Tech Conference Costs

maybe you should pay to go to conferences ?

Regular conference goers - what conferences would you recommend if you had to pay for your own tickets?

I was considering a conference that will be happening next month. After researching it a bit more, I realized I would have been really ticked if I had actually gone. The conference was not expensive at all, but going to it would have meant a flight and hotel, as well as valuable time away from our startup. Looking at the info, I discovered two important things:1. They still have not announced the topics, just the speakers, which makes me think that the talks will be ill-prepared at best. A go

I’ve encountered the same attitude from other large, profitable companies and large, profitable conferences. [..] My hosts are clearly planning to gain value from my talk or they wouldn’t have said yes. In total they will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars paying programmers to listen to the talk, discuss it afterwards, and experiment with the ideas. But pay the presenter? Inconceivable.At RailsConf this year, I heard that the non-keynote speakers weren't paid and weren't having

Ha! That sounds like certain for-profit conferences."You've been selected a speaker for our super elite conference! You can invite your friends to attend for the paltry sum of $XYZ. Oh and it'll also cost you $ABC..."

It sounds like the conference Amber went to was a bad conference. They exist. Both expensive and non-expensive ones :-)A few thoughts...1) Price != ValueJust like everything else in life the price tag is not the way to judge a conference. It's the value received. Some free conferences will be worth £1000 to somebody. Some £1000 conferences will be worth nothing to somebody else. Some expensive conferences will suck universally. Some free events will too. If you want to know what a confe

I guess it has to do with the fact that when organizing a conference many optimize for speakers attracting crowds rather than content.

Is it a good idea to have such entertainment at a conference when tickets + travel are already so expensive?

$300 is cheap for a conference where great speakers give great talks about about focused topics that are relevant to your career and/or interests. $300 is expensive for a conference where some "cool" hackers spend the day cracking in-jokes and showing silly slides.

I don’t think this is quite right with all conferences - I’ve personally found it quite common for these event companies to give talks to “platinum” sponsors as an indirect way of charging for them.(Although this particular instance sounds like a scam)