13 ms·

Why Your Excellent Conference Talk Was Rejected

251 points by promptworks 10y ago

robertcope 10y ago
So, in order to be a presenter, I must have already been a presenter?
- Etzos 10y ago
  It looks like a blog would also suffice. Although I had the same initial reaction: it feels like a rather overzealous exclusion.
  - delinka 10y ago
    You don't just drop someone without presentation experience onto a stage in front of hundreds or thousands with a laptop and a projector. That's a great way to get negative reviews for the conference from the attendees. Much like you don't hire someone with no experience writing software to come in a write you a brand new point-of-sale system for your chain of a thousand stores just because they're enthusiastic.
    - Etzos 10y ago
      I think you're making an assumption that I disagree with the conclusion of the article when in reality, I don't. My initial reaction was that it was overly exclusive and in a way, it is. They don't give a chance to those with no experience doing this kind of thing, which makes the bar for someone with no experience that much higher. However, I don't think this is wrong, especially for such a large conference. If this were a smaller conference then I think it would actually be overzealous, but that is not what I think in this case, which is why I said it was only my initial reaction. I would also like to add that the example summary given shows more than just enthusiasm, it shows knowledge of topic as well as the ability to convey that information in a concise and reasonable way. So, a more apt comparison would be not hiring said person to build your brand new POS system just because their academics were good and make a nice resume (just without job experience).
- BostX 10y ago
  Catch-22
- asimuvPR 10y ago
  I feel this is meant as: "If you want to present at a big conference, then you must have experience doing smaller conferences or presentations." You can gain experience by presenting in local meetups, making videos and posting them online, doing short tech talks at your job, etc. Doing those first will net you a lot of valuable skills and experiences.
- ori_b 10y ago
  Assuming that there is no shortage of presenters, is it a stretch for organizers to pick the ones that have strong previous talks first?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- clintonc 10y ago
  In order to be a presenter at a conference with enough visibility that they receive six good applications for each slot, you must have already been a presenter.
- pimterry 10y ago
  For a big conference (as this seems to be), yes, definitely. Partly because conferences can sadly be quite risk averse, but also because presenting is a real skill, and assuming you're already great at it and jumping in at the deep end won't help anybody. If you are looking to get into public speaking there are no shortage of meetups desperate to get speakers booked in, on any topic you like, in almost every city in the world (try meetup.com). Once you've done one or two you'll hopefully have some video of you usefully presenting complex ideas to an audience. From there getting into a conference gets drastically easier. Spend a little time and start with that. Having some initial visibility before jumping straight to huge international conference scale is typically a requirement, and a pretty reasonable one. I don't want to put people off public speaking; it's super rewarding professionally and personally, and we as an industry do desperately need to hear a wide variety of ideas from as many people as possible. It's not immediately easy though, just because you're a great developer/designer/PM/other. It's famously scary, and a quite substantial skill in itself, and if you jump from zero experience to trying to present hard concepts to an audience of hundreds of people who are paying hundreds of dollars, you'll struggle, and it won't do you or your audience or your confidence any good. Spend a little time warming up. If you're already great, waiting a month and talking at a local meetup first will just be extra practice. If you're not, you'll want to find that out in a small friendly room of nice people, not on a huge stage in a vast auditorium live streamed around the world.
- hibikir 10y ago
  There are conferences specializing in giving rookie persenters chances. KCDC, for instance, takes chances on a lot of new people every year. Another good way to start is user groups: Many will let anyone speak as long as they claim to have a relevant topic. After a video or two of those, you move up until you are eventually invited into conferences that invite speakers, as opposed to ask for submissions. Even for a talented speaker, the road from one end to the other will take about 3 years, speaking at least 5 times a year. I for one don't think is worth it at all, but I have friends that have 10+ speaking trips a year.
- jldugger 10y ago
  Presumably the bar is higher at a single track conference like the author's.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  For a big conference, one that attendees spend lots and lots of money to travel to and attend, the pressure on the organizers is to make sure that all the presentations (and presenters) are at some baseline level of quality so that attendees will go away happy. They are much less concerned with providing opportunities and teaching moments to aspiring conference speakers, which hopefully everyone agrees is the right set of priorities for an organizer for that type of conference. There are all sorts of ways an aspiring presenter can get experience or demonstrate ability that don't involve catching a break from a sympathetic organizer whose job is looking out for the attendees that spent thousands of dollars to be there.
- tomjen3 10y ago
  Yes. Or have a recorded talk, or a blog, or something so that they can judge you. Really I was also about ready to smash them over the head with that requirement, but reading that part does make it seem pretty reasonable.
- brongondwana 10y ago
  So, in order to swim for the Olympic team, I must already have been a swimmer?
imron 10y ago
I like the spinning cogs in the background.
- rkangel 10y ago
  It was a lovely design idea, but I found it distracting as I was reading. A bit like how a running video elsewhere on the page draws the eye, the cogs moving as I scrolled distracted from the text. If they just were behind the title and opening paragraph, they would scroll out of view relatively quickly. You'd get the nice effect, but stop being distracted.
- finid 10y ago
  Spinning cogs in the background? Didn't even notice them, so I clicked back to the article. Sure enough, there are spinning cogs. Didn't notice them, no distractions.
wernerb 10y ago
"We found every submission to be of high quality. We will now explain why your talks are actually garden-variety by using landscaping metaphores" Jokes aside. The issues raised are very good, but I can't help but think biased to a certain intended crowd. How does the panel(?) stay objective? Are the different views on topics and how to formulate the synopsis (exaggeration) perhaps relevant to a certain type of conference attendee and so deserving of a separate conference track?
wirrbel 10y ago
Can't argue much with these criteria. Yet why "previous presenter experience"? If you are afraid of inexperienced speakers to deliver a boring talk, why Not just give them a 10-15 minute slot? Them, I am reminded that many speakers tour many events with the same talk. I rather like the idea of having fresh speakers on stage over the 4th instance of the very same old talk.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  > Yet why "previous presenter experience"? If you are afraid of inexperienced speakers to deliver a boring talk, why Not just give them a 10-15 minute slot? That makes it even less likely that the talk will turn out (as well as complicating the conference schedule). Giving a 30 minute talk is much easier than giving a 10-15 minute talk. "If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now." Many conference organizers will give some slots to brand new presenters, especially if the topic seems interesting; they just want a good balance of new and experienced presenters. But a conference that has so many talk submissions that it has to reject incredible talks can afford to be more selective.
- bonniemuffin 10y ago
  Most people will bomb their first conference talk (I'm sure I did). It's best to get that experience out of the way at a smaller venue, or even get some practice recording talks or podcasts for a blog before doing it in front of a huge live audience.
- krschultz 10y ago
  I think of it as a ladder that you progress through as a speaker. This reduces risk for the organizers, but it's also good for your growth as a speaker. If you think you can just hop right into a conference talk with no warmup, then the earlier steps should be a breeze. - Short meetup talk (10-20 minutes). - Long meetup talk (20-40 minutes) - Conference talk. The only gotcha is that most meetups are not recorded. That makes it difficult to apply for conferences outside of your hometown.
