Does anyone here regularly speak at tech conferences? I’ve noticed it can lead to stellar engineering career trajectory regardless of competency. I’ve also notice that lots of the digital/Devops/SRE/Hyper Scaleability transformation stories that are told at tech conferences are total BS that never happened. People seem to bare face lie at these things. I know a few folks who have no background or expertise in what they talk about who are now hot shit on the circuit. The speaker circuit seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy. Just work for a decent company, make shit up, talk at conference, then get invited to the next one and watch recruiters fall over themselves to offer you Senior roles. Is this a common thing I’m only waking up to now? EDIT: I’m not really talking about customer faving conferences like Techready etc, more about industry specific ones like SREcon, Devops days, AI etc
Bingo
Do you really want to be that guy who gets up on stage and says “It’s a great time to be a developer?”
Imagine, then, if you could develop speaking talent AND have the technical chops to back it up? Limitless potential.
I need to get with the damn program!!!
It's a thing. You're not crazy. That's basically the story of how I got into Facebook from a tier 3 company where I was a regular speaker at conferences. I'm not smart at all as you can tell by my height and/or ethnicity.
What?! I need to start speaking at these things. How do I do this!
A good manager will send its team to those events. Not just the rockstars either, but every single member in a rotation. It's great to practice public speaking, build confidence, networking, team morale, knowledge building, etc.
Hmmmm what if you don't have that good of a manager. And still want to know how to go about it. ?
Like how do I know what conferences I could attend. And for which ones I can apply to talk. Any tips to self pursue this ?
Common. And you hit the nail on the head.