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Guide to speaking at tech conferences

362 points by karlhughes 7y ago

ilikehurdles 7y ago
Wonderful work. Hopefully this will go a long way toward accomplishing my related new years resolution to speak at tech conferences :)!
- chestermacwerth 7y ago
  Eventually ideas like this always eat theirselves. The "speaking at conference" meme is now thoroughly eaten; there's a cottage industry of bullshit around the whole thing. People do it now to advance their careers and achieve an extremely modest amount of e-fame. Most talks are pointless. It's people giving talks to give talks about helping other people give takls about giving talks for their boss's arbitrary stipulation that giving talks is a required feature for "team lead" engineers, etc..
  - karlhughes 7y ago
    That's pretty cynical, but I'll admit there's some truth to it. I take the optimist's view of it though: speaking is a good way to advance your career, but with so many new people getting into software development it's also a great way to teach others. Even if you can watch the video online, conferences allow you to actually meet and ask questions of others who know things you don't. It's hard to replicate these interactions online.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    What's with the anger? If it's something you don't want to do, don't. There are plenty of people who get a lot of value out of the interactions and maybe part of the "boss's arbitrary stipulation" is that there is value to the company through promoting technologies/etc. at events. I get that a lot of people are cynical about conferences. And I sometimes am one of them. But a lot of people and organizations find them worthwhile.
    - prepend 7y ago
      I see the glut of bad talks (GP mentioned talks about talking about talking) as crowding out other, more valuable talks. I’m not angry and don’t know if GP is, but it’s certainly worth pointing out and discouraging, if possible. For me, it’s not that the talks aren’t valuable to some people. That’s neat. And the talk certainly helps the talker and their boss. I think it’s that the marginal value is low.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        I'm not sure I've ever seen a talk about giving talks at any tech conference I've ever attended. Personally, that sort of meta-topic doesn't sound like something I'd be inclined to pick as a conference organizer. Certainly individuals will disagree about conference content. I know I've gotten evaluations that were simultaneously "too in-depth" and "too high-level" for the same talk! Conference organizers are usually trying to choose talks that appeal to a range of people--both in depth and in topic area. Furthermore, they're usually not familiar with every speaker so some sessions that sound interesting--but aren't or are just poorly delivered--slip in. And conference organizers just screw up too. Maybe they give undue weight to choosing something a bit random from someone they know. At the same time, many conferences these days are trying to encourage first-time speakers so it's not always the usual suspects. And, at some level, that means taking the good with the bad.
  - nsxwolf 7y ago
    It’s a goal of mine to speak at a conference so that I can have a photograph of myself speaking at a conference for my LinkedIn profile.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      I assume you're being sarcastic. But, if not, that's a pretty bad reason. I've been pretty critical with some other comments on this thread but I actually agree that naked self-promotion is not a good reason to give a conference talk.
      - BigJono 7y ago
        It's actually a great reason if you're optimising for the amount of money you make in a career in big business. Which is entirely the point of this thread.
        ghaff 7y ago
        If that's your only motivation, I'm guessing you're not going to do a great job. There are exceptions of course.
        bryanrasmussen 7y ago
        Although there are many people out there who do good jobs based only on their love of what they are doing I believe this number is dwarfed by the number of people doing good jobs for money. I bet the number of people doing bad jobs based only on their lover of what they are doing is also dwarfed by the number of people doing bad jobs for money, but it would be nice to see stats on these things. Still, since I only do jobs for money almost everyone I've ever interacted with that was doing a job good or bad was also doing it for money. I suppose the parent comment might do pretty good dependent on how well they are actually motivated by money and their skills.
        ghaff 7y ago
hayksaakian 7y ago
Thank you for creating this, I've already shared it with a few people
Ace__ 7y ago
Although I have no interest in speaking at a tech or any conference,the sheer amount of work put in meant that I had to check it out. Good work mate. You should really add the ability to exchange email for a downloadable PDF of the guide. And that bottom bar that slides in "20+ new CFPs every week", it won't close no matter how many times I click on x. Browser: Chrome. Cheers, Ace.
- karlhughes 7y ago
  Thanks for the heads up, and I appreciate the kind words. I interviewed over 30 speakers myself, plus read through several dozen articles to compile this guide. I will eventually offer a PDF download option, but I wanted to start off by putting it out there for free to the public. After I've made some revisions and improvements and it's a bit more stable I'll go the ebook route too. Thanks again!
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Look forward to reading it as it's something I do a lot of. Thanks!
hnbreak 7y ago
Speaking at conferences is a strong urge in the dev community. Some do it because they want to improve their public speaking skills or to prove something to themselves ('I can be as outgoing as the marketing guy next door, har har'). Or to improve their market value. In my early days, I had also this urge but it's wrong. The whole post is wrong. Ask yourself WHY you want to speak at tech conferences. What's the aim of your speech? Most of the times and most people don't have an answer. You want to have nice Google SERPs on your name? Why? To increase your personal market value? You think one speech is enough? Not at all. You need so much more. A topic, more than your vim config or some Github repo which got five stars. You need achievements, first. You need a damn story, a sharp profile. Then go out and hold 10 talks/year, shotgun Google's video search with your talks. I promise you, once you have a good story, public speaking is easy, it feels like talking. But if you don't have anything to tell you sound like the odd & boring AWS sales guy who wants to sell some new overpriced AWS service and paid for the speaking slot. And be aware that public talks don't necessarily improve your market value. One so-so talk on Youtube about your vim config at some third-class conference is worse than nothing. Besides, most tech conference are third-class created by some greedy local meetup tycoon rebranding his useless meetups. The best is that the meetup