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Code Watch: The conference calls

By Larry O'Brien

September 15, 2011 — (Page 1 of 2)
It's the most wonderful time of the year. I'm talking, of course, about training season. With the end of the fiscal year looming, good managers all across the globe spend the last big scoops of their budget on professional development. Hotels have big room blocks available, flights are reliable, and the great annual migration of the nerds takes place. (BZ Media is a conference producer, so apply whatever grains of salt you find appropriate.)

Training has changed remarkably in the Web age. At a fundamental level, access to expertise has become cheap. Once upon a time, it was difficult to find opinions on arcane technologies. Now, it's difficult to put aside the endless stream of opinions and get any work done. And although there is a part of me that suspects that the best week's skill improvement would come from hunkering down in a cruddy hotel next door to a decent pizza joint, there is far more to professional development than pure skill enhancement.

The No. 1 rule of conferences is: The value of a conference is not the lecture material. One of the shocks I had in my first years speaking and chairing conference tracks was how very little technical content anyone could hope to communicate in a conference lecture environment. Even in a fairly homogenous crowd, there's far more variation than faced by a college professor; a conference speaker cannot give a dense, challenging talk whose value unfolds as it's applied to homework while the talk is still fresh in memory. My rule of thumb became that an hour-long talk ought to cover about as much material as a thousand-word technical article.

In other words, were you to attend a conference where you dutifully filled your days with lectures, the best you could hope for would be to receive less technical information than you could get from a good book.

A number of conferences have tried to improve the information density of the lectures, primarily by moving toward shorter sessions, including "lightning talk" formats that rigorously enforce their brief durations. In my opinion, lightning talks are more appetizer than meal: They can stimulate and intrigue, but they do so by trading off depth and subtlety, and, perhaps most importantly, they can't afford questions and clarifying answers.

Related Search Term(s): professional development

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Third-party tools showcased at Professional Developers Conference
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