On Apr 2, 2009, at 10:39 PM, Andrew Langmead wrote:
Just the other day, I was talking to a co-worker about how it would be
hard to justify the cost of a conference or tutorial. If I went, would
the knowledge I gained result in a $1k+ increase in productivity?
So I want to give an impassioned answer to this question, both as
someone who has attended conferences over the years and as someone who
has organized them. Clearly it depends on the _which_ conference you
go to and how you spend your time there, but if you find the right
one, definitely. Maybe 5x or 10x that amount of return.
Let me give you four direct examples:
1) I've been going to LISA (http://www.usenix.org/events/byname/lisa.html
) for many years now. There is no doubt in my mind that I am a
different, much more advanced professional than I would have been had
I not gone. Hanging out with people who were leagues ahead of me had a
tremendous impact on my development as a sysadmin. I don't think that
development could have happened any other way. Am I $Nk more
productive now than I was before I went to these conferences?
Absolutely, and my employer got someone who functions at a higher
level to boot. And I still have so much to learn from those more
advanced than I am so I go back each year for more.
2) I haven't been to OSCON in several years (childrearing, etc), but
when I did go I derived immediate and tangible benefit from the
contacts I made there. Leaving out the people in the Perl world that I
met there, I can recall a situation where we were struggling at work
to find way to think about a REST interface we were designing (this
was before REST really took off). Paul Prescott was kind enough to sit
down with me at lunch one day and talk in depth about how to think
about these things. How much did my employer pay vs. what it would
normally cost to get that information?
3) One of the things I thought about when it was my turn to chair LISA
was the idea that everyone goes to these conferences with a question
or a problem they are hoping to solve. I tried to build into my year's
conference as many opportunities as possible for people to get the
answers they sought. Now, if you can find the answer to a key question
(from experts in the field) that will impact your employer (be it
technical direction, reliability of infrastructure, technology to use,
etc), was that worth $1k to them?
4) Last trivial example: one of the minor projects I was involved in
before going to LISA last year was trying to contact various SSL cert
vendors to see if I could put together some sort of package to
purchase certs in bulk. The cost of the certs we needed in my college
was continuing to grow as we rolled out more and more things that
needed SSL. I wasn't even thinking of this project when in the middle
of a workshop I was in someone mentioned that there was a cert vendor
that provided certs to .EDU sites for free. That one tip paid the cost
of my trip.
And the longer I think about it, the more examples like this I can
remember.
So yes, definitely.
-- dNb
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