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Programming Conferences

A good example of this is the BUILD Windows conference by Microsoft, Its $2000 for a ticket. I've never been to one of these conferences so perhaps there are unicorns everywhere, but I have a hard time justifying the cost.

Is there anything really valuable at a conference like this or will it all be available 1 hour after the conference for free?

Where is the price justification for you?

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I dunno, i haven't gotten to go to one yet. Hoping i can go to PASS this year. – DForck42 Jul 15 '11 at 16:43
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One of Steve Ballmers lower minions may actually notice your existence. He may even shake your hand. Think! A real Microsoft employee. Don't say that's not worth 2000 bucks. – thorsten müller Jul 15 '11 at 16:50
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Pretty simple really. People are willing to pay those prices. – Randy Minder Jul 15 '11 at 16:52
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It's paid for by corporations; they send their employees to conferences each year. I've been to one because I was a vendor. It was nice because it was free but definitely not worth paying (much) for. – Kevin Jul 15 '11 at 18:26
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What @Kevin said. The price is always right when you're spending someone else's money. – Philip Kelley Jul 15 '11 at 18:32
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marked as duplicate by Michael K, Walter, Mark Trapp Jul 15 '11 at 22:45

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6 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

As others have said, they cost that much to attend because they cost that much to put on. They exist because they provide value that exceeds the attendance cost. Those bosses who are paying for their staff to go are doing so because they believe the firm will gain value.

I got out my own credit card on the second or third day Build registration was open, and not only paid the registration, but also plane tickets and hotel reservations. There is no doubt at all to me that being there, in person, will be worth it. I have been to many PDCs and watched others online, and the difference is significant. Some of the differences include:

  • Networking (face time) with your colleagues, with blue badges, with speakers (at PDC/Build essentially all the speakers are internal to Microsoft, at other Microsoft conferences it's about 1/3 external), with vendors, and with other attendees
  • Getting your questions answered after the session or at "ask the experts", chalk talks etc. When you watch a streaming video, you can't ask questions.
  • A chance for meta information like what sessions are popular, where attendees are going, what people discussed at lunch
  • High nerd-value souvenirs like Tshirts that prove you were there (hard to predict what will have value later, but these things make great conversation starters)
  • Once upon a time, "the bits" in the form of a CD set, DVD set, or hard drive.
  • Physical attendee swag like a laptop, phone, etc. Many speculate a slate/tablet will be handed out at Build. That isn't why I'm going.
  • Sessions that are not streamed - BOFs, chalk talks, round tables and so on. These are often where the truly valuable details lurk. You can read the tweetstream of a keynote and learn what you need from that - no need to even watch the video. But for inside-the-API stuff that chalk talk (by the guy whose fingers typed in the code) may be the only documentation there is for the next 6 months.
  • In the case of sending a staff member, the sense of appreciation and pampering that a technical person can feel from being sent to a conference.

As well, disengaging from your day job to immerse yourself in this material for a week carries real value, and watching the streaming videos really isn't the same.

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+1 for the T-shirts. I love schwag – CamelBlues Jul 15 '11 at 18:39
They cost 2000 USD per person to put on - are you kidding me?! – UpTheCreek Jul 15 '11 at 20:43
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@UpTheCreek - I'm serious. I have been told by people who run a number of large conferences that they are run as breakeven propositions. Feel free to call a random convention centre to ask how much the whole building will cost for 10 days or so (you need set up and tear down time before and after the conference.) The answer will be in the millions for a place that can hold 5000 attendees and roughly double that in staff, exhibitors etc. Now pay 3 AV people per room. Print thousands of banner and pay people to hang them. Etc etc. Mind boggling. – Kate Gregory Jul 15 '11 at 20:48
up vote 17 down vote

From my experiences a lot of people at these conferences are not paying for them out-out-pocket, it's usually a company event/bonus/reward of some sort (especially the Microsoft ones). So, knowing that most of your audience is probably going to be sponsored by a company and not an individual expense, you can generally get away with jacking up the price a bit.

Also, the speakers are usually not working for charity as their time is valuable, not to mention the cost of reserving conference centers, equipment, etc.

Personally, I probably would never pay for a developer conference (ones at that cost anyway) as a personal expense. However, I'll gladly go to all the ones that my company wants to pay for.

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You could apply these assumptions to any conference and yet there are many *cons that manage to be accessible to wider public. Heck, I paid somewhere around $2000 for 10 months of postgrad studies with lectures from some really experienced non-academia people – Mchl Jul 15 '11 at 16:55
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@Mchl I didn't mean to imply ALL *cons, just specifically the "corporate targeted" ones, such as Microsoft. $2000 for 10 months of postgrad studies seems like a deal. However, $2000 for a few days - week of multiple people saying relatively the same things about some new "game changing" feature of a framework... not so much. – Brandon Moretz Jul 15 '11 at 17:15
I should probably add that it was 10 months of weekends, not weekday courses, but still I consider it well spent. – Mchl Jul 15 '11 at 17:20
Actually the speakers generally are working for charity, or at best their employers are paying their regular salary while they spend the week at the conference. Actual speaker fees rarely rise above the level of "token thankyou". See programmers.stackexchange.com/q/10916/285 (closed, but has good answers) – Kate Gregory Jul 15 '11 at 18:18
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ok, but there are roughly 25 attendees for each speaker at big conferences (eg 5000 attendees, 200 speakers, or 500 attendees, 20 speakers.) Even on a salary of 100K, 2K a week, to each speaker (and we know that's wrong, even the MS guys at Tech Ed are working on outside stuff throughout the week so the conf doesn't need to earn back their full week's pay, plus externals aren't being paid out of conference fees) that's $80 per attendee. Not really a big contributor to the cost. Plane tickets and hotel rooms for speakers might double that. Still not where the $$ is spent. – Kate Gregory Jul 15 '11 at 18:37
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up vote 6 down vote

