Eventually ideas like this always eat theirselves. The "speaking at conference" meme is now thoroughly eaten; there's a cottage industry of bullshit around the whole thing. People do it now to advance their careers and achieve an extremely modest amount of e-fame. Most talks are pointless. It's people giving talks to give talks about helping other people give takls about giving talks for their boss's arbitrary stipulation that giving talks is a required feature for "team lead" engineers, etc..

That's pretty cynical, but I'll admit there's some truth to it.

I take the optimist's view of it though: speaking is a good way to advance your career, but with so many new people getting into software development it's also a great way to teach others. Even if you can watch the video online, conferences allow you to actually meet and ask questions of others who know things you don't.

It's hard to replicate these interactions online.

It’s a goal of mine to speak at a conference so that I can have a photograph of myself speaking at a conference for my LinkedIn profile.

I have some pics from VentureBeat while winning a contest there. :)

I assume you're being sarcastic. But, if not, that's a pretty bad reason.

I've been pretty critical with some other comments on this thread but I actually agree that naked self-promotion is not a good reason to give a conference talk.

It's actually a great reason if you're optimising for the amount of money you make in a career in big business. Which is entirely the point of this thread.

If that's your only motivation, I'm guessing you're not going to do a great job. There are exceptions of course.

Although there are many people out there who do good jobs based only on their love of what they are doing I believe this number is dwarfed by the number of people doing good jobs for money.

I bet the number of people doing bad jobs based only on their lover of what they are doing is also dwarfed by the number of people doing bad jobs for money, but it would be nice to see stats on these things.

Still, since I only do jobs for money almost everyone I've ever interacted with that was doing a job good or bad was also doing it for money. I suppose the parent comment might do pretty good dependent on how well they are actually motivated by money and their skills.

There's a vast gulf between being motivated only by money and being motivated only by love of what you're doing. I enjoy my work, including speaking, most of the time. But if someone weren't paying me to do it I would be--at a minimum--much much more selective about what I took on.

sure I like programming also, but I realized some years ago when I got my first really big consultant paycheck that a lot of the stuff I used to hate about working just flew out the window.

What's with the anger?

If it's something you don't want to do, don't. There are plenty of people who get a lot of value out of the interactions and maybe part of the "boss's arbitrary stipulation" is that there is value to the company through promoting technologies/etc. at events.

I get that a lot of people are cynical about conferences. And I sometimes am one of them. But a lot of people and organizations find them worthwhile.

I see the glut of bad talks (GP mentioned talks about talking about talking) as crowding out other, more valuable talks.

I’m not angry and don’t know if GP is, but it’s certainly worth pointing out and discouraging, if possible.

For me, it’s not that the talks aren’t valuable to some people. That’s neat. And the talk certainly helps the talker and their boss. I think it’s that the marginal value is low.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a talk about giving talks at any tech conference I've ever attended. Personally, that sort of meta-topic doesn't sound like something I'd be inclined to pick as a conference organizer.

Certainly individuals will disagree about conference content. I know I've gotten evaluations that were simultaneously "too in-depth" and "too high-level" for the same talk!

Conference organizers are usually trying to choose talks that appeal to a range of people--both in depth and in topic area. Furthermore, they're usually not familiar with every speaker so some sessions that sound interesting--but aren't or are just poorly delivered--slip in.

And conference organizers just screw up too. Maybe they give undue weight to choosing something a bit random from someone they know. At the same time, many conferences these days are trying to encourage first-time speakers so it's not always the usual suspects. And, at some level, that means taking the good with the bad.