A lot of the comments here are complaining about the last point in the article (the n00b), asking how on earth you get started if you have to have presented before in order to present. The article is telling you exactly how to do that:
- Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers, and it's an excellent way to get practice at presenting in a lower stress environment. It's not always small audiences either, I've seen and given talks with 50 or more attendees at a local meet up. As for getting accepted, organizers are always in need of talks, and organizers are not getting 6 submissions per month, they're usually lucky if they can fill every month with a talk, so you're much more likely to be accepted.
- Maintain a blog. Writing articles on your blog is practice for writing a talk, and gives you a steady stream of ideas that can be turned into a presentation fairly easily.
I'm going to add a couple more:
- Give a lightning talk at conferences you attend. As well as giving you practice, you are also visible to all the attendees, including people who will be selecting talks at future conferences you submit to.
- Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted.
These steps aren't going to make it so that you're immediately accepted at large conferences, but they give you the start the article is claiming you need. And finally, if you're rejected, don't give up. Conferences do take chances on new speakers (although probably not all new speakers who submit a talk), and being rejected doesn't mean your talk is bad, or that your skills are bad, just that you didn't get it this time.
> Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted.
And also it lets you make a fool of yourself with a smaller audience.
Very few people are good at something the first time they try it. Why do you imagine you're a great presenter the first time out? As with anything else, make your mistakes in small domains.
If you are interested in public speaking, but don't have too much practice in speaking, I highly recommend checking out a local open mic and trying out some stand up.
Easier to look a fool telling jokes than look a fool making a valid point.
Among other things, Toastmasters will cure you of what ails many accomplished speakers. That is, the verbal or non-verbal tic (umm, ahh, so, like, wild gestures, hands in pocket).
As with anything else, make your mistakes in small domains.
And you would be amazed at the kinds of mistakes that you can make!
A few years back I did a 3 hour tutorial at OSCON. I put a lot of effort into making sure that I had 3 hours of material I planned on presenting, with some extra I could slip in. I "presented" to an empty room and was sure of my timing.
Turns out that I speak quite a bit faster in front of a real audience. I was done in 2.5 hours, including what I planned on leaving out...
Many of us talk a bit quicker when nervous. I've only presented twice, both to a very small audience (6-10 people) for a local user group nearly a decade ago. The first time I was very nervous and self conscious. The second time, I was still somewhat nervous, but the first time is always the worst. I felt like I did rather well, with a more conversational style, the second time. Unfortunately, there's no video.
Then again, it's probably doubly cringeworthy if I did see it. Once for the mistakes I would see, and once again for the difference in how well I felt I did to what I imagine would be apparent once I could review it.
I'd probably add "go niche on your topic" as well. While it may put off some selection folks because it's too narrow, it can also work in your favor. I've been selected for conferences precisely because of somewhat niche topics. Now... whether anyone shows up for your talk or not... different story, but if they do, it's a signal that people may want more of that, and it feeds back to organizers.
I think it' funny that there is so much criticism about that point considering that the blog post already shows how to gain these experience points without actually having talked at conferences (by making a video, by presenting at events with lower requirements, like a meetup).
The problem with these smaller groups is you have no proof you did anything there and were any good. I got rejected to PyCon one year for this very reason - and I have tons of experience speaking at smaller conferences.
(Note: The reason is not speculation as they tell you in a rejection email.)
As the primary meetup organizer for SLC Python, I wholeheartedly agree. We often have people practicing their talks in front of our group before they go onto much larger forums such as PyCon and Open West. It's also a good chance to practice public speaking and presenting complicated ideas.
> - Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers
Our local python user group regularly attracts 100+ people crowds and they always have space for speakers. If you want to try dipping your toe, it's hard to screw up a 5 minute talk.
There's a possible ugly 5th heartbreaker: "we love your topic and experience but you look too old and unhip for our hip frontend conference".
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.
Totally agree. I've noticed something else similarly disturbing. The people who advocate the loudest for demographic diversity aren't really interested in diversity of ideas. They want to see men and women of all shapes and colors saying similar things. If you want thought provoking talks, diversity of ideas is far more important than having a group of speakers that looks like captain planet and the planeteers.
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.
I don't see these two goals as being mutually exclusive. Even if they are, it'd be good to aim for a balance, rather than just choosing one entirely over the other. They're both good goals for a conference.
Many people don't agree with me and that's OK. I literally couldn't care less about demographic checkboxes when listening to a talk about technology. The number one priority should be having thought provoking, relevant, and high impact talks about technology at a technology conference. Seeing these talks and engaging in conversations about the technology should be the number one priority for attendees.
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 ;)
I literally couldn't care less about demographic checkboxes
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.
A warm, diverse, welcoming, and accepting technical conference that contains no interesting technical content is less a technical conference and more a purely social gathering. There's really nothing wrong with that, but at that point it's no longer meaningfully a technical conference.