Do a bit of convention organizing [and attending here]. @Brandon Moretz is pretty spot on about one side of the equation. I'll add that a typical week-long training class will run $2k+. I'll also add that you forgot about travel & entertainment here -- oftentimes registration is the small part of the company costs.

The flip side to this is that conferences and expositions are horribly expensive to put on. Doing just about anything in a convention center requires overpaying for materials and for insane amounts of union labor. I have signed off on $1k+ bills to get a single lighbulb replaced. Chris Williams gives a great breakdown of what is involved building a small conference. You don't want to know how crazy building a big conference can get.

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Don't know about $1000 light bulbs, but I have seen the Teamsters charge $100 to move a pallet 60 feet from a loading dock to a display booth. And you're not allowed to grab a pallet jack and just move it yourself. – Robert Harvey Jul 15 '11 at 17:09
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@Robert, I am non-union and I would charge you $95 ;) – maple_shaft♦ Jul 15 '11 at 17:12
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@maple_shaft: Gee, thanks. You're all heart. – Robert Harvey Jul 15 '11 at 17:13
@Robert, I think what you've seen is that the convention center chages that while employing teamsters. I suspect teamsters don't have a per pallet commision. – user179700 Aug 24 '11 at 0:17
up vote 2 down vote

Most people who go to these are going on the company dime. Many managers have a bloated budget for these conference/training/presentation events and they tend to look at it as Edu-tainment.

Sure it can be educational, you may get exposed to some cutting edge new things that will be coming soon, you get to meet important people and make contacts, but ultimately they are a lot of fun too.

Managers know that these are fun and sometimes use them as a reward to hard working employees, let them go to a conference in another city, spend a couple nights in a hotel, run up an expense account on booze.

Personally I would rather have a bonus but if HR or executive decisions prevent that I would be perfectly happy being sent to a conference. :)

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up vote 2 down vote

The price justification is the networking opportunity. At a conference that I attended recently I make a personal connection with several speakers by asking them questions and following up afterwards on the floor. Since then I've been in contact with these speakers by email or their blog site and they have helped me solve tricky technical problems or find answers that otherwise I might have spent a day or more trolling for online. At that rate the $1000 fee for two days conference plus hotel, meals and travel is a bargin. I'm an independent consultant so paying the bills out of my own per diem.

So when considering a conference I would look carefully at who the speakers are, will they be available to one-on-one Q&A outside their talk, and do they answer community questions on a blog.

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I don't buy the networking angle. Would you pay 2K for a bunch of linkedIn connections? – Kevin Jul 15 '11 at 18:29
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There is a huge difference between face time and a linkedIn connection. If that's not obvious to you, start attending user groups or code camps as a free way to experience face time. Then consider a large conference as a way to get two orders of magnitude more of that. – Kate Gregory Jul 15 '11 at 18:45
You're crazy if you don't think networking face to face is important. – Nic Jul 15 '11 at 20:45
up vote 2 down vote

A good example of this is the BUILD Windows conference by Microsoft, Its $2000 for a ticket. I've never been to one of these conferences so perhaps there are unicorns everywhere, but I have a hard time justifying the cost.

Where is the price justification for you? Why are developer conferences so expensive?

Because they can be! No, seriously - you know this is a market economy we're living in (well, quite a large percentage of us in here).

You sell peaches at the local market at $4/kilo and people are buying them. Then you discover you can sell them at $8/kilo and people would still be buying them. Are you going to sell them at $4 or $8/kilo (or maybe $12?) ...

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By the same arguement a C# book should cost $1000 and sell like hot cakes! – Martin Beckett Jul 15 '11 at 19:03
@Martin Beckett - No it couldn't. Because if it could, it would! Would you pay $1000 for a C# book? – Rook Jul 15 '11 at 19:29
This is pretty much the only answer: because they price it at that level and there is enough demand so they can sell enough tickets to make it worthwhile. The other answers are less relevant: yes, conferences are expensive to put on, but that just sets a lower bound for the price below which the conference will be cancelled. – smackfu Jul 15 '11 at 19:45
@Rook, the difference is that conferences are expensive to put on so there is a lower limit on price. If it was purely that the knowledge gained was worth $2K then books with the same knowledge would also cost $2K. Why an employer would pay $K to send you to a conference, hotels, flights etc but quibble about buying $50 books is a different question! – Martin Beckett Jul 15 '11 at 20:06
Without getting into an enormous debate about market economics, the reason that C# books don't cost $K is because of competition and supply. With a larger supply and greater competition in the market, prices approach the cost of production. With a lower supply and reduced competition, prices will approach what consumers are willing to pay. In the case of conferences, there is a reduced supply, and minimal competition (which is a good thing, it makes attendance a more memorable experience). – zzzzBov Jul 15 '11 at 20:29

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