tycoon gets free content, YOU on stage, on Youtube, for a crappy conference he sold tickets for 500 bucks. He doesn't care if the entire world makes fun of your speech about your vim config. I remember one guy who did music with hard-coded JS decades ago, not impressive, maybe a bit interesting. This guy was on several speaking gigs with always the same topic, his stupid JS music. After the third time I saw him, I started to hate him, I swore to never hire this person. Remember, speaking can backfire if you don't have a topic. I've another guy: Jared, he wrote amazing Formik, a great lib. His talks though are so-so, promoting his company (I think it's just a shell for him freelancing) too much and yeah not on par with his repo. When seeing his talks on a shabby meetup, my first thought was, better fix your repo's issues instead of doing this self-promotion. Again: it backfired and didn't improve his market value. Rather the opposite, before I thought Formik, Jared, the king. Once I saw the speaches, OMG, Jared got jarring. I rather prefer a cozy Youtube video on a living room couch on Svelte like from the Youtuber Harry Wolff (highly recommended!!! => [1]). Good speakers like Harry are entertainers, they understand to be authentic without even trying and it's hard to deconstruct what they do right. So, public speaking skills are overrated. It's enough to be able to moderate a meeting/standup for 10-50 people. To do proper speaking, you need to do it frequently, you need to understand entertainment, you need to get deeply into story telling, how to plot narratives, sometimes you need script writers, media trainers and you MUST be in shape, no need to look like James Bond but getting on keto few weeks before sounds like a plan. If you still think you should be a public speaker, test if you have the basics for being a good entertainer. Do internal presentation at your company, bigger ones where you invite multiple departments, do Youtube videos, screen recordings. Test how people react on your voice, on your appearance, your jokes, If you see positive signals or slight growth, continue. Otherwise just don't. Public speaking is a profession and imagine a public speaker who wants to pair-program with you in C++. I mean why not? If you can hold a speech he should be able to write some kernel code. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPVQ3M9b6CY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPVQ3M9b6CY
dclowd9901 7y ago
In the list of 11 reasons people speak at conferences, I can’t help but see that a good 7 of them or so are vanity related. I think this is the number 1 reason I don’t speak at conferences (and probably the number 1 reason I find conferences to be of very limited utility).
- karlhughes 7y ago
  I think this is a fair critique. Many people who are drawn to public speaking probably tend toward the "vain" side of the personality spectrum. Anecdotally, I acted in a play when I was in college. Almost every person in it was studying acting, and the level of self-absorption was overpowering at times. All that said, speakers and topics are only a small portion of what I find valuable about attending a conference anyway. Most of the opportunity for learning and advancement comes in meeting other people you wouldn't have been able to connect with otherwise.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Whether or not it's vanity, there's an element of enjoying being in the public eye--at least in some contexts. If someone really doesn't like being publicly visible they're mostly going to self-select out of being a speaker unless they have some other compelling motivation for doing so. Whether or not it comes naturally or it's a persona they've developed for professional reasons, most public speakers like the energy of the crowd or other audience. (Personally, I'm much more comfortable live than on video--which is a somewhat different skill.)
- ghaff 7y ago
  I'd fully expect "11 reasons people speak at conferences" to include a lot of reasons associated with personal benefits. (And I'd actually only count 3 of those as being vanity: the rush, promotion, and recognition.) People sure don't speak at conferences so they can spend more time at airports and on planes. Many do also enjoy it for altruistic reasons listed. But relatively few people are going to take on tasks that aren't also beneficial to themselves personally.
macintux 7y ago
I'd long since forgotten I created a gist for speaking resources, but I've added this and a few other links, and cleaned up some older broken (sigh) links: https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837 https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837
peter303 7y ago
A variant of reason #11 is that you improve your own skills by being able to teach it to others. That is why course tutors are people who have recently taken a course. The material and obstacles are fresh in their minds.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Thorentis 7y ago
Duplicating a comment I posted on a previous conference thread that is even more relevant here: "... am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out ticket invites and request for papers. Conferences were originally for leading experts in a particular field to share new research and present papers that were going to be published, and give people the chance to ask questions and find out more from the authors. Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck. I recognise the networking aspect of them can be useful, but I couldn't justify spending the ticket price of some of them, to go to a conf based around one very narrow tech (unless it was a narrow but widely used and lucrative tech, and I was looking for work in that area currently)." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874372)
- sangnoir 7y ago
  > Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. I mean - this shouldn't come as a surprise. Any sufficiently large community is going to self-organize and attempt to be self-sustaining (there's a named law about this self-perpetuation, I forget the name). I suspect your mental model of conferences infers too much decorum: there's a whole bunch of conferences for computer games, juggulos, furries, comics, "over-unity" energy, and anime. Why can't JS frameworks have thier own fandom?
  - CapitalistCartr 7y ago
    "(there's a named law about this self-perpetuation, I forget the name)" Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle
FsDuke 7y ago
These threads always bring out the jealous introverts getting mad at more outgoing people that are able to speak in public. Guys you can do it too, really. It's not that hard.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Introverts can be, and often are, very outgoing. They just find it exhausting and need time alone afterwards to recharge. I have an evergreen recommendation that anyone who wants to understand want introvert, extravert, and ambivert really mean should read Quiet by Susan Cains.
sundarurfriend 7y ago
The useful information (IMO) starts from section 3: https://www.cfpland.com/guides/speaking/how-conferences-choose/ https://www.cfpland.com/guides/speaking/how-conferences-choo...