  - 10y ago
DrNuke 10y ago
Pretty harsh with the noob, we have all been there in a very distant past, aren't we? Just accept the most promising noobs and pack them all into the same session with a navigate chair and a senior speaker ready to rescue every single talk.
- exelius 10y ago
  I think it's more "a paid / sponsored conference isn't the best place to get presentation experience". Especially when you have a plethora of experienced presenters to choose from.
  - slantedview 10y ago
    The experienced presenters tend to talk about the same things, over and over, at conference after conference. Selecting for "noobs" injects diversity into what is otherwise a well-worn conference circuit by many of the non-noobs.
    - exelius 10y ago
      On the other side of the coin, people tend to ask about the same things, over and over again -- so a professional presenter will hit more of the points that people are interested in.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
BJBBB 10y ago
Have done reviews for IEEE, APEC, and ACM stuff. There can be many reasons that a presentation is not accepted. Some rejects are a simple instance of subject matter not matching the scope of the symposium. Or there can be some problems with the math and other technical issues. Another unfortunate and not uncomman issue is where the English syntax and/or grammar is so poor that the meaning of the proposal is lost. And there can be the occasional submittal that is a bit before its time - it has happened to myself. Example is the IEEE (PSES and other societies) is probably at least 15 years behind the ACM on matters of software safety and test methodology. Members of the ISPCE tech committiee recently approached me about a session on software safety analysis for the 2017 symposium; yet my submittals for similar presentations were rejected at least twice during last 10 years, by this same group of people. So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarly been a poor idea. Please do not take rejections personnaly.
- eganist 10y ago
  > So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarily been a poor idea. Please do not take rejections personally. There's also the case of having too many good talks and simply having to tailor the conference around a specific track of talks that might make the most sense for a given audience or for a given industry focus.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pimterry 10y ago
So many of these articles never cover what 'good' looks like, only bad. What does their perfect pitch look like? Which abstracts blew them away? What topic surprised them most (in a good way)? Both good and bad examples are important, but articles like this that include only the rejected outlines just feels quite discouraging.
mivok 10y ago
A lot of the comments here are complaining about the last point in the article (the n00b), asking how on earth you get started if you have to have presented before in order to present. The article is telling you exactly how to do that: - Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers, and it's an excellent way to get practice at presenting in a lower stress environment. It's not always small audiences either, I've seen and given talks with 50 or more attendees at a local meet up. As for getting accepted, organizers are always in need of talks, and organizers are not getting 6 submissions per month, they're usually lucky if they can fill every month with a talk, so you're much more likely to be accepted. - Maintain a blog. Writing articles on your blog is practice for writing a talk, and gives you a steady stream of ideas that can be turned into a presentation fairly easily. I'm going to add a couple more: - Give a lightning talk at conferences you attend. As well as giving you practice, you are also visible to all the attendees, including people who will be selecting talks at future conferences you submit to. - Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted. These steps aren't going to make it so that you're immediately accepted at large conferences, but they give you the start the article is claiming you need. And finally, if you're rejected, don't give up. Conferences do take chances on new speakers (although probably not all new speakers who submit a talk), and being rejected doesn't mean your talk is bad, or that your skills are bad, just that you didn't get it this time.
- ohjeez 10y ago
  > Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted. And also it lets you make a fool of yourself with a smaller audience. Very few people are good at something the first time they try it. Why do you imagine you're a great presenter the first time out? As with anything else, make your mistakes in small domains.
  - Roboprog 10y ago
eganist 10y ago
> Heartbreaker #4 – The N00b > [...] > This presentation would have been accepted if we had seen speaker talked at local meetup groups, had a recorded presentation we could view, or maintained a blog so that we could foresee of how he would present his ideas and build an argument. Perhaps we were outliers, but @buu700 and I were accepted to BlackHat and DEF CON with no prior speaking experience outside from a dry run of the talk to a single meet-up. One delivery -- and the talk as delivered in both conferences ended up being far different from that specific instance. Now if the article suggests that just doing it once is fine, cool, but if it's suggesting a track record of past smaller conferences, I'm inclined to disagree, as are the reviewers for the largest conferences. It helps, but being bereft of it certainly doesn't disqualify you.
- krschultz 10y ago
  Had you presented to the meetup before applying or only after you knew that you were accepted in the conference? Even having done a talk once is far better than most applications.
  - eganist 10y ago
    Delivered it deliberately in preparation for a submission (i.e. before we even submitted the talks but knowing full well that that would be the end goal). Both the talk and delivery were engineered with those audiences in mind, so we restricted recording and distribution of the talk at the prior OWASP meetup until after it was published at BH/DC. It didn't go all that smoothly at DEF CON (which I'll freely attribute to us both being conference noobs), but it went pretty well overall, all things considered. Don't know if we'll have anything interesting to talk about next year, but I'm looking forward to potentially doing it again.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  I don't think the article is saying those without experience shouldn't apply. It's just saying that, if you don't have experience, even if your abstract was good, that's probably why you weren't selected.
- hjnilsson 10y ago
timtadh 10y ago
Honestly, applying to speak at industry conferences is a very frustrating experience. I have given lots of talks at my university, I have spoken at local meetups, and at one local free conference where the organizers knew me. Students and other attendees at my talks often tell me that my talks are good. However, trying to break into the "conference" circuit has been difficult as I have never gotten any direct feedback from anywhere I have submitted to and often wonder if they read my proposal at all. They sometimes even forget to inform you that your talk has not been accepted! It is a bit ridiculous. In contrast, while I don't want to paint a rosy picture of academic conferences, you always get detailed feedback on your paper/talk that you submit. It may be biased, it may be frustrating, but at least you can tell that someone at least looked at your paper/talk and gave you some feedback. Industry conferences never do this.
Roboprog 10y ago
It can be difficult to get "hard data" about a topic, as most of us certainly don't have that available in our day to day work. The best you can hope for is to find somebody else's academic research, and then riff on it in an understandable, enjoyable, manner, I guess.
brightball 10y ago
Just to reinforce the last point regarding blogging and presenting locally, they are 100% correct. I've never actually submitted a talk for a conference but I've been speaking to local programming groups fairly regularly as well as blogging for the last 3-4 years. Regularly is a couple of times per year or slightly more often. I don't get paid to do any of it, I just really enjoy talking about this stuff. Through these talks and blogging I've been recruited by 3 different companies to contribute to their company tech blogs and I was invited to speak at a rather large and exclusive conference where I was the only speaker not from a HUGE company on the docket. It happened because I was giving the talk locally, somebody affiliated with the conference drove in from about an hour away to hear it and then stuck around to invite me to speak. I never considered that conferences would recruit but apparently they do.
