The case for conferences in 2024
COVID and the end of ZIRP weirded everything. Are companies still funding travel for professional development, and is it still worth doing?
I was stupid enough to make some predictions about the post-COVID world on March 13, 2020:
Some of them have not aged well.
The USA did not pass a public-health version of the Patriot Act with far-reaching surveillance powers.
The world’s digital infrastructure held up just fine, despite most of our COBOL programmers falling in an elevated COVID risk demographic.
Sadly, we did not come to a global long-term consensus that knowledge work is just as effectively done from home.
But I did make one prediction that has held up: I called the end of “peak tech conference.”
The end of frivolous conference travel
At the time it was clear to me that a lot of tech events had become “DevRel talking to DevRel” ouroboroses that consumed wasteful amounts of time, travel, and swag for little real benefit to anyone. I suspected that marketing departments would wake up to the fact that there are better places to spend growth dollars. And I assumed that companies would become much more hesitant to send valuable engineers into crowded public places.
All of that turned out to be true. The end of the zero-interest-rate environment, and the associated tightening of budgets across the industry, only exacerbated the trend.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been asking a bunch of engineers and managers in tech about how their company policies on conference travel have changed. Here are some common themes I hear:
“We are freezing hiring and raises across the org. I’d be crazy even to ask for budget to travel for a conference.”
“We used to have a per-person training budget, but now we just have one lump sum for all team travel. So we have to choose between getting our whole team together offsite or sending a few individuals to a conference.”
“Professional development opportunities used to be crucial for hiring and retention, but the job market is so bad that that’s not true anymore.”
“If I’m going to pay for someone to travel to a conference, I need to be convinced of a direct benefit for the whole team.”
It’s often easier to get funding for a ticket at a local conference that doesn’t require travel, and that’s great! But unless you live in one of a few tech-hub cities, the conferences don’t necessarily come to you. You have to go to them. And that’s harder than ever to justify.
What’s the value prop of conferences in 2024, anyway?
Is it still personally helpful for your career to travel to tech conferences?
If you are speaking, and particularly if that talk is recorded, the answer is usually still an easy yes. Putting your expertise out there in a professional setting raises your profile and leads to better career opportunities.
But what if you’re not speaking?
As one platform engineering VP said to me: “Get a talk accepted? I’ll approve [your travel]. Going to learn? Convince me it’s high value and there aren’t better ways to learn it.”
Simply put, if you want to go to a conference to sit in a room and hear people explain subjects that somebody else has already explained on YouTube, I think fewer and fewer teams will have the budget to fund that.
However, “classroom learning” was never the value prop of tech conferences. Not the good ones, anyway.
How do I figure out if a conference is good?
Here’s where an example might help.
I’m speaking next month at Gene Kim’s remarkable event for IT leaders and builders, the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit). I’ve attended ETLS twice before, because I believe it’s the most worthwhile independent conference in tech for professional IT/Ops people. (Use discount code REVOLUTION to take $350 off the ticket price!)
Here are three questions I use to evaluate whether a conference is worthwhile in 2024; I’ll use Gene’s event to illustrate.
Are the speakers mostly known for doing stuff, or for talking about stuff?
Spend some time with the conference’s published speaker lineup. Is it full of “tech celebrities” who seem to be more notable for their Twitter following than for anything they actually work on? Or does it foreground people who have done hard things in complex environments?
Take a look at Gene’s speaker lineup. These are not Twitter celebrities at the top of the card, but technical leaders at companies like Southwest Airlines, Wendy’s, Vanguard, John Deere, etc. He works hard to bring in people with battle scars who are sharing their failures as well as their successes.
That is the type of insight you cannot find on the internet. You will be learning things that YouTubers do not know. In many cases, these people will be publicly telling their stories for the first and only time.
Does the event make it easy for you to meet and learn from other attendees?
Sometimes you’ll hear people say “the best part of a tech conference is the hallway track”, by which they mean that the real value in going is not attending the official sessions, but networking with the other conference-goers.