362 points by karlhughes 7y ago

Wonderful work. Hopefully this will go a long way toward accomplishing my related new years resolution to speak at tech conferences :)!

chestermacwerth 7y ago
Eventually ideas like this always eat theirselves. The "speaking at conference" meme is now thoroughly eaten; there's a cottage industry of bullshit around the whole thing. People do it now to advance their careers and achieve an extremely modest amount of e-fame. Most talks are pointless. It's people giving talks to give talks about helping other people give takls about giving talks for their boss's arbitrary stipulation that giving talks is a required feature for "team lead" engineers, etc..
- karlhughes 7y ago
  That's pretty cynical, but I'll admit there's some truth to it. I take the optimist's view of it though: speaking is a good way to advance your career, but with so many new people getting into software development it's also a great way to teach others. Even if you can watch the video online, conferences allow you to actually meet and ask questions of others who know things you don't. It's hard to replicate these interactions online.
- ghaff 7y ago
  What's with the anger? If it's something you don't want to do, don't. There are plenty of people who get a lot of value out of the interactions and maybe part of the "boss's arbitrary stipulation" is that there is value to the company through promoting technologies/etc. at events. I get that a lot of people are cynical about conferences. And I sometimes am one of them. But a lot of people and organizations find them worthwhile.
  - prepend 7y ago
    I see the glut of bad talks (GP mentioned talks about talking about talking) as crowding out other, more valuable talks. I’m not angry and don’t know if GP is, but it’s certainly worth pointing out and discouraging, if possible. For me, it’s not that the talks aren’t valuable to some people. That’s neat. And the talk certainly helps the talker and their boss. I think it’s that the marginal value is low.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      I'm not sure I've ever seen a talk about giving talks at any tech conference I've ever attended. Personally, that sort of meta-topic doesn't sound like something I'd be inclined to pick as a conference organizer. Certainly individuals will disagree about conference content. I know I've gotten evaluations that were simultaneously "too in-depth" and "too high-level" for the same talk! Conference organizers are usually trying to choose talks that appeal to a range of people--both in depth and in topic area. Furthermore, they're usually not familiar with every speaker so some sessions that sound interesting--but aren't or are just poorly delivered--slip in. And conference organizers just screw up too. Maybe they give undue weight to choosing something a bit random from someone they know. At the same time, many conferences these days are trying to encourage first-time speakers so it's not always the usual suspects. And, at some level, that means taking the good with the bad.
- nsxwolf 7y ago
  It’s a goal of mine to speak at a conference so that I can have a photograph of myself speaking at a conference for my LinkedIn profile.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I assume you're being sarcastic. But, if not, that's a pretty bad reason. I've been pretty critical with some other comments on this thread but I actually agree that naked self-promotion is not a good reason to give a conference talk.
    - BigJono 7y ago
      It's actually a great reason if you're optimising for the amount of money you make in a career in big business. Which is entirely the point of this thread.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        If that's your only motivation, I'm guessing you're not going to do a great job. There are exceptions of course.
        bryanrasmussen 7y ago
        Although there are many people out there who do good jobs based only on their love of what they are doing I believe this number is dwarfed by the number of people doing good jobs for money. I bet the number of people doing bad jobs based only on their lover of what they are doing is also dwarfed by the number of people doing bad jobs for money, but it would be nice to see stats on these things. Still, since I only do jobs for money almost everyone I've ever interacted with that was doing a job good or bad was also doing it for money. I suppose the parent comment might do pretty good dependent on how well they are actually motivated by money and their skills.
        ghaff 7y ago

