
Where does socializing fit into that world view? Hell, employees who socialize do pesky things like unionize.
I think it's a broader social problem. People also socialize less in private as well. Atomization, mobile entertainment etc.
> The way I see it is that corporate cultures have completely given up on investment in employees. No more tuition reimbursement, no more certification reimbursement, you’re a hired mercenary. They are telling employees straight to their face that they are replaceable temp workers who had better start using AI as much as possible or else they’ll get fired and be replaced with AI anyway.
Chicken-or-egg of course, but employees also tend to job hop much more than before (again, understandable if they can't get a raise otherwise), making investment less rational for companies. It's a self-feeding cycle. People used to work for multiple decades in the same place before that. But probably some MBA books derived that this is bad, because they become too crucial and too unique, bus factor things, you need more fungible cogs than that.
Even in friend groups people are flakier, romantic relationships are treated as more disposable etc. Of course all these have a flipside, they didn't happen without reason. A general shift away from a "high-trust society" model.
I suspect that outside of executive ranks and probably some other exceptions, staying with the same company mostly didn't result in huge year-to-year raise. BUT jumping companies mostly didn't either. The tech job hop for 2x the money after a couple years is a relatively recent phenomenon for the most part.
It was also never a move that did anything beyond early career even back in the “good old days.”
The whole benefit is that you could convince your next employer that you had senior level experience after spending a short few years as a practitioner.
Almost no one in my field goes to conferences to "learn" anything. Panels don't say anything controversial it's all a giant marketing presentation. Two or three years in you hear the same shit again and again and zone out.
What people do go to conferences for is networking and meeting people. It's often the only time some folks are in the same spot for a face to face dialog. That is 100% not replicable online.
Panels are (mostly) useless unless you have a good moderator and panelists a little controversial. Crowded breakout rooms (or keynotes with 10,000 of your closest friends), I'd mostly rather watch the video or a good stream--though I may not take the time. As mentioned somewhere upthread, conferences can also have value in somewhat focusing your attention for a few days.
> (and the associated drinking)
I expect this, or lackthereof, is actually the biggest single reason. Which is to say that people aren't wanting to drink much anymore, so by extension they aren't going out to drink. Alcohol is known as the "social lubricant" for good reason. Despite a rise in use during the early stages of COVID lockdowns/restrictions, consumption of alcohol has dropped precipitously since — now at the lowest rate on record.
Opinions are split on this take because people attend conferences for different reasons.
The group who attend conferences to view the talks and absorb material can mostly accomplish the same thing remotely without dealing with travel, hotels, and being away from family. Remote conferences are great for them.
Another group doesn't really care about the content all that much. They went to conferences to walk around, see things, bump into people, go to parties, and have an excuse to travel. This group feels a big loss because the parts they enjoyed the most have been taken away.
On the contrary it actually showed me the value of person.
It did for me too, I still travel to some things.
But it did show me that a lot of things were unnecessary to travel too and were just fine virtually.
It isnt go back to how it was before or all virtual, there is a middle ground of traveling and in person when it is actually valuable instead of just being yet another conference.
I still go to some events; I'm in a part-time role these days on my own as well. But I'm much more selective than 10 years or so when I was constantly putting out speaking proposals and shooting off to conferences pretty casually.
For better or worse, it’s kind of the double-edged sword of ICs insisting that WFH is fine and they don’t need to see other people in the office. Once you’ve made that argument, it’s hard to find a principled objection when management says “OK, no more conferences on our dime then.”
I can't imagine wanting to go to even a local conference unless it's a paid alternative to doing real work in a shitty office. Like sure, it's better than that. But certainly not wanting to travel for it. Like if it's just "getting me out of" WFH, lol, no, I'll pass.
I like social events well enough, but Christ, I'd rather go to some other profession's conference than a tech conference. If I started showing up at them it'd be a sign of distress, that I was desperate for a job and my existing network had failed me.
Conferences aren't always a great use of our time, but it allowed us a social escape valve, and it seems to me that just isn't the case anymore. 10 years ago, you'd go to a conference and there would be a massive group conversation about it on Twitter. Not just sessions, but people wanting to get together, eat, drink, and be merry. A simple hashtag search pretty much gave you a quick avenue to meet new people. Now that's pretty much dead, probably due to how people use Twitter and social media, but also the backlash toward it and its owner. Nothing has really replaced that, and most potential replacements either lack the network effects or are essentially restricted in access (requiring a signup or invite).
You're right - Twitter used to generate FOMO amongst those not attending, plus make it easier for attendees to coordinate after-hours events. Both of those factors are diminished.
