Conferences - now that they seem to be ramping back up, has anyone ever gone to one? What's the actual point?
Seems like any sort of demo or walkthrough is going to be worse than just watching a youtube video. Is it purely networking? How generally has going to conferences helped your career (if at all)?
It was networking mostly. I was excited to go and it was memorable.
The value is the learning, both from networking and the presentations. For the presentations, yeah maybe a YouTube video is as good but when was the last time your company carved out multiple days for you to watch videos like that? The Q&A at the end also gives you a chance to learn more or ask specific questions. On the networking side, it’s not just about making contacts, but also being able to ask questions of people who have knowledge. As an example, a few years ago my department was starting to evaluate using a service mesh in their tech stack (when they were very new). I watched a presentation about them at a conference, then ended up talking to the presenter for 45 minutes after the presentation, giving me a chance to ask a load of questions and massively accelerate my learning.
It's always for employee to waste company money and take a vacay
There is no point.
It's mainly just to waste your company money