The year before, the head of machine learning at amazon spent his 45 mins talking about the advantages of AWS over Azure. The more money someone manages at these companies, the worse their presentation is going to be, in my experience.

I think some people get sent to conferences for the wrong reasons: the company has some money for some reason so they send them.

Other people should go but they can't get the money.

Many times the companies that get booths and sponsor the conference press a lot of flesh and get a lot of business cards but no sales. Sometimes you will see a conference sponsor smiling afterwards, but often they end up spending the last day doing a seminar on some product to a bunch of tired defense contractors who flew across the country to read stuff on their laptops -- if you get in free as a speaker it is probably worth the airfare to commiserate about it with the head of marketing for the sponsor afterwards in the hotel bar.

A nearby city has been thinking about building a conference center, consultants are telling them that most conference centers don't make a profit. Many cities subsidize them because they hope that it will bring in more traffic to other businesses in the area.

However, with conferences being as expensive as they are, I wonder how it is they don't make a profit? Who does?

Both times I came back with a handful of tidbits that would have saved either myself or an entire team weeks of frustrating debugging or research work. So yeah, you got your money's worth.

Most people are there for the free swag, parties, and booze.

The sessions have increasingly sensationalized titles with hollow delivery.

The local hotels charge $500 night. Uber and Lyft drivers converge on Moscone center like bees to honey.

Local traffic in SF comes to a halt.

Sounds fun. Right?

Conference speakers have some patterns of topics and they're useful and I appreciate them, but they often touch on some topics / have their own way of looking at things.

Other speakers seem to be all about spelling out a laundry list of platitudes topics that are even more disconnected ... I appreciate those less.

Sales pitches ... not interested.

Not to say they're useless but there are a huge variety of workplaces, developers, and all sorts of things that work differently, and conferences tend to be very focused on their general POV about how things work and are done.

I'm not sure I worded anything right but the conference culture always seems a bit 'off' for me.

> Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's.

It's not all about you, and you're not the center of the universe.

This isn't commonly known, but the O'Reilly Open Source Conference was specifically glitzy so the global press had a good experience broadcasting it, and promoting Open Source, since around 2000. They also had about 10 simultaneous tracks, which requires a large venue. That costs real money.

> They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship.

Their prices are clearly posted on their registration pages, and they offer generous alumni discounts. And most IT people work for ... wait for it ... corporations.

> The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance.

Companies pay for those booths. If you don't like their pitch, you can ask for a technical contact to followup. Or not visit them.

Personally, I walked around to each booth and ask for an overview of their products and asked detailed questions, then blogged about it for others who couldn't make it to the conference.

So they are valuable, if you're in the right frame of mind.

> They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches.

The larger sponsors have the chance to do a keynote. That's how it works. A small percentage of keynotes at O'Reilly conferences are outright sales pitches. The rest aren't. The most valuable ones I saw were the 451 Group market analyses of upcoming trends, which I wasn't expecting to be valuable initially.

Ironically, I heard the most complaints about a keynote delivered by a world expert on HA from VMware - the problem wasn't the talk, the problem was he was a decade ahead of most of the attendees. lol.

The Percona Conference does it right: they have a track with a dedicated room for vendor-sponsored talks. So everybody knows what to expect before sitting down. Yet they still get plenty of attendees.

> If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

Or, you know, you could just go to a bar. But I'm sure you would gripe about the wallpaper color they chose, right?

An added bonus to strictly attending local conferences is less harmful emissions from frivolous air travel.

I think that's mostly their point. It's a getaway "perk" for office drones.

Conferences are fun to attend once a year, but personally I never did much "business" at them. It was a work vacation. YMMV.

Even stuff like "I was trying to solve this problem but I saw this really popular pattern and folks seemed to like it but damn it looks like it would just blow up if you ever did X." And someone tells me "yeah that blew up for me and here is how". So helpful!

I want a conference where folks get into small groups and everyone goes around and says:

Here is what I'm doing, challenges we faced, how we overcame them, lessons learned.

Even basic day to day stuff that someone talks about can be handy. The minuta and stuff sometimes is the key it seems. And sometimes just sharing similar stories / problems that don't have solutions for me inspires a lot of confidence and that can lead to real results.

In ye olden days they were a relatively reliable publisher. Now I won't even consider touching them unless I can find many reviews vouching for a book.

(That a lot of people mostly equate OSCON with the O'Reilly events business is likely a symptom of the overall problem. This isn't a commentary on the quality of their events generally--which I've found to be pretty solid--but it does say something about the mindshare they have beyond OSCON.)

And, if I'm being honest, OSCON has gone from being almost a must go if you were in certain open source circles to something still mostly worth going to if you could find the time and budget. OSCON out-survived a lot of shows that were about open source overall but it's frankly a bit hard to be an event about open source in a general way when open source touches almost everything.

In any case, in spite of the special place a lot of people have for OSCON, it probably wasn't sustainable as a standalone event without the rest of the event slate.

The thing is that cheap conferences depend on either a company running it for sales purposes (and mostly not then for big events) or volunteers providing cheap labor--both of which limit the options. Volunteers mostly get tired of running conferences when there are large commercial interests involved--as happened with Hadoop.

If there is a virtual training class rather than an online conference, I'd make that a priority, if the funds may disappear.

As for replacement conferences, I wouldn't assume that you'll have any certainty around those until those for some time.

https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/5