Twitter used to be a huge conference backchannel. But, as far as I can tell, that's largely gone and neither Mastodon nor Bluesky have really recreated the Twitter of old. I have accounts on all three and I barely look at them and many others I know are the same.
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.
- Selecting good presentations became harder. Once speaking at a meetup or conference became a resume badge of honor, it became a competition to secure the speaking slot at all costs. The previously interesting local talks were getting replaced with entertainment spots, where presenters spent more time showing funny video clips, memes, or even performing live musical pieces to entertain the audience. Discussing the subject matter wasn't a priority.
- Conferences started catering to lowest common denominator attendees to broaden their appeal. Interesting deep dives into highly technical topics started disappearing. They were replaced with basic topics that have been covered to death, such as "How to supercharge your development process with continuous deployment"
- The people I most want to meet up with started transitioning to other activities. Instead of spending my evening on a meetup where the speaker isn't interested in anything other than adding a line to their resume, we now meet up for big group lunches or do outdoor activities together.
- Conference costs kept rising. Organizers realized attendees were expensing the tickets, so they tried to set prices based on what they thought they could get away with charging companies. It became a machine for extracting those personal development budget dollars, not for getting people together efficiently.
- Conference drama. Maybe this is local to me. Every conference seemed to attract a lot of drama: Someone's talk didn't get accepted and they turned it into accusations of bias or favoritism. Conference organizers would have a falling out and try to split into two conferences with a lot of finger-pointing to make people pick a side. Someone was bad with money and ran out of cash, so a conference would be cancelled at the last minute with drama around getting refunds. Someone would try to stir up drama with their presentation or an attendee would accuse someone of a code of conduct violation, turning in months of debate. It all gets so exhausting that I just don't want to be anywhere near it.
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.
Your point about resume badges of honor is what really jaded me leading up to their decline around covid.
Even before all the LLM nonsense as of late I saw way too many events which had speakers that honestly just had nothing interesting to say who just seemed to be regurgitating 3rd hand information. Just the bare minimum to have gotten in front of people.
Imho the reason is that the value of the events has reduced.
Attendance costs keep rising (including commute and stay).
The content will be on YouTube within a few weeks.
With the popularity of zoom, discourse, discord, slack, I’m socializing with the community more regularly. Also where you’d see a lot of content early.
If I need to network, I can organize a much cheaper dinner and drinks instead of paying for larger events.
International conferences make more sense from a business ROI to intermingle , but local ones are a losing battle of value.
Cost. I run a small Chicago area “private” meetup (in the sense that one needs to be invited, it’s not publicly advertised) for small business owners. We do workshops on how to advertise using Google ads, do basic web analytics, etc. The skyrocketing cost of meeting rooms and basic catering have gone through the roof. I’m not talking about catering as in lobster and steak; even just getting Panera Bread level food has been ridiculously expensive.
I love conferences and talks and wish I could go to them more — what stops me is the sudden drop in corporate sponsorship of them. It’s been nearly impossible to convince leadership to spend money to train their employees or to socialize within their own discipline, and while I’d love to go to conferences, taking time out of my own PTO and my own wallet to see them isn’t worth it.
> while I’d love to go to conferences, taking time out of my own PTO and my own wallet to see them isn’t worth it
I’ve been using PTO and my own dime for conferences this whole time! It’s been super worth it career-wise especially as a speaker. Lots of fun, meet great people, have a bunch of “sawdust” to show for it.
The biggest impact has been that people in the industry generally know of me and that lends itself to creating opportunities / opening doors that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
> what stops me is the sudden drop in corporate sponsorship of them.
That's true in two ways: not only are less companies paying to send their attendees to training, but less companies are paying to sponsor these events as well.
Even at AI research conferences the trend seems to be such (also fewer industry exhibits), though I'm not perfectly up to date on this, might have turned around very recently. The reason seems to be that they are not hiring as much right now.
I think this is a shorter-term trend in the economy though, it doesn't necessarily hold as much inertia as other factors. Unless the AI job replacement really works out the way many companies hope.
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.
Yes, it boils down to a trust issue. People on both sides of the table pressing the defect button over and over.
Realistically, conference attendance is a perk, and should be understood as such and accepted. Of course to a shareholder breathing down the neck of the business admins, it's unsqueezed slack in the system that has to be better justified than that. And realistically the employee would go, attach a few extra days, maybe skip a day of the event, but still feel some kind of duty (what a quaint word) to make use of the actual conf too.
