Then I was looking at other conferences lineups and saw many repeat speakers from that same conf, often with the same talk, turned me off quite a bit from going to any more conferences, lots of the same, basic content, with not much expertise behind it.
The value is mostly in hanging out with various people. The best experience has generally been when I went alone and met loads of new people, instead of going with coworkers or friends and then just hang out with them. Not that's not fun either, but I can do that next weekend anyway.
The more professionally organised ones don't tend to have that many stands, except for paying sponsors. I understand why they do that, but I think there's good value in "community stands" too.
I mean, the talks themselves are just "shut up and listen", right? Not too much socializing happening there. I think that revolving the entire conference around presentations is probably not always the best format.
There was a big space for vendors to have stalls but if you talked to them it was like talking to a sales person. Sometimes they had a tech-oriented sales person but it was still selling you their product.
So I think that repeated talks and intro talks are to be expected. Through I did not mind them, I used them to get idea about new thing X while I have time set aside for learning.
Most tech events don't in general pay for speakers or any travel. (Keynotes, scholarships, etc. are among the sometimes exceptions.)
I rarely literally re-use a presentation slide for slide but many presentations I give are based on an earlier presentation I gave. In most cases, a different conference is going to be a mostly different audience. In general, it doesn't make a lot of sense to just dump a presentation because I gave it once to a couple hundred peop,e.
To you. On the flip side, it provided an introductory level overview of a concept many watching/attending may not have looked into themselves, or were thinking of looking into. It also provided a different form of introduction, which could be valuable for attendees with a learning style preference different to that of look-at-a-how-to or check-out-the-docs.
>the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it".
Hey, at least he was honest and didn't try to bluff his way through an answer, as many in our industry will.
Overall, depending on the audience and context, it sounds like it may have been worthwhile for many attendees. Plus he got to work on his soft skills, and doing so with such vulnerability could inspire others to also.
It doesn't matter how eloquent and thorough the introductory tutorial is, if the presenter has not experienced the technology sufficiently to have accumulated a few scars[1], they will not have the ability to convey the relative importance of the various aspects of the introduction, with which can be modified simply as a matter of taste, and which should be followed unless very careful consideration of global engineering context, and a full appreciation of the consequences.
If you are unable to meet that bar, at the very least, your abstract should make that abundantly clear out of respect for your audience.
[1] or at least have the experience to say that normally they would have expected to get bitten by something by their point in usage, but the technology meets their requirements so thoroughly that it has been particularly smooth sailing.
For example I currently mostly work with Go, and if I would give a high-level presentation about Go I'd start with the "tour of Go" tutorial, but I'd also add some context to some things, explain where you need to be careful to avoid problems, and emphasize the usefulness of other things that may not be obvious at a glance. That kind of stuff. I think the presentation format is a great way for doing that.
A beginning JavaScript programmer might explain the "with" keyword, which would be a mistake. I have no idea if the presentation contained any mistakes like that.
I don't work much with JS, and I haven't looked much as TypeScript since, but I didn't really learn all that much more than what I already knew: "TypeScript is JavaScript with optional typing".
Was it useful for others? Maybe; I hope so. But for me personally I consider it a wasted hour in my life.
Is this not true of most tech meetups / tech conferences though? I feel like they all carry an implicit YMMV with them, which attendees know when deciding to join.
I think Dunning-Kruger is part of it, but also excitement.
If you are the expert you probably got that way by putting in a lot of time, you are at any rate older than when you started out and you may be in fact be quite older than the average developer, often older people do not have the same enthusiasm and excitement for things (although sure there are many that do) so that cuts down the number of people who have experience who also have enthusiasm for getting up and talking.
Getting up and Talking means doing work for it, if you have kids you may not want to do that work unless your job is one where you have to do it. So if you are an older expert with kids but not employed in an evangelist role you probably are not going to go out and do talks.
The expert in a subject may see so deeply into the subject that it is difficult for them to express the gee-whiz aspects that will attract other people. Those who know more are not necessarily able to express that knowledge in an interesting way.
The expert may have lost interest in the matter as they gain in expertise, or they may think things that others will find amazing and interesting to be so obvious and trivial as to not be worth expressing.
For these reasons it may be that talks on a subject are preponderantly given by those with less than expert mastery of the subject.
Do you think or feel it is shameful for you to give introductory talk? Did you grew up in environment where such thing was mocked or did you grew up somewhere it was praised? Do you think it matters super much if someone in audiemce looks down on you or are you rather motivated by single person that likes you?
Do you think you need to be super awesome experienced speaker to make first public talk? Are you ok having public talk with primary purpose being to learn doing public talks?
These imo make the difference. It is not like there would be lines of experts wanting to talk.
Then in the Q&A someone asked a "In our experience, we've had problems with X, what's your take?" (I've forgotten what X was specifically), and the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it".
So ... he basically just read the TypeScript "getting started" tutorial, transformed it to a presentation, and had no real knowledge of TypeScript.
The entire talk seemed pretty useless to me. I don't even know how accurate that presentation was, because there's much more to using a language effectively than the basic syntax learned from a glance at a tutorial page.