I want to see talks where presentors have radically different approaches to problems. I want to see Zed Shaw and Douglas Crockford have a passionate explitive laden argument about the merits of Ruby vs server side JS only to see Ken Thompson or Rob Pike blow their minds with a talk about go. So what if they all happen to be white guys. What matters is they have interesting things to say and vastly different perspectives coming from long careers in the industry honing their craft.
Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers. If someone doesn't want to go to a conference on concurrency and distributed algorithms because a demographic de-jour isn't speaking then that person isn't passionate about the subject of the conference and the conference is better off without them there.
That may seem harsh but I'm just throwing my opinion out there for the sake of diversity of ideas ;)
Then you are not the audience those "demographic checkboxes" are there for. (Neither am I.)
I'm a white male engineer, and I've never had the experience of going to a tech conference and wondering whether I'm supposed to be there because I don't see anyone else who looks like me. That experience is common for engineers who are women, POC, or in various other demographics.
For all I know you might be a member of one of those demographics, but if you "couldn't care less" then I assume you haven't had that experience either. That doesn't affect your right to an opinion, but it does mean you are not fully considering at least one reason that demographic diversity is important.
Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers.
I haven't met a single hacker or engineer who wasn't also a person, and other things that matter to people include feeling welcome and accepted.
If you're accustomed to feeling welcome and accepted at technical conferences, it's easy to say that feeling welcome and accepted doesn't matter to you at such conferences. If most conferences didn't make you feel that way, it might matter to you more to find one that did.
One way to make people feel welcome and accepted is to reduce the extent to which they feel like the "odd one out", in as many senses as possible.
As autarch points out above, this isn't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that replaced quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have more than one criterion to optimise for. Multi-objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal.
Perhaps there's a desirable balance to be struck here.
this isn't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that replaced quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have more than one criterion to optimise for. Multi-objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal.
Hopefully we can agree that a conference which had interesting technical content and was welcoming to a broad range of people would be better than a conference that had only one or the other.
The jist of my opinion is this: The subject technology should always be the highest priority at a technology conference.
If you consider the feeling of being, say, the only person of color at a conference to be a "superficial hangup", then perhaps your beliefs about what makes people comfortable have not been closely examined. It sounds like a statement about what makes you comfortable.
Personally, I care about having the most interesting technical ideas and interesting minds at the conferences I choose to attend.
Is it safe to say you're a member of a demographic who has never had those checkboxes applied to them negatively?
It sure sounds like you're trying to do that right now.
Can you explain to me why using race/demographics as a means to sideline and devalue my opinion isn't the highest form of hypocrisy in this context?
In other words... Isn't your question a perfect example of you "applying those checkboxes" to me negatively?
It's funny that you can say that right after someone implied I was a member of an over-represented group and then used that assumption as leverage against me in an argument. So that statement is demonstrably false.
It's supposed to be about equality, right? How can we get more equal than focusing on the ideas themselves?
> One 60-year-old software engineer, fired in January after seven years at a chipmaker in San Jose, now wears casual button-downs, khakis, and sneakers to interviews, studies embedded systems (cell phones, video game consoles) at a local extension school, and has started working out and dyeing his gray hair a dark auburn. He also had blepharoplasty, plastic surgery to remove bags and dark circles under his eyes. “It’s smart to stay current and look as young as possible if you want to keep working in an industry where so many people are in their 20s,” he says. “I still want to work in tech, because I love solving problems. And I don’t yet have enough saved for retirement.”
/rimshot
At the end of the day, people want a movie that reaffirms their personal views more than they want a quality constructed film. They want music that triggers their own pet emotions, not a technically clever composition. And they want a friend, not a coworker.
Except that they don't. If I walk around a conference saying that all the women at this event are filthy whores who should go back to the kitchen, what law am I breaking? Do you really think that's acceptable behavior at a conference?
My feeling is that codes of conduct mainly serve the salesmen and workshop providers. The thankfully defunct Ada Initiative was the worst actor, but others have stepped in.
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassmen... - here is a very reasonable CoC that mostly deal with behavior that is actually law breaking.
Someone actually flagged my comment, which to me is pretty jaw dropping. This isn't a topic we can discuss? Okay.
I've been rejected for conferences where every speaker that was accepted looked well under 30. At the least, no one had grey hair.
It's frustrating to me because the very same conferences are highly vocal about seeking diversity, and do usually end up with some gender diversity (although non-Asian/non-White speakers are almost always poorly represented). But there's no age diversity: everyone on stage is between 20-30, or else goes to a plastic surgeon and dresses to look that age.