It's an arms race where both sides are saying, if you don't give a shit, we don't give a shit.
Yikes, that last one sounds like straight up embezzlement?
> But after the pandemic, the release schedules slowed dramatically to once every 3 years, and the new features weren’t really groundbreaking, not requiring deep education to keep up.
This really seems to be the clincher here -- COVID surely contributed, but "post"-COVID if there's not much to talk about, why make the trip?
I'd be curious to hear how often newbies showed up to these SQL events pre-COVID. Was there interest from people outside the regulars? Were people truly excited to learn about SQL technologies?
> I'd be curious to hear how often newbies showed up to these SQL events pre-COVID.
Large SQLSaturday events used to regularly get 300-400 attendees, and a good 10-20% of them were new to the field. I would regularly do a show-of-hands in my session asking how many of them were attending a SQL Saturday for the first time, and it wasn't unusual to see half the hands go up.
People learn SQL every day, believe it or not.
I'm in several local groups. The hardest part to keep a community going is that someone needs to step and be the consistent force to keep engaging in conversations. At some point, it ends up being a full-time job.
I mean, there are so many factors. The piece covers many but I think there really are a few more that I've personally noticed:
- Companies have generally tightened belts on discretionary spending, which means fewer people are being paid to go to conferences and events. Many workplaces offered a relatively free hand when it came to company-sponsored conference trips, but now you're not only looking at paying your own way but taking PTO to do it!
- As someone who still makes an effort with in-person meetups: space is so hard to get unless you're well-funded. There used to be a plethora of startups around here that were happy to let you use their office after hours, but the end of ZIRP and the ensuing belt-tightening has taken a lot of these places off the list.
- AI has sucked so much air out of the room. AI-related meetups around here are still pretty common, lots of VC-funded AI startups lending their space to AI-related meetups. Heck, many even have a food and drinks budget. But if you're in any space that isn't AI this kind of support is basically completely non-existent.
Also, I think a major factor that can't be discounted are incentives for speakers. For the same reason most companies have switched to recorded announcements vs. live stage announcements, speakers are incentivized towards remote/recorded events vs. in-person since the content has much wider reach. It may be less useful for the in-person participants but you're optimizing for the long tail of people viewing remotely/viewing later.
Just got back from an In-Person conference, as a vendor the cost was $8K, up from $6K for the same thing last year so a 30% YoY increase. The $6K last year already felt like we were being gouged. I may end up cutting back and going every second year. For 3 days if we rented a 30" screen and a stand it would have cost $2.2K and $350 respectively - I brought my own monitor and stand. Other vendors buy monitors each year and donate it to charity and there is a charity rep that goes around collecting monitors and other 'single use' items. It was a very large conference and I understand the need for an actual hotel / conference venue but the hotel costs were rough as were the built in food / drink options. Since these are often a bit out of town we have to get Ubers to leave and that costs at least $20 each way. I think next year we'll go grocery shopping first thing and avoid the restaurants. Vendors are expected to shout a round or two at the end of the day at the hotel bar. Simple cocktails like an Old-Fashioned were $25. It's likely that the conference will still be a net-positive for us but we're hearing a lot of other vendors complain about the costs and suggest that they too will switch to alternate years.
I was just going to write:
>>"because everybody is BROKE?!?!"
...but I didn't want to offend anybody with `whining` [I'm an average net-worth, for my age, US blue collar worker].
----
Here are my whines of thought:
I think the thing many of my brothers (three multi-millionaires, I am not) fail to see at the moment is that the "bottom majority" is having an increasingly "really bad time" existance. Myself, I have zero dependants, and zero desire to reproduce in this world. e.g. I have savings, but no healthcare (why?) and plenty of debt.
When I start seeing "struggling majority" grow from simple 51% to increasingly-closer-to "bottom 90%" lately... I start getting really concerned. I don't giveAF about almost anything, but whatever this majority's percentage: they're not wrong (life is getting too difficult for majority).
¢¢
As inequality grows, regardless of the mechanism, the proportion who benefit will decrease. The top 10% that benefited from the initial increase will find themselves on the wrong side of it as the process continues.
I supply a low cost alternative software option so cost pressures on customers tends to improve sales so that helps a bit with recession resistance up to a point. Though more customers are choosing to do without any alternative which means it must be really rough out there as such software is pretty essential to their work.
