it's not a security-specific thing (i actually think it's a less pernicious problem in security, since such a large fraction of people are just straight up not allowed to talk about their work), but more of a... a certain subset of Bay Area culture? or perhaps open source culture (since OSS folks will be able to talk about their work more than most)?
i hesitate to name specific conferences that make me raise my eyebrows, but: there's a subset of Tech Conferences that have really huge budgets and flashy marketing and tend to be focused on really young technologies that have a lot of rando competitors in the market right now. the way you differentiate yourself / market yourself in that kind of space seems to be "get someone who tweets a lot to give a bunch of talks at these sorts of conferences about how this technology will Save The World (also buy our specific solution)"!
this is not inherently horrible, this is kinda just How Marketing Works, but i always end up kind of disoriented when i hang out with friends who are more "tapped into" that world than i am, because people will say "so-and-so is so legit," and i will ask how they know so-and-so is so legit? and they will say well they gave a really good talk last year, and i will look them up and they've been in the industry for like two years, and like this does not make them a bad person but two years is not a lot of time and also i have no other artifacts by which to judge their legitness! i am not sure "gave a random talk" is the barometer of quality i care about, i am far more impressed by "i worked with them and they engineered lots of things" or "they worked on a really hard problem for a really long time and gave a talk about that" or whatever.
(the antithesis of these conferences would be something like Linux Plumbers Conference, which is easily the most useful-feeling conference i've ever been to. this makes sense because the structure is so different than, say, a random language conference, which tend to be lots of random stories of "here's how we used this language at our company, come join us!" at LPC, it's literally "random Linux developers from all around the world get in the same room to talk about how we're gonna collectively make Linux better in the coming year," and the talks are all very concrete and focused on real and pressing problems, and a lot of the talks end in real dialogues with the audience, because the goal is gathering consensus on a solution & disseminating knowledge to the people who need it to like, do their jobs. presentations tend to be unflashy and unpretentious and tbh kinda boring, but it feels like actual engineering is happening.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2019-12-05 01:56 am (UTC)i hesitate to name specific conferences that make me raise my eyebrows, but: there's a subset of Tech Conferences that have really huge budgets and flashy marketing and tend to be focused on really young technologies that have a lot of rando competitors in the market right now. the way you differentiate yourself / market yourself in that kind of space seems to be "get someone who tweets a lot to give a bunch of talks at these sorts of conferences about how this technology will Save The World (also buy our specific solution)"!
this is not inherently horrible, this is kinda just How Marketing Works, but i always end up kind of disoriented when i hang out with friends who are more "tapped into" that world than i am, because people will say "so-and-so is so legit," and i will ask how they know so-and-so is so legit? and they will say well they gave a really good talk last year, and i will look them up and they've been in the industry for like two years, and like this does not make them a bad person but two years is not a lot of time and also i have no other artifacts by which to judge their legitness! i am not sure "gave a random talk" is the barometer of quality i care about, i am far more impressed by "i worked with them and they engineered lots of things" or "they worked on a really hard problem for a really long time and gave a talk about that" or whatever.
(the antithesis of these conferences would be something like Linux Plumbers Conference, which is easily the most useful-feeling conference i've ever been to. this makes sense because the structure is so different than, say, a random language conference, which tend to be lots of random stories of "here's how we used this language at our company, come join us!" at LPC, it's literally "random Linux developers from all around the world get in the same room to talk about how we're gonna collectively make Linux better in the coming year," and the talks are all very concrete and focused on real and pressing problems, and a lot of the talks end in real dialogues with the audience, because the goal is gathering consensus on a solution & disseminating knowledge to the people who need it to like, do their jobs. presentations tend to be unflashy and unpretentious and tbh kinda boring, but it feels like actual engineering is happening.)