hayksaakian 7y ago

Thank you for creating this, I've already shared it with a few people

Ace__ 7y ago

Although I have no interest in speaking at a tech or any conference,the sheer amount of work put in meant that I had to check it out. Good work mate. You should really add the ability to exchange email for a downloadable PDF of the guide. And that bottom bar that slides in "20+ new CFPs every week", it won't close no matter how many times I click on x. Browser: Chrome. Cheers, Ace.

karlhughes 7y ago
Thanks for the heads up, and I appreciate the kind words. I interviewed over 30 speakers myself, plus read through several dozen articles to compile this guide. I will eventually offer a PDF download option, but I wanted to start off by putting it out there for free to the public. After I've made some revisions and improvements and it's a bit more stable I'll go the ebook route too. Thanks again!
- ghaff 7y ago
  Look forward to reading it as it's something I do a lot of. Thanks!

hnbreak 7y ago

Speaking at conferences is a strong urge in the dev community. Some do it because they want to improve their public speaking skills or to prove something to themselves ('I can be as outgoing as the marketing guy next door, har har'). Or to improve their market value. In my early days, I had also this urge but it's wrong. The whole post is wrong. Ask yourself WHY you want to speak at tech conferences. What's the aim of your speech? Most of the times and most people don't have an answer. You want to have nice Google SERPs on your name? Why? To increase your personal market value? You think one speech is enough? Not at all. You need so much more. A topic, more than your vim config or some Github repo which got five stars. You need achievements, first. You need a damn story, a sharp profile. Then go out and hold 10 talks/year, shotgun Google's video search with your talks. I promise you, once you have a good story, public speaking is easy, it feels like talking. But if you don't have anything to tell you sound like the odd & boring AWS sales guy who wants to sell some new overpriced AWS service and paid for the speaking slot. And be aware that public talks don't necessarily improve your market value. One so-so talk on Youtube about your vim config at some third-class conference is worse than nothing. Besides, most tech conference are third-class created by some greedy local meetup tycoon rebranding his useless meetups. The best is that the meetup tycoon gets free content, YOU on stage, on Youtube, for a crappy conference he sold tickets for 500 bucks. He doesn't care if the entire world makes fun of your speech about your vim config. I remember one guy who did music with hard-coded JS decades ago, not impressive, maybe a bit interesting. This guy was on several speaking gigs with always the same topic, his stupid JS music. After the third time I saw him, I started to hate him, I swore to never hire this person. Remember, speaking can backfire if you don't have a topic. I've another guy: Jared, he wrote amazing Formik, a great lib. His talks though are so-so, promoting his company (I think it's just a shell for him freelancing) too much and yeah not on par with his repo. When seeing his talks on a shabby meetup, my first thought was, better fix your repo's issues instead of doing this self-promotion. Again: it backfired and didn't improve his market value. Rather the opposite, before I thought Formik, Jared, the king. Once I saw the speaches, OMG, Jared got jarring. I rather prefer a cozy Youtube video on a living room couch on Svelte like from the Youtuber Harry Wolff (highly recommended!!! => [1]). Good speakers like Harry are entertainers, they understand to be authentic without even trying and it's hard to deconstruct what they do right. So, public speaking skills are overrated. It's enough to be able to moderate a meeting/standup for 10-50 people. To do proper speaking, you need to do it frequently, you need to understand entertainment, you need to get deeply into story telling, how to plot narratives, sometimes you need script writers, media trainers and you MUST be in shape, no need to look like James Bond but getting on keto few weeks before sounds like a plan. If you still think you should be a public speaker, test if you have the basics for being a good entertainer. Do internal presentation at your company, bigger ones where you invite multiple departments, do Youtube videos, screen recordings. Test how people react on your voice, on your appearance, your jokes, If you see positive signals or slight growth, continue. Otherwise just don't. Public speaking is a profession and imagine a public speaker who wants to pair-program with you in C++. I mean why not? If you can hold a speech he should be able to write some kernel code. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPVQ3M9b6CY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPVQ3M9b6CY