It’s hitting the top end of the market as well, the large staffs and debts mean they have to extract more money from a declining customer base that is less able to pay. It’s bad enough even these big multinationals can’t afford to build new features and are choosing to instead exit various markets to focus on their most profitable products. This will only work short term as the less profitable parts were effectively a loss leader for the profitable ones and shouldn’t really be considered a separate offering. They appear to have entered a terminal decline, and it seems that some of them know this and are gouging on their way out.
Multiply this across N industries and it looks like this stagflation / recession is just getting warmed up.
>more customers are choosing to do without any alternative which means it must be really rough out there
Absolutely. Outside of software, here is my simple dietary POV:
Last year, I gave up beef (chicken is less expensive).
Last spring, I planted my first garden (cucumbers, squash, peppers, strawberries).
Last week, I gave up chocolate (no alternative, so far).
I am a fat native blue-collar Texan, so this is ultimately a good dietary change — but terrifying for a consumer-based economy / society.
For a meetup hosted in my city, I used to stay in the city after work one day a month to attend. Now that I work from home, there is zero chance I am commuting into the city at rush hour to go to a meetup.
I miss going to some conferences, but I dislike being "on duty" as a representative of my employer, and the travel / hotel / away-from-home hassles just aren't worth it any more for going on my own dime to attend presentations.
The world needs BBSs again. That was the best source of local meetups back in the 90s.
We had our circle of regulars at a large local BBS in the late 80s/early 90s. I won't say we got together a lot but we did.
No corporate travel budgets any more ever since the Russians sent the worldwide economy tanking. If you're not a C-level, you're on your own. Same for "20%" agreements and the likes - companies across the board have fully gone on to "squeeze mode" when it comes to staff. Everyone and their dog is cutting expenses where they can.
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.
In this case you’re just talking about a completely unrelated and irrelevant subject. This article and discussion isn’t about private gatherings hosted by you.
Do you know the reasons why people (including you) don't want in-office jobs? Now multiply these reasons by 10.
Instead of 1 hour commute, have an airplane travel or a couple hours drive. Instead of hours in a cubicle, have an hotel. And now add more expenses and crappy food.
Sure, the "social interactions" in a pub might be more pleasant than the "water-cooler side chat" but they won't be much more productive.
Socializing is overrated.
I myself am full time remote and look forward to attending one annual tech conference.
For me it feels like a nice event. Being related to my career, learning something new from passionate people and stepping out of my comfort zone a bit, all while not having to think much about work.
If you have a steady job you're satisfied with, and a settled, well-oiled life, then yes sure.
But changes in life trajectory almost always happen through in-person socializing.
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Since covid required/allowed/enabled it, people want to hide out in their houses. They get takeout or delivery and watch streaming and go online instead of getting out in the world as often. We've started down the path to being the Wall-E society.
As someone who likes getting out of the house, I don't understand the why.
On the contrary, COVID led to an increase in outdoor activity
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michellebruton/2023/02/28/outdo...
People are just going to fewer events together, likely due to price and economic factors, but are very much still going out and socializing.
My take is less "the mindless hordes crave darkness and ennui" and more "the owner class is squeezing the working classes harder than ever, and so those people optimize things to be lower cognitive overhead or less effort, that they otherwise would like to do the slower but more fulfilling way, in an attempt to eke out any semblance of freedom or free time."
Being able to just "get out of the house" implies you're not crushed by just the facts of trying to exist. I'm glad, for your sake, that you don't understand why. But don't mistake your own lack of understanding for there not being a root cause that's not just writing off most people as inherently seeking out isolation.
This is the easy explanation, but doubtful. Similarly people blame costs for having fewer children. Except people aren't objectively worse off than before. People in poor countries manage to socialize just fine.
I think it's more a mismatch with subjective expectation. Combined with news, social media, plenty of infinite entertainment on tap tailored to you, apps for food delivery, etc. It's a better bet on the day to day timescale than even talking to neighbors (for free), who likely don't align with your interests and online bubbles. And anyway everyone is likely to move soon, no sense in investing time. The benefits would only accumulate slowly over a long time, so people don't bother. Feedback cycles must be quick. And social media also turns hobbies and hanging out into competition. You can and often feel like you're supposed to obsess over the details of the hobby, see better gear on YouTube, people doing it much better than you ever will, so watching is just good enough.
Perceived risk of being caught in a mass shooting is too great to feel comfortable at mass gatherings.
Has there ever been a mass shooting at a tech conference?
That isn't a new phenomenon.
Only if you’re addicted to the news and lack an understanding of statistical risk.
Personally, as a former meetup organizer, my health has not been good post-COVID. I have a lot less energy to do extra-curricular work or go out and socialize after work.