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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Because work from home has been normalized and it takes much more inertia to get people out of their homes to drive or take public transit to a work event than it did when they were held at some office nearby.
Because companies used to host event spaces for Meetups, and between them scaling this back (my opinion) and event space being expensive, it's harder for work-related Meetups to meet. (Non-work-related Meetups seem to be doing okay though!)
Because companies are also getting stingier about flying rank-and-file engineers out to events, even if it's part of their training budget.
Because --- and this might be a stretch --- free food and drinks was a major draw for these events, and people (especially the youngs) are drinking less.
Saying that COVID was simply "a factor" in causing this is a dramatic undersell. COVID was THE factor. It opened peoples' eyes to work from home. That changed literally everything.
As for me: these events were all about the drinks and late nights _after_ (and sometimes during) the event. I don't enjoy drinking late at night, I'm usually on a meal plan and prefer to stick to it, and I generally go to sleep earlier these days. All of these things have made tech events harder to enjoy. Also, everything's about AI now, which couldn't be more depressing IMO.
I think it's certainly true that, if you're working from home, the activation energy of going to an evening event is certainly higher than if you've already gone into an office anyway.
I do expect the space issue has also become a bigger issue in general. For non-tech get-togethers, people's houses are a much lower barrier.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, brands like Yotel (compact smaller rooms) aren't really much cheaper if any.
Because companies used to host event spaces for Meetups, and between them scaling this back (my opinion) and event space being expensive, it's harder for work-related Meetups to meet. (Non-work-related Meetups seem to be doing okay though!)
Because companies are also getting stingier about flying rank-and-file engineers out to events, even if it's part of their training budget.
Because --- and this might be a stretch --- free food and drinks was a major draw for these events, and people (especially the youngs) are drinking less.
Saying that COVID was simply "a factor" in causing this is a dramatic undersell. COVID was THE factor. It opened peoples' eyes to work from home. That changed literally everything.
As for me: these events were all about the drinks and late nights _after_ (and sometimes during) the event. I don't enjoy drinking late at night, I'm usually on a meal plan and prefer to stick to it, and I generally go to sleep earlier these days. All of these things have made tech events harder to enjoy. Also, everything's about AI now, which couldn't be more depressing IMO.
I do expect the space issue has also become a bigger issue in general. For non-tech get-togethers, people's houses are a much lower barrier.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.