Perhaps there's a desirable balance to be struck here.
That was the point I attempted to convey with my last paragraph:
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.
I think we mostly agree. The difference is I believe what makes people comfortable at a technology conference isnt superficial hangups about race and gender, it's the ability to talk shop about that technology and have meaningful discussions surrounding that topic.
The jist of my opinion is this: The subject technology should always be the highest priority at a technology conference.
> The difference is I believe what makes people comfortable at a technology conference isnt superficial hangups about race and gender
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.
Because you're the one saying race and demographics don't matter, yet you're likely a member of the race and demographic who hasn't had negative experiences because of their race/demographic. You don't think it's important because you've never really had to think about it.
>yet you're likely a member of the race and demographic who hasn't had negative experiences because of their race/demographic.
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.
> 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.”
Marketing is key, in any industry. People are run by emotion, including social cues, much more than they'd like to admit. People want to feel like the thing they are discussing is relevant to themselves, so they prefer insular groups that confirm their fantasy. A greying middle-aged guy in a suit doesn't stroke the ego of the exuberant youth.
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.
Which is strange, really. I can't speak for every mid-20s guy, but I'd personally be much more interested in seeing a relatively unknown industry veteran get up to talk about something interesting than see hip funny JS talk #38292 from some guy in a humorous T-shirt.
Yes, no one really wants to talk about the ageism thing. I'm not sure how much the plastic surgery thing actually happens in real life, but I too find it frustrating and sad how it's never included in the topic of diversity. It's a problem that literally everyone who sticks around long enough will gave to contend with.
> (Completely ignoring that local, state, and federal laws all already exist to handle all of it.)
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?
I've said it elsewhere: management sets the tone, not the code of conduct. If there is a random arsehole behaving badly, they get ejected, with or without code of conduct. But is a person of power behaves like an arsehole, then it's up to management to decide if proper behaviour is mandatory or optional.
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.
I know you weren't replying to me but I've never seen it. I also would never condone that kind of behavior, or even be associated with people who did that.
Someone actually flagged my comment, which to me is pretty jaw dropping. This isn't a topic we can discuss? Okay.
Only diversity in looks and skin color is endorsed. Not the diversity of ideas (at least when it comes to online discussions on the subject) or backgrounds or experiences ;-) Which seems to be the opposite of what the original goal was i think.
Please don't create new accounts to violate the guidelines with. Not only do we ban them (which we've done), but we ban the main account if it continues.
Seems like a lot of people don't understand the noob part. Let me explain:
Imagine you pay a lot of money to attend a conference. And I'm not even talking about flight+food+hotel as some conferences' cover are pretty high (blackhat). Now you go in a talk and discover that the speaker is just horrible. The topic might be interesting but you get nothing out of it because the speaker is just bad.
Now this is a problem because as an attendant you're no happy, and this is the responsibility of the judges of the CFP. They need to work to protect you from these kind of talks.
I'd much tolerate beginners at smaller conferences, or meetups. This is where you can get experience before going to a bigger one. A one that might even give you money and pay for your travel+accommodation.
By the way, I think most of you people have no idea how bad talks can be. In more academic conferences, foreign speakers make a big chunk of the talks and some of them can't speak english at all. It's painful for everyone to sit through that kind of talk. (Note that I'm a foreigner myself, just saying that some of us are EXTREMELY BAD AT ENGLISH (not going to point fingers).)
Many attendees don't care, the trip is paid for by the company. It is a nice trip to an attractive location (sunny Florida in winter, etc).
At most conferences I attended, there were scores of presenters who, frankly, sucked, or the supposedly "technical" topic turned out to be unabashed product/service pitch.
Honestly, applying to speak at industry conferences is a very frustrating experience. I have given lots of talks at my university, I have spoken at local meetups, and at one local free conference where the organizers knew me. Students and other attendees at my talks often tell me that my talks are good. However, trying to break into the "conference" circuit has been difficult as I have never gotten any direct feedback from anywhere I have submitted to and often wonder if they read my proposal at all. They sometimes even forget to inform you that your talk has not been accepted! It is a bit ridiculous.
In contrast, while I don't want to paint a rosy picture of academic conferences, you always get detailed feedback on your paper/talk that you submit. It may be biased, it may be frustrating, but at least you can tell that someone at least looked at your paper/talk and gave you some feedback. Industry conferences never do this.
Have done reviews for IEEE, APEC, and ACM stuff. There can be many reasons that a presentation is not accepted. Some rejects are a simple instance of subject matter not matching the scope of the symposium. Or there can be some problems with the math and other technical issues. Another unfortunate and not uncomman issue is where the English syntax and/or grammar is so poor that the meaning of the proposal is lost. And there can be the occasional submittal that is a bit before its time - it has happened to myself. Example is the IEEE (PSES and other societies) is probably at least 15 years behind the ACM on matters of software safety and test methodology. Members of the ISPCE tech committiee recently approached me about a session on software safety analysis for the 2017 symposium; yet my submittals for similar presentations were rejected at least twice during last 10 years, by this same group of people.