bcantrill 10y ago
Like many here, I totally and vehemently disagree with the fourth reason for rejection (the "n00b"): if someone has a proposal that is worthy of presentation, they should be given the opportunity to present -- regardless of their age or experience. There are many reasons for this, including the most obvious one that if every conference insists on experience, no one will be able to get that experience. But the reasons for not depending on prior presentations run much deeper: if you are going to evaluate a proposal based on the speaker's prior presentations, you are tautologically unblinded in your review process. Having an unblinded review process is a grievous mistake: when conferences aren't blind in their reviews, they end up confirming their own biases more than selecting the best possible work. (I have always felt this way, but my feelings on this were galvanized by my own experiences inside the sausage factory[1] -- and for the conference that I am currently organizing[2], we are emphatically double blind.) I understand the problem of creating engaging presentations as well as compelling content, but there are ways to achieve this other than being prejudicial. For example, if you want to create an invited talk or two for those whose presentations the program committee particularly likes, great. And if you want to provide presentation coaching for those who you accept who haven't presented before, even better. (I have provided this coaching informally in the past, and have found that a little coaching can go a long way.) But a blinded review process must be viewed as a constraint on the problem: to do any less is to deprive ourselves of the new ideas and presenters that provide us our collective vitality! [1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/cantrill https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/p... [2] http://systemswe.love/ http://systemswe.love/
- st3v3r 10y ago
  "if someone has a proposal that is worthy of presentation, they should be given the opportunity to present -- regardless of their age or experience" At the same time, it sounds like they had many, many submissions that were worthy of presentation, and this was a bigger conference. There are smaller conferences which are not as inundated with presentations to which newer speakers can apply, and from there apply to the bigger ones. It's just like everything else in life, where you have to prove yourself on a smaller scale before being allowed on bigger things.
pendext 10y ago
To add a personal anecdote, I was accepted to speak at a large regional conference as my first speaking gig. I explicitly stated I did not have any previous conference experience. I attribute this partially to having a relatively niche topic. I was lucky enough to give the talk twice at a local user group prior to the conference, which helped with the actual conference talk, I am sure.
jazzyk 10y ago
There is a big elephant in the room here: Most conferences have been converted to strictly money-making entities. Here is how it works: - a RFP is published - you submit - you get a response: "Unfortunately, your proposal did not get accepted, however, we have a limited number of time slots for sponsors. If you become a silver sponsor..." In other words, you can submit any crap, as long as you provide "sponsorship". This may or may not apply to DevOps Days, I don't know enough about it. Also, the above does not invalidate some good points made by the author regarding selecting the right angle of the presentation, etc.
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  I've never seen that. Has anyone else? I've had talks rejected from places even where we were sponsoring.
  - zerooneinfinity 10y ago
    I've seen that in every gaming competition I've ever entered. Which is probably over twenty at this point.
  - johnbellone 10y ago
    I have seen talks rejected from places where we were silver sponsor. But that being said, most conferences I go to the platinum/gold sponsors are all over the tracks. Even if they don't know a lick about the topics.
- suyash 10y ago
  Good point, even for non-sponsored talks, they may have an agenda which is based towards certain topics that cover certain technologies for certain companies, you get the point.
- erroneousfunk 10y ago
  Although conferences are hard work to put on, and I certainly don't want to imply that the organizers don't deserve to be paid well, I've noticed a large rise in other types of (sleazy) money-making conferences as well. I've been cold-called by several conferences before (not totally unusual, I've spoken at a few large ones, and my name's out there) where they ask me to speak, but "don't have the budget" for payment and don't reimburse or offer a stipend for travel costs. Unsurprisingly, they charge hundreds of dollars for admission, have extremely cheap venues, and a somewhat lackluster roster of gullible "expert speakers." Sure, there's a large gray area between "not a very good conference" and "scammy ripoff" but it's another thing to watch out for.
slantedview 10y ago
> Heartbreaker #4 – The N00b Everyone is a n00b at some time. But being a conference n00b doesn't mean you're not an expert on the subject of your talk, that your content is not original, that you're not an excellent speaker, or that your talk would not be excellent. All it means is that you're a n00b to public conferences. The wholesale discounting of candidate talks based on such narrow criteria is foolish.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Murkin 10y ago
We ran 2 large conferences and 2 large meetups and about 90% of CFPs get rejected for a simple reason: Everyone are submitting to talk about the exact same subject. "Whats new in Angular2", "Using Redux", etc.
edthrowaway 10y ago
There's a possible ugly 5th heartbreaker: "we love your topic and experience but you look too old and unhip for our hip frontend conference". I've been rejected for conferences where every speaker that was accepted looked well under 30. At the least, no one had grey hair. It's frustrating to me because the very same conferences are highly vocal about seeking diversity, and do usually end up with some gender diversity (although non-Asian/non-White speakers are almost always poorly represented). But there's no age diversity: everyone on stage is between 20-30, or else goes to a plastic surgeon and dresses to look that age.
- draw_down 10y ago
  Yes, no one really wants to talk about the ageism thing. I'm not sure how much the plastic surgery thing actually happens in real life, but I too find it frustrating and sad how it's never included in the topic of diversity. It's a problem that literally everyone who sticks around long enough will gave to contend with.
- exolymph 10y ago
  Reminds me of this heartbreaking Bloomberg Businessweek piece: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/silicon-valley-s-job-hungry-say-we-re-not-to-old-for-this http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/silicon-va... > One 60-year-old software engineer, fired in January after seven years at a chipmaker in San Jose, now wears casual button-downs, khakis, and sneakers to interviews, studies embedded systems (cell phones, video game consoles) at a local extension school, and has started working out and dyeing his gray hair a dark auburn. He also had blepharoplasty, plastic surgery to remove bags and dark circles under his eyes. “It’s smart to stay current and look as young as possible if you want to keep working in an industry where so many people are in their 20s,” he says. “I still want to work in tech, because I love solving problems. And I don’t yet have enough saved for retirement.”
  - biztos 10y ago
    Well at least it got him to start working out. /rimshot
- 10y ago
verelo 10y ago
How has no one mentioned the gears in the background on this page yet? It's a touch distracting, but there is some smart stuff going on to make them line up. Sadly the CSS is optimized, which makes understanding its implementation a little tough, but i suspect it'd make for fun reading!
- timv 10y ago
  The background is a canvas element - the gear turning is implemented with javascript.
  - verelo 10y ago
    Thanks, I should have said CSS/JS, it too is impossible to read due to the optimization.
carsongross 10y ago
Heartbreaker #6 - The Your Company Did Not Sponsor This Conference Topic Heartbreaker #7 - The You Don't Have Any Personal Contacts on The Conference Circuit And Aren't Particularly Attractive Or Personable Topic Heartbreaker #8 – The intercooler.js You Are All Doing It Wrong And You Should Feel Bad Topic
- hedwall 10y ago
  DevOpsdays actually have very well written article about how sponsorship works in their context.
baby 10y ago