dclowd9901 7y ago

In the list of 11 reasons people speak at conferences, I can’t help but see that a good 7 of them or so are vanity related. I think this is the number 1 reason I don’t speak at conferences (and probably the number 1 reason I find conferences to be of very limited utility).

karlhughes 7y ago
I think this is a fair critique. Many people who are drawn to public speaking probably tend toward the "vain" side of the personality spectrum. Anecdotally, I acted in a play when I was in college. Almost every person in it was studying acting, and the level of self-absorption was overpowering at times. All that said, speakers and topics are only a small portion of what I find valuable about attending a conference anyway. Most of the opportunity for learning and advancement comes in meeting other people you wouldn't have been able to connect with otherwise.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Whether or not it's vanity, there's an element of enjoying being in the public eye--at least in some contexts. If someone really doesn't like being publicly visible they're mostly going to self-select out of being a speaker unless they have some other compelling motivation for doing so. Whether or not it comes naturally or it's a persona they've developed for professional reasons, most public speakers like the energy of the crowd or other audience. (Personally, I'm much more comfortable live than on video--which is a somewhat different skill.)
ghaff 7y ago
I'd fully expect "11 reasons people speak at conferences" to include a lot of reasons associated with personal benefits. (And I'd actually only count 3 of those as being vanity: the rush, promotion, and recognition.) People sure don't speak at conferences so they can spend more time at airports and on planes. Many do also enjoy it for altruistic reasons listed. But relatively few people are going to take on tasks that aren't also beneficial to themselves personally.

macintux 7y ago

I'd long since forgotten I created a gist for speaking resources, but I've added this and a few other links, and cleaned up some older broken (sigh) links: https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837 https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837

peter303 7y ago

A variant of reason #11 is that you improve your own skills by being able to teach it to others. That is why course tutors are people who have recently taken a course. The material and obstacles are fresh in their minds.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Thorentis 7y ago

Duplicating a comment I posted on a previous conference thread that is even more relevant here: "... am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out ticket invites and request for papers. Conferences were originally for leading experts in a particular field to share new research and present papers that were going to be published, and give people the chance to ask questions and find out more from the authors. Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck. I recognise the networking aspect of them can be useful, but I couldn't justify spending the ticket price of some of them, to go to a conf based around one very narrow tech (unless it was a narrow but widely used and lucrative tech, and I was looking for work in that area currently)." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874372)

sangnoir 7y ago
> Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. I mean - this shouldn't come as a surprise. Any sufficiently large community is going to self-organize and attempt to be self-sustaining (there's a named law about this self-perpetuation, I forget the name). I suspect your mental model of conferences infers too much decorum: there's a whole bunch of conferences for computer games, juggulos, furries, comics, "over-unity" energy, and anime. Why can't JS frameworks have thier own fandom?
- CapitalistCartr 7y ago
  "(there's a named law about this self-perpetuation, I forget the name)" Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle

FsDuke 7y ago

These threads always bring out the jealous introverts getting mad at more outgoing people that are able to speak in public. Guys you can do it too, really. It's not that hard.

onion2k 7y ago
Introverts can be, and often are, very outgoing. They just find it exhausting and need time alone afterwards to recharge. I have an evergreen recommendation that anyone who wants to understand want introvert, extravert, and ambivert really mean should read Quiet by Susan Cains.

sundarurfriend 7y ago

The useful information (IMO) starts from section 3: https://www.cfpland.com/guides/speaking/how-conferences-choose/ https://www.cfpland.com/guides/speaking/how-conferences-choo...