This is a) true, and b) completely overwhelming. I know what it feels like to go to a conference where all the cool people are huddled up talking to each other. You could wander the hallways for three days and never once figure out how to get pulled into a meaningful conversation.
Gene combats the native shyness of tech nerds through a few ingenious tricks:
Every speaker is required to end their talk with a slide listing something they need help on. That gives you a built-in opening to approach interesting people.
He schedules daily “Birds of a Feather” sessions where you are forced to talk with people who share your interests in a lightly structured setting.
He runs an active Slack workspace for past and present ETLS attendees, where absurdly overqualified people are happy to answer your questions or meet with your for mentorship 1:1 — even years later.
He creates a culture of learning and humility around the event; I’ve never once felt that someone at ETLS was “big-timing” me, even though many of them have reached the very top of their field.
A culture like that doesn’t just happen, and many organizers haven’t given thought to it. If you are going to spend your own precious time traveling to a conference, let alone your company’s money, you need to be sure you’re making connections that will propel your career for years to come.
Is the conference organized around ideas and practices that are not easy to learn about from online sources?
I don’t know if I would spend my current company’s money to attend a conference about, say, serverless functions. I feel like we’ve beaten that particular technology to death over the last 10 years and most of the interesting things there are to say about it have probably already been said.
But man, in 2017-2019 when I was helping to run ServerlessConf? That event was a hotbed of fascinating people trying to build things in ways that were completely new. I personally gave what I think may have been the first-ever independent talk about running a production workload on AWS Step Functions. There was no other place to learn that stuff except at events like ServerlessConf.
In the same way, Gene has smartly pivoted his event away from being DevOps-centric to focus on the outer limits of what’s possible in modern cloud and IT. (Yeah, that means a lot of Generative AI stuff. But from the perspective of the people who are actually trying to run workloads on top of it, and what is or isn’t working.)
How to convince your boss a conference is worth attending
Once you’ve convinced yourself that you will get value out of an event, it’s time to convince your boss to agree that it’s worth spending the company’s money on it.
The time-honored way to do this is with something called a Business Justification Letter. You could write this yourself, or get AI to do it. I was able to get ChatGPT to write me a pretty darn good letter with the following prompt:
Write a business justification letter to help convince my boss why I, a DevOps engineer, should attend the ETLS conference in Las Vegas this year.
Include in the justification letter specific references to 3 excellent speakers at the current year's event that a DevOps engineer would get value from. Also, the letter should emphasize that ETLS is a practitioner's event featuring real war stories from builders at large, complex organizations.
You should also mention that the event is independent, not put on by a particular vendor, and so is able to cut through the hype to deliver real learnings on how mature teams are using (or not using) generative AI.
That gave me about 500 words that I was able to tweak slightly to sound pretty convincing.
Your team may have constraints that prohibit them from funding travel no matter how reasonable your letter is. But they may not.
One manager I talked to said this: “I’d find budget for some of my senior folks if they wanted to go [to a conference], just to keep them happy and engaged. [But] my teams haven’t asked.” (emphasis mine)
You’re not going to get fired for suggesting a professional development opportunity. The worst your boss can say is no. And you already have a no. So there is only upside.
I would love to see you in Las Vegas for ETLS next month. Again, you can use the code REVOLUTION to shave several hundred dollars off the ticket cost. Can you do two things for me? 1) if you follow the three questions above and feel ETLS or another event would be useful for you, can you generate the pitch letter and send it to your boss? and 2) can you let me know how it goes?
I’m very interested to hear your results.
Good sponsored thing
Reminder that Pluralsight is still running their 30-day trial of their learning platform for anybody working on the Cloud Resume Challenge. Use this link to claim your free month. Go get a cert or something. You’ll be glad to have invested the time in yourself.
Just for fun
If we all have to return to the office anyway, we might as well demand some training budget.