Seems like a lot of people don't understand the noob part. Let me explain: Imagine you pay a lot of money to attend a conference. And I'm not even talking about flight+food+hotel as some conferences' cover are pretty high (blackhat). Now you go in a talk and discover that the speaker is just horrible. The topic might be interesting but you get nothing out of it because the speaker is just bad. Now this is a problem because as an attendant you're no happy, and this is the responsibility of the judges of the CFP. They need to work to protect you from these kind of talks. I'd much tolerate beginners at smaller conferences, or meetups. This is where you can get experience before going to a bigger one. A one that might even give you money and pay for your travel+accommodation. By the way, I think most of you people have no idea how bad talks can be. In more academic conferences, foreign speakers make a big chunk of the talks and some of them can't speak english at all. It's painful for everyone to sit through that kind of talk. (Note that I'm a foreigner myself, just saying that some of us are EXTREMELY BAD AT ENGLISH (not going to point fingers).)
- jazzyk 10y ago
  Many attendees don't care, the trip is paid for by the company. It is a nice trip to an attractive location (sunny Florida in winter, etc). At most conferences I attended, there were scores of presenters who, frankly, sucked, or the supposedly "technical" topic turned out to be unabashed product/service pitch.
  - baby 10y ago
    > Many attendees don't care, the trip is paid for by the company And many still care even though their company pays for them. > the supposedly "technical" topic turned out to be unabashed product/service pitch. That's another issue though, bad content.
patja 10y ago
I was expecting the noob to be rejected for not knowing how to spell the word 'amateur' correctly.
jupiter90000 10y ago
From the viewpoint of a self-supporting individual (not having someone else foot the bill) who would only be interested in learning about new topics in a field, does anyone here think it is worth hundreds to thousands in cost to attend a conference, and why? Is there anything there one would definitely miss about advances in the field if not attending? Or is it more about (essentially) self-promotion?
saurik 10y ago
Before any of the rest of this, I want to say that this is a useful article for people as conferences actually do think like this, but my comment is then to point out that not all conferences do, and that I generally prefer attending ones which don't. > The premise is good, but the abstract is so short we have no idea where this is going to go. Even if the speaker were experienced and a known conference superstar, it is hard to give the presenter a speaking slot without more detail. When you go to a performance by a standup comedian, you don't read an abstract first: if there is even a title it is probably arbitrary or a gag. When I go to a conference and am choosing to bother going to see a talk, I select talks based on who is speaking, not based on their abstract. In my experience, a good speaker is interesting no matter what they are talking about, and otherwise the talk ends up being disappointing no matter how on point the abstract is to my interests. You might then ask: "but surely the good speaker is capable of making a good abstract?", but the best talks are also coordinated and topical and deep. The person whose talks I most enjoy and now never miss is essentially incapable of making an abstract ahead of time, as his talk is based on his thoughts and passions at that moment, and are about topics so compelling that after the talk I would have a hard time summarizing it other than "you really should have been there". You might then ask "but is the speaker actually good if the audience member can't summarize the talk?", and I will claim the exact opposite: if you can replace the talk with a summary of the content and (maybe) the slides, you should not be wasting anyone's time with a talk. This is something both many conferences and many attendees fundamentally seem to not "get": they ask for peoples' slides, as if they have meaning. One may as well ask for a photograph of the empty sets for a play they missed instead of a video of the performance, that is how much content you can recover from the slides and abstract of a good talk. > It’s crummy to turn away such a good presentation, but it’s also risky to entrust your conference audience to someone who has never presented before. But this is also how you get extremely loyal speakers who will speak at your conference for free while refusing to even bother speaking at other venues. It is also how you manage to show your audience "something new" instead of "the same old people that every conference gets to speak as they are the safe bet / known quantity". The absolute best regular conference I go to, by far, gets all of this: the couple that runs 360|iDev works with new speakers to hone ideas (many speakers I have talked to are incredibly grateful to this conference for giving them "their break"), but doesn't even bother with an approval process for known good speakers, and they then aren't afraid to have sessions at their conference with neither a title nor an abstract, just a name, a bio, and a "placeholder" title and abstract that are devoid of content. It is seriously the only conference where I really find myself interested to bother attending any of the talks past "I guess I absolutely need to try to see this so I can talk about it with other people tonight sigh". Expanding into the category of atypical conferences, XOXO takes the cake, but it is half-festival, was never sure if it was anything more than a temporary concept, and doesn't really have a "topic" that is easy to describe. But, the Andy's hand-nurture first-time speakers based on core attendees and prior speakers "nominating" people they really want to see give talks, many of whom are artists or bloggers who might even "perform" in various ways but have never given a talk. The schedule has names and bios, but not a single title or abstract.
jsprogrammer 10y ago
>submissions were uniformly good ><list of different reasons some submissions were not good [and in one case, you would have been picked if not for this not good quality]> please. What are the chances this submission was brigaded to the top^ spot? ^http://hnrankings.info/12725337/ http://hnrankings.info/12725337/
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Just ate it up, eh?
gravypod 10y ago
> We had several great pitches from people who have never given a talk before; we asked about presentation experience as part of submitting a talk and we did a little googling too. It’s crummy to turn away such a good presentation, but it’s also risky to entrust your conference audience to someone who has never presented before I don't care about how a presenter presents their information at a technical conference. If this was a conference for public speaking and entertainment I'd think it's important then.
sakopov 10y ago
If you're very new to public speaking but dying to give it a shot try submitting an entry to KCDC. It's one of the biggest dev conferences in the Midwest and they do accept rookies with very little to no experience from all over the globe. A good friend of mine had his first talk at KCDC a couple of years ago. No blog. No github account. Just a very good topic and a willingness to push limits and share his passion. It's also opened up a ton of other opportunities for him.
partycoder 10y ago
Try to improve your talk by presenting it first in a meetup, get some feedback, and most importantly find the right levels of detail for each part of the presentation. The topics need to also be aligned consistently around a larger theme, that is closed by a concrete conclusion that people can ideally apply in their life.
dahart 10y ago
I've never been to a conference that didn't have a high percentage of first time speakers. In many ways that is what provides the value of a good conference. One of the largest ACM conferences is SIGGRAPH, in which graduate students generally present. As long as there's content, and the speakers receive some communication about being prepared, practicing, and ensuring they will meet the time limit, how is there so much worry that it's preferable to reject good abstracts than take the risk?? On top of that, it seems like risky presenters with good abstracts could easily be given the opportunity to send in a video of them speaking or have a phone call with a conference organizer. Given these things, it's seems sad to trivially reject based on inexperience, it hurts the conference more than the applicants, and of course gives the impression the conference cares more about style than substance. I realize that's a rash decision making wild generalizations based on a small amount of text... OTOH that is probably how some of those less experienced applicants feel.

