4 ms·
In my personal experience at places I've worked, there has been a strong negative correlation between conference attendance and overall quality and productivity
by mador 9y ago
In my personal experience at places I've worked, there has been a strong negative correlation between conference attendance and overall quality and productivity of the staff. Conferences offer such an easy out for people who want to waste a week while pretending to work and taking a quasi-vacation on the company dime that if you're careless in permitting conference attendance, it can easily turn into a free-for-all.
At one small conference I attended, most companies were represented by one or two people, maybe a CXX and a bizdev guy. Our company had a couple dozen people there. The attendee list was published, and it was kind of embarrassing when they acknowledged our presence during the intro remarks because it basically told everyone what a joke of a company we were. The only reason my team was there was so that my boss could add more make-work to put in his quarterly report while earning points from his team for being that "good boss" that supports employee development. It was such a mismanaged mess at that company that they even paid for a team of contractors to take a paid week off to attend a conference, mostly so that they could pad their resumes, since none of that knowledge was actually applicable to the project they were on.
At my next job, people were too busy trying to hit their goals to pitch their boss on conferences in Vegas.
Conference attendance can provide benefits to employers under the right circumstances, but if I had my own company and an employee initiated a request to attend a conference, I'd insist that he have some skin in the game--he'd either have to take vacation days, or if it counted as work days, he'd have to pay for a significant part of the travel/registration costs himself. If he's not willing, then it probably wasn't worth much to him anyway.
- convolvatron 9y agohere's how its supposed to work: you have a great contributor. someone who does a substantial amount of work and has come up with enough novel stuff to get a paper published in the field. they go to the conference, and no you don't get their output for a few days...except some work on the plane and some nights at the hotel but they give a great talk, and learn about a bunch of new exciting things in their field to bring back with them. every time someone talks to this person and is impressed by their work, the name of your company gets associated transitively when the people at the conference think about a new job, or using a product in your space, they implicitly think 'foo co - thats a great place doing really cool stuff'
- anaccountforme 9y agoI completely agree with you about the value of conferences(for my industry) and I've stopped attending them. I find trainings generally more valuable, though they are frequently pricey. One alternative I've also considered is the ability to work remotely/disconnected for a week or so to focus on researching a new technology or skill. For a self-starter I think this could be a great use of time and money for all parties. Obviously for any of these scenarios to work you need an employee that wants to learn, and an employer who is willing to invest in their employee's growth.
- YZF 9y agoI guess you should also ask your employee to pay for his laptop? Clearly if he's not willing to put in $500 towards a new MBP it can't be worth much to him anyways ;) Why would you hire someone as an employee if you don't trust them not to abuse company resources like that? Their "skin in the game" is that they're your employees. It sounds like those places with negative correlation had other problems. I'd say correlation not causation.