251 points by promptworks 10y ago

robertcope 10y ago

So, in order to be a presenter, I must have already been a presenter?

Etzos 10y ago
It looks like a blog would also suffice. Although I had the same initial reaction: it feels like a rather overzealous exclusion.
- delinka 10y ago
  You don't just drop someone without presentation experience onto a stage in front of hundreds or thousands with a laptop and a projector. That's a great way to get negative reviews for the conference from the attendees. Much like you don't hire someone with no experience writing software to come in a write you a brand new point-of-sale system for your chain of a thousand stores just because they're enthusiastic.
  - Etzos 10y ago
    I think you're making an assumption that I disagree with the conclusion of the article when in reality, I don't. My initial reaction was that it was overly exclusive and in a way, it is. They don't give a chance to those with no experience doing this kind of thing, which makes the bar for someone with no experience that much higher. However, I don't think this is wrong, especially for such a large conference. If this were a smaller conference then I think it would actually be overzealous, but that is not what I think in this case, which is why I said it was only my initial reaction. I would also like to add that the example summary given shows more than just enthusiasm, it shows knowledge of topic as well as the ability to convey that information in a concise and reasonable way. So, a more apt comparison would be not hiring said person to build your brand new POS system just because their academics were good and make a nice resume (just without job experience).
BostX 10y ago
Catch-22
asimuvPR 10y ago
I feel this is meant as: "If you want to present at a big conference, then you must have experience doing smaller conferences or presentations." You can gain experience by presenting in local meetups, making videos and posting them online, doing short tech talks at your job, etc. Doing those first will net you a lot of valuable skills and experiences.
ori_b 10y ago
Assuming that there is no shortage of presenters, is it a stretch for organizers to pick the ones that have strong previous talks first?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
clintonc 10y ago
In order to be a presenter at a conference with enough visibility that they receive six good applications for each slot, you must have already been a presenter.
pimterry 10y ago
For a big conference (as this seems to be), yes, definitely. Partly because conferences can sadly be quite risk averse, but also because presenting is a real skill, and assuming you're already great at it and jumping in at the deep end won't help anybody. If you are looking to get into public speaking there are no shortage of meetups desperate to get speakers booked in, on any topic you like, in almost every city in the world (try meetup.com). Once you've done one or two you'll hopefully have some video of you usefully presenting complex ideas to an audience. From there getting into a conference gets drastically easier. Spend a little time and start with that. Having some initial visibility before jumping straight to huge international conference scale is typically a requirement, and a pretty reasonable one. I don't want to put people off public speaking; it's super rewarding professionally and personally, and we as an industry do desperately need to hear a wide variety of ideas from as many people as possible. It's not immediately easy though, just because you're a great developer/designer/PM/other. It's famously scary, and a quite substantial skill in itself, and if you jump from zero experience to trying to present hard concepts to an audience of hundreds of people who are paying hundreds of dollars, you'll struggle, and it won't do you or your audience or your confidence any good. Spend a little time warming up. If you're already great, waiting a month and talking at a local meetup first will just be extra practice. If you're not, you'll want to find that out in a small friendly room of nice people, not on a huge stage in a vast auditorium live streamed around the world.
hibikir 10y ago
There are conferences specializing in giving rookie persenters chances. KCDC, for instance, takes chances on a lot of new people every year. Another good way to start is user groups: Many will let anyone speak as long as they claim to have a relevant topic. After a video or two of those, you move up until you are eventually invited into conferences that invite speakers, as opposed to ask for submissions. Even for a talented speaker, the road from one end to the other will take about 3 years, speaking at least 5 times a year. I for one don't think is worth it at all, but I have friends that have 10+ speaking trips a year.
jldugger 10y ago
Presumably the bar is higher at a single track conference like the author's.
mwfunk 10y ago
For a big conference, one that attendees spend lots and lots of money to travel to and attend, the pressure on the organizers is to make sure that all the presentations (and presenters) are at some baseline level of quality so that attendees will go away happy. They are much less concerned with providing opportunities and teaching moments to aspiring conference speakers, which hopefully everyone agrees is the right set of priorities for an organizer for that type of conference. There are all sorts of ways an aspiring presenter can get experience or demonstrate ability that don't involve catching a break from a sympathetic organizer whose job is looking out for the attendees that spent thousands of dollars to be there.
tomjen3 10y ago
Yes. Or have a recorded talk, or a blog, or something so that they can judge you. Really I was also about ready to smash them over the head with that requirement, but reading that part does make it seem pretty reasonable.
brongondwana 10y ago
So, in order to swim for the Olympic team, I must already have been a swimmer?

imron 10y ago

I like the spinning cogs in the background.

rkangel 10y ago
It was a lovely design idea, but I found it distracting as I was reading. A bit like how a running video elsewhere on the page draws the eye, the cogs moving as I scrolled distracted from the text. If they just were behind the title and opening paragraph, they would scroll out of view relatively quickly. You'd get the nice effect, but stop being distracted.
finid 10y ago
Spinning cogs in the background? Didn't even notice them, so I clicked back to the article. Sure enough, there are spinning cogs. Didn't notice them, no distractions.

wernerb 10y ago

"We found every submission to be of high quality. We will now explain why your talks are actually garden-variety by using landscaping metaphores" Jokes aside. The issues raised are very good, but I can't help but think biased to a certain intended crowd. How does the panel(?) stay objective? Are the different views on topics and how to formulate the synopsis (exaggeration) perhaps relevant to a certain type of conference attendee and so deserving of a separate conference track?

wirrbel 10y ago

Can't argue much with these criteria. Yet why "previous presenter experience"? If you are afraid of inexperienced speakers to deliver a boring talk, why Not just give them a 10-15 minute slot? Them, I am reminded that many speakers tour many events with the same talk. I rather like the idea of having fresh speakers on stage over the 4th instance of the very same old talk.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
> Yet why "previous presenter experience"? If you are afraid of inexperienced speakers to deliver a boring talk, why Not just give them a 10-15 minute slot? That makes it even less likely that the talk will turn out (as well as complicating the conference schedule). Giving a 30 minute talk is much easier than giving a 10-15 minute talk. "If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now." Many conference organizers will give some slots to brand new presenters, especially if the topic seems interesting; they just want a good balance of new and experienced presenters. But a conference that has so many talk submissions that it has to reject incredible talks can afford to be more selective.
bonniemuffin 10y ago
Most people will bomb their first conference talk (I'm sure I did). It's best to get that experience out of the way at a smaller venue, or even get some practice recording talks or podcasts for a blog before doing it in front of a huge live audience.
krschultz 10y ago
I think of it as a ladder that you progress through as a speaker. This reduces risk for the organizers, but it's also good for your growth as a speaker. If you think you can just hop right into a conference talk with no warmup, then the earlier steps should be a breeze. - Short meetup talk (10-20 minutes). - Long meetup talk (20-40 minutes) - Conference talk. The only gotcha is that most meetups are not recorded. That makes it difficult to apply for conferences outside of your hometown.
- 10y ago

DrNuke 10y ago

Pretty harsh with the noob, we have all been there in a very distant past, aren't we? Just accept the most promising noobs and pack them all into the same session with a navigate chair and a senior speaker ready to rescue every single talk.

exelius 10y ago
I think it's more "a paid / sponsored conference isn't the best place to get presentation experience". Especially when you have a plethora of experienced presenters to choose from.
- slantedview 10y ago
  The experienced presenters tend to talk about the same things, over and over, at conference after conference. Selecting for "noobs" injects diversity into what is otherwise a well-worn conference circuit by many of the non-noobs.
  - exelius 10y ago
    On the other side of the coin, people tend to ask about the same things, over and over again -- so a professional presenter will hit more of the points that people are interested in.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

BJBBB 10y ago

Have done reviews for IEEE, APEC, and ACM stuff. There can be many reasons that a presentation is not accepted. Some rejects are a simple instance of subject matter not matching the scope of the symposium. Or there can be some problems with the math and other technical issues. Another unfortunate and not uncomman issue is where the English syntax and/or grammar is so poor that the meaning of the proposal is lost. And there can be the occasional submittal that is a bit before its time - it has happened to myself. Example is the IEEE (PSES and other societies) is probably at least 15 years behind the ACM on matters of software safety and test methodology. Members of the ISPCE tech committiee recently approached me about a session on software safety analysis for the 2017 symposium; yet my submittals for similar presentations were rejected at least twice during last 10 years, by this same group of people. So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarly been a poor idea. Please do not take rejections personnaly.

eganist 10y ago
> So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarily been a poor idea. Please do not take rejections personally. There's also the case of having too many good talks and simply having to tailor the conference around a specific track of talks that might make the most sense for a given audience or for a given industry focus.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pimterry 10y ago

So many of these articles never cover what 'good' looks like, only bad. What does their perfect pitch look like? Which abstracts blew them away? What topic surprised them most (in a good way)? Both good and bad examples are important, but articles like this that include only the rejected outlines just feels quite discouraging.

mivok 10y ago

A lot of the comments here are complaining about the last point in the article (the n00b), asking how on earth you get started if you have to have presented before in order to present. The article is telling you exactly how to do that: - Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers, and it's an excellent way to get practice at presenting in a lower stress environment. It's not always small audiences either, I've seen and given talks with 50 or more attendees at a local meet up. As for getting accepted, organizers are always in need of talks, and organizers are not getting 6 submissions per month, they're usually lucky if they can fill every month with a talk, so you're much more likely to be accepted. - Maintain a blog. Writing articles on your blog is practice for writing a talk, and gives you a steady stream of ideas that can be turned into a presentation fairly easily. I'm going to add a couple more: - Give a lightning talk at conferences you attend. As well as giving you practice, you are also visible to all the attendees, including people who will be selecting talks at future conferences you submit to. - Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted. These steps aren't going to make it so that you're immediately accepted at large conferences, but they give you the start the article is claiming you need. And finally, if you're rejected, don't give up. Conferences do take chances on new speakers (although probably not all new speakers who submit a talk), and being rejected doesn't mean your talk is bad, or that your skills are bad, just that you didn't get it this time.

ohjeez 10y ago
> Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted. And also it lets you make a fool of yourself with a smaller audience. Very few people are good at something the first time they try it. Why do you imagine you're a great presenter the first time out? As with anything else, make your mistakes in small domains.
- Roboprog 10y ago

eganist 10y ago

> Heartbreaker #4 – The N00b > [...] > This presentation would have been accepted if we had seen speaker talked at local meetup groups, had a recorded presentation we could view, or maintained a blog so that we could foresee of how he would present his ideas and build an argument. Perhaps we were outliers, but @buu700 and I were accepted to BlackHat and DEF CON with no prior speaking experience outside from a dry run of the talk to a single meet-up. One delivery -- and the talk as delivered in both conferences ended up being far different from that specific instance. Now if the article suggests that just doing it once is fine, cool, but if it's suggesting a track record of past smaller conferences, I'm inclined to disagree, as are the reviewers for the largest conferences. It helps, but being bereft of it certainly doesn't disqualify you.

krschultz 10y ago
Had you presented to the meetup before applying or only after you knew that you were accepted in the conference? Even having done a talk once is far better than most applications.
- eganist 10y ago
  Delivered it deliberately in preparation for a submission (i.e. before we even submitted the talks but knowing full well that that would be the end goal). Both the talk and delivery were engineered with those audiences in mind, so we restricted recording and distribution of the talk at the prior OWASP meetup until after it was published at BH/DC. It didn't go all that smoothly at DEF CON (which I'll freely attribute to us both being conference noobs), but it went pretty well overall, all things considered. Don't know if we'll have anything interesting to talk about next year, but I'm looking forward to potentially doing it again.
st3v3r 10y ago
I don't think the article is saying those without experience shouldn't apply. It's just saying that, if you don't have experience, even if your abstract was good, that's probably why you weren't selected.
hjnilsson 10y ago

timtadh 10y ago

Honestly, applying to speak at industry conferences is a very frustrating experience. I have given lots of talks at my university, I have spoken at local meetups, and at one local free conference where the organizers knew me. Students and other attendees at my talks often tell me that my talks are good. However, trying to break into the "conference" circuit has been difficult as I have never gotten any direct feedback from anywhere I have submitted to and often wonder if they read my proposal at all. They sometimes even forget to inform you that your talk has not been accepted! It is a bit ridiculous. In contrast, while I don't want to paint a rosy picture of academic conferences, you always get detailed feedback on your paper/talk that you submit. It may be biased, it may be frustrating, but at least you can tell that someone at least looked at your paper/talk and gave you some feedback. Industry conferences never do this.

Roboprog 10y ago

It can be difficult to get "hard data" about a topic, as most of us certainly don't have that available in our day to day work. The best you can hope for is to find somebody else's academic research, and then riff on it in an understandable, enjoyable, manner, I guess.

brightball 10y ago

Just to reinforce the last point regarding blogging and presenting locally, they are 100% correct. I've never actually submitted a talk for a conference but I've been speaking to local programming groups fairly regularly as well as blogging for the last 3-4 years. Regularly is a couple of times per year or slightly more often. I don't get paid to do any of it, I just really enjoy talking about this stuff. Through these talks and blogging I've been recruited by 3 different companies to contribute to their company tech blogs and I was invited to speak at a rather large and exclusive conference where I was the only speaker not from a HUGE company on the docket. It happened because I was giving the talk locally, somebody affiliated with the conference drove in from about an hour away to hear it and then stuck around to invite me to speak. I never considered that conferences would recruit but apparently they do.

bcantrill 10y ago

Like many here, I totally and vehemently disagree with the fourth reason for rejection (the "n00b"): if someone has a proposal that is worthy of presentation, they should be given the opportunity to present -- regardless of their age or experience. There are many reasons for this, including the most obvious one that if every conference insists on experience, no one will be able to get that experience. But the reasons for not depending on prior presentations run much deeper: if you are going to evaluate a proposal based on the speaker's prior presentations, you are tautologically unblinded in your review process. Having an unblinded review process is a grievous mistake: when conferences aren't blind in their reviews, they end up confirming their own biases more than selecting the best possible work. (I have always felt this way, but my feelings on this were galvanized by my own experiences inside the sausage factory[1] -- and for the conference that I am currently organizing[2], we are emphatically double blind.) I understand the problem of creating engaging presentations as well as compelling content, but there are ways to achieve this other than being prejudicial. For example, if you want to create an invited talk or two for those whose presentations the program committee particularly likes, great. And if you want to provide presentation coaching for those who you accept who haven't presented before, even better. (I have provided this coaching informally in the past, and have found that a little coaching can go a long way.) But a blinded review process must be viewed as a constraint on the problem: to do any less is to deprive ourselves of the new ideas and presenters that provide us our collective vitality! [1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/cantrill https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/p... [2] http://systemswe.love/ http://systemswe.love/

st3v3r 10y ago
"if someone has a proposal that is worthy of presentation, they should be given the opportunity to present -- regardless of their age or experience" At the same time, it sounds like they had many, many submissions that were worthy of presentation, and this was a bigger conference. There are smaller conferences which are not as inundated with presentations to which newer speakers can apply, and from there apply to the bigger ones. It's just like everything else in life, where you have to prove yourself on a smaller scale before being allowed on bigger things.

pendext 10y ago

To add a personal anecdote, I was accepted to speak at a large regional conference as my first speaking gig. I explicitly stated I did not have any previous conference experience. I attribute this partially to having a relatively niche topic. I was lucky enough to give the talk twice at a local user group prior to the conference, which helped with the actual conference talk, I am sure.

jazzyk 10y ago

There is a big elephant in the room here: Most conferences have been converted to strictly money-making entities. Here is how it works: - a RFP is published - you submit - you get a response: "Unfortunately, your proposal did not get accepted, however, we have a limited number of time slots for sponsors. If you become a silver sponsor..." In other words, you can submit any crap, as long as you provide "sponsorship". This may or may not apply to DevOps Days, I don't know enough about it. Also, the above does not invalidate some good points made by the author regarding selecting the right angle of the presentation, etc.

chrisseaton 10y ago
I've never seen that. Has anyone else? I've had talks rejected from places even where we were sponsoring.
- zerooneinfinity 10y ago
  I've seen that in every gaming competition I've ever entered. Which is probably over twenty at this point.
- johnbellone 10y ago
  I have seen talks rejected from places where we were silver sponsor. But that being said, most conferences I go to the platinum/gold sponsors are all over the tracks. Even if they don't know a lick about the topics.
suyash 10y ago
Good point, even for non-sponsored talks, they may have an agenda which is based towards certain topics that cover certain technologies for certain companies, you get the point.
erroneousfunk 10y ago
Although conferences are hard work to put on, and I certainly don't want to imply that the organizers don't deserve to be paid well, I've noticed a large rise in other types of (sleazy) money-making conferences as well. I've been cold-called by several conferences before (not totally unusual, I've spoken at a few large ones, and my name's out there) where they ask me to speak, but "don't have the budget" for payment and don't reimburse or offer a stipend for travel costs. Unsurprisingly, they charge hundreds of dollars for admission, have extremely cheap venues, and a somewhat lackluster roster of gullible "expert speakers." Sure, there's a large gray area between "not a very good conference" and "scammy ripoff" but it's another thing to watch out for.

slantedview 10y ago

> Heartbreaker #4 – The N00b Everyone is a n00b at some time. But being a conference n00b doesn't mean you're not an expert on the subject of your talk, that your content is not original, that you're not an excellent speaker, or that your talk would not be excellent. All it means is that you're a n00b to public conferences. The wholesale discounting of candidate talks based on such narrow criteria is foolish.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Murkin 10y ago

We ran 2 large conferences and 2 large meetups and about 90% of CFPs get rejected for a simple reason: Everyone are submitting to talk about the exact same subject. "Whats new in Angular2", "Using Redux", etc.

edthrowaway 10y ago

There's a possible ugly 5th heartbreaker: "we love your topic and experience but you look too old and unhip for our hip frontend conference". I've been rejected for conferences where every speaker that was accepted looked well under 30. At the least, no one had grey hair. It's frustrating to me because the very same conferences are highly vocal about seeking diversity, and do usually end up with some gender diversity (although non-Asian/non-White speakers are almost always poorly represented). But there's no age diversity: everyone on stage is between 20-30, or else goes to a plastic surgeon and dresses to look that age.

draw_down 10y ago
Yes, no one really wants to talk about the ageism thing. I'm not sure how much the plastic surgery thing actually happens in real life, but I too find it frustrating and sad how it's never included in the topic of diversity. It's a problem that literally everyone who sticks around long enough will gave to contend with.
exolymph 10y ago
Reminds me of this heartbreaking Bloomberg Businessweek piece: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/silicon-valley-s-job-hungry-say-we-re-not-to-old-for-this http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/silicon-va... > One 60-year-old software engineer, fired in January after seven years at a chipmaker in San Jose, now wears casual button-downs, khakis, and sneakers to interviews, studies embedded systems (cell phones, video game consoles) at a local extension school, and has started working out and dyeing his gray hair a dark auburn. He also had blepharoplasty, plastic surgery to remove bags and dark circles under his eyes. “It’s smart to stay current and look as young as possible if you want to keep working in an industry where so many people are in their 20s,” he says. “I still want to work in tech, because I love solving problems. And I don’t yet have enough saved for retirement.”
- biztos 10y ago
  Well at least it got him to start working out. /rimshot
10y ago

verelo 10y ago

How has no one mentioned the gears in the background on this page yet? It's a touch distracting, but there is some smart stuff going on to make them line up. Sadly the CSS is optimized, which makes understanding its implementation a little tough, but i suspect it'd make for fun reading!

timv 10y ago
The background is a canvas element - the gear turning is implemented with javascript.
- verelo 10y ago
  Thanks, I should have said CSS/JS, it too is impossible to read due to the optimization.

carsongross 10y ago

Heartbreaker #6 - The Your Company Did Not Sponsor This Conference Topic Heartbreaker #7 - The You Don't Have Any Personal Contacts on The Conference Circuit And Aren't Particularly Attractive Or Personable Topic Heartbreaker #8 – The intercooler.js You Are All Doing It Wrong And You Should Feel Bad Topic

hedwall 10y ago
DevOpsdays actually have very well written article about how sponsorship works in their context.

baby 10y ago

Seems like a lot of people don't understand the noob part. Let me explain: Imagine you pay a lot of money to attend a conference. And I'm not even talking about flight+food+hotel as some conferences' cover are pretty high (blackhat). Now you go in a talk and discover that the speaker is just horrible. The topic might be interesting but you get nothing out of it because the speaker is just bad. Now this is a problem because as an attendant you're no happy, and this is the responsibility of the judges of the CFP. They need to work to protect you from these kind of talks. I'd much tolerate beginners at smaller conferences, or meetups. This is where you can get experience before going to a bigger one. A one that might even give you money and pay for your travel+accommodation. By the way, I think most of you people have no idea how bad talks can be. In more academic conferences, foreign speakers make a big chunk of the talks and some of them can't speak english at all. It's painful for everyone to sit through that kind of talk. (Note that I'm a foreigner myself, just saying that some of us are EXTREMELY BAD AT ENGLISH (not going to point fingers).)

jazzyk 10y ago
Many attendees don't care, the trip is paid for by the company. It is a nice trip to an attractive location (sunny Florida in winter, etc). At most conferences I attended, there were scores of presenters who, frankly, sucked, or the supposedly "technical" topic turned out to be unabashed product/service pitch.
- baby 10y ago
  > Many attendees don't care, the trip is paid for by the company And many still care even though their company pays for them. > the supposedly "technical" topic turned out to be unabashed product/service pitch. That's another issue though, bad content.

patja 10y ago

I was expecting the noob to be rejected for not knowing how to spell the word 'amateur' correctly.

jupiter90000 10y ago

From the viewpoint of a self-supporting individual (not having someone else foot the bill) who would only be interested in learning about new topics in a field, does anyone here think it is worth hundreds to thousands in cost to attend a conference, and why? Is there anything there one would definitely miss about advances in the field if not attending? Or is it more about (essentially) self-promotion?

saurik 10y ago

Before any of the rest of this, I want to say that this is a useful article for people as conferences actually do think like this, but my comment is then to point out that not all conferences do, and that I generally prefer attending ones which don't. > The premise is good, but the abstract is so short we have no idea where this is going to go. Even if the speaker were experienced and a known conference superstar, it is hard to give the presenter a speaking slot without more detail. When you go to a performance by a standup comedian, you don't read an abstract first: if there is even a title it is probably arbitrary or a gag. When I go to a conference and am choosing to bother going to see a talk, I select talks based on who is speaking, not based on their abstract. In my experience, a good speaker is interesting no matter what they are talking about, and otherwise the talk ends up being disappointing no matter how on point the abstract is to my interests. You might then ask: "but surely the good speaker is capable of making a good abstract?", but the best talks are also coordinated and topical and deep. The person whose talks I most enjoy and now never miss is essentially incapable of making an abstract ahead of time, as his talk is based on his thoughts and passions at that moment, and are about topics so compelling that after the talk I would have a hard time summarizing it other than "you really should have been there". You might then ask "but is the speaker actually good if the audience member can't summarize the talk?", and I will claim the exact opposite: if you can replace the talk with a summary of the content and (maybe) the slides, you should not be wasting anyone's time with a talk. This is something both many conferences and many attendees fundamentally seem to not "get": they ask for peoples' slides, as if they have meaning. One may as well ask for a photograph of the empty sets for a play they missed instead of a video of the performance, that is how much content you can recover from the slides and abstract of a good talk. > It’s crummy to turn away such a good presentation, but it’s also risky to entrust your conference audience to someone who has never presented before. But this is also how you get extremely loyal speakers who will speak at your conference for free while refusing to even bother speaking at other venues. It is also how you manage to show your audience "something new" instead of "the same old people that every conference gets to speak as they are the safe bet / known quantity". The absolute best regular conference I go to, by far, gets all of this: the couple that runs 360|iDev works with new speakers to hone ideas (many speakers I have talked to are incredibly grateful to this conference for giving them "their break"), but doesn't even bother with an approval process for known good speakers, and they then aren't afraid to have sessions at their conference with neither a title nor an abstract, just a name, a bio, and a "placeholder" title and abstract that are devoid of content. It is seriously the only conference where I really find myself interested to bother attending any of the talks past "I guess I absolutely need to try to see this so I can talk about it with other people tonight sigh". Expanding into the category of atypical conferences, XOXO takes the cake, but it is half-festival, was never sure if it was anything more than a temporary concept, and doesn't really have a "topic" that is easy to describe. But, the Andy's hand-nurture first-time speakers based on core attendees and prior speakers "nominating" people they really want to see give talks, many of whom are artists or bloggers who might even "perform" in various ways but have never given a talk. The schedule has names and bios, but not a single title or abstract.

jsprogrammer 10y ago

>submissions were uniformly good ><list of different reasons some submissions were not good [and in one case, you would have been picked if not for this not good quality]> please. What are the chances this submission was brigaded to the top^ spot? ^http://hnrankings.info/12725337/ http://hnrankings.info/12725337/

jsprogrammer 10y ago
Just ate it up, eh?

gravypod 10y ago

> We had several great pitches from people who have never given a talk before; we asked about presentation experience as part of submitting a talk and we did a little googling too. It’s crummy to turn away such a good presentation, but it’s also risky to entrust your conference audience to someone who has never presented before I don't care about how a presenter presents their information at a technical conference. If this was a conference for public speaking and entertainment I'd think it's important then.

sakopov 10y ago

If you're very new to public speaking but dying to give it a shot try submitting an entry to KCDC. It's one of the biggest dev conferences in the Midwest and they do accept rookies with very little to no experience from all over the globe. A good friend of mine had his first talk at KCDC a couple of years ago. No blog. No github account. Just a very good topic and a willingness to push limits and share his passion. It's also opened up a ton of other opportunities for him.

partycoder 10y ago

Try to improve your talk by presenting it first in a meetup, get some feedback, and most importantly find the right levels of detail for each part of the presentation. The topics need to also be aligned consistently around a larger theme, that is closed by a concrete conclusion that people can ideally apply in their life.

dahart 10y ago

I've never been to a conference that didn't have a high percentage of first time speakers. In many ways that is what provides the value of a good conference. One of the largest ACM conferences is SIGGRAPH, in which graduate students generally present. As long as there's content, and the speakers receive some communication about being prepared, practicing, and ensuring they will meet the time limit, how is there so much worry that it's preferable to reject good abstracts than take the risk?? On top of that, it seems like risky presenters with good abstracts could easily be given the opportunity to send in a video of them speaking or have a phone call with a conference organizer. Given these things, it's seems sad to trivially reject based on inexperience, it hurts the conference more than the applicants, and of course gives the impression the conference cares more about style than substance. I realize that's a rash decision making wild generalizations based on a small amount of text... OTOH that is probably how some of those less experienced applicants feel.