So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarly been a poor idea. Please do not take rejections personnaly.
> So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarily been a poor idea. Please do not take rejections personally.
There's also the case of having too many good talks and simply having to tailor the conference around a specific track of talks that might make the most sense for a given audience or for a given industry focus.
Most conferences have been converted to strictly money-making entities.
Here is how it works:
- a RFP is published
- you submit
- you get a response: "Unfortunately, your proposal did not get accepted, however, we have a limited number of time slots for sponsors. If you become a silver sponsor..." In other words, you can submit any crap, as long as you provide "sponsorship".
This may or may not apply to DevOps Days, I don't know enough about it.
Also, the above does not invalidate some good points made by the author regarding selecting the right angle of the presentation, etc.
Although conferences are hard work to put on, and I certainly don't want to imply that the organizers don't deserve to be paid well, I've noticed a large rise in other types of (sleazy) money-making conferences as well.
I've been cold-called by several conferences before (not totally unusual, I've spoken at a few large ones, and my name's out there) where they ask me to speak, but "don't have the budget" for payment and don't reimburse or offer a stipend for travel costs. Unsurprisingly, they charge hundreds of dollars for admission, have extremely cheap venues, and a somewhat lackluster roster of gullible "expert speakers."
Sure, there's a large gray area between "not a very good conference" and "scammy ripoff" but it's another thing to watch out for.
It's worth noting that many prestigious genuine conferences do not reimburse speakers and charge them for a full price ticket as well.
For example, all the ACM conferences.
I actually like this - everyone contributes to the costs, and speakers are just attendees like everyone else.
I've seen people get extremely irate when they see this, saying it's a scam, but at many conferences speakers are just normal attendees like anyone else.
But for most conferences, interesting speakers provide the whole value of the conference - it is what attracts attendees. Therefore, organizers make decent money off of speakers, so no, they are not like regular attendees.
Really? My mental model is that the value of the conference lies entirely in network effects. That is, it's valuable for people deep in topic X to go to a conference for X because they expect many other people who are also deep in topic X to go to that conference. The speakers are just a means to an end, to get the initial core group interested and start the quadratic snowball going.
I think the organiser of the conference is providing the value to the speaker, not the other way around. They're providing a platform for the speaker to talk about their project.
I have seen talks rejected from places where we were silver sponsor. But that being said, most conferences I go to the platinum/gold sponsors are all over the tracks. Even if they don't know a lick about the topics.
Good point, even for non-sponsored talks, they may have an agenda which is based towards certain topics that cover certain technologies for certain companies, you get the point.
Can't argue much with these criteria. Yet why "previous presenter experience"? If you are afraid of inexperienced speakers to deliver a boring talk, why Not just give them a 10-15 minute slot?
Them, I am reminded that many speakers tour many events with the same talk. I rather like the idea of having fresh speakers on stage over the 4th instance of the very same old talk.
> Yet why "previous presenter experience"? If you are afraid of inexperienced speakers to deliver a boring talk, why Not just give them a 10-15 minute slot?
That makes it even less likely that the talk will turn out (as well as complicating the conference schedule). Giving a 30 minute talk is much easier than giving a 10-15 minute talk. "If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now."
Many conference organizers will give some slots to brand new presenters, especially if the topic seems interesting; they just want a good balance of new and experienced presenters. But a conference that has so many talk submissions that it has to reject incredible talks can afford to be more selective.
Most people will bomb their first conference talk (I'm sure I did). It's best to get that experience out of the way at a smaller venue, or even get some practice recording talks or podcasts for a blog before doing it in front of a huge live audience.
I think of it as a ladder that you progress through as a speaker. This reduces risk for the organizers, but it's also good for your growth as a speaker. If you think you can just hop right into a conference talk with no warmup, then the earlier steps should be a breeze.
- Short meetup talk (10-20 minutes).
- Long meetup talk (20-40 minutes)
- Conference talk.
The only gotcha is that most meetups are not recorded. That makes it difficult to apply for conferences outside of your hometown.
Most meetups would not have an issue with you bringing a friend who would record the talk for you on their phone or with a camera. As with all these things, make sure to ask the organizers first, though.
A flip cam is, what 100-200 usd? I know personally that you can get a mount with slideable legs for about 10 usd, and that will include noobs that you can turn to make it so that it can be slide left/right even by an inexperienced user. A slight breeze will shake it, but since most conferences/meet ups, etc will take place indoors that shouldn't be a problem.
it's a real risk when you're a conference organizer to take someone with no prior experience. I've seen quite a few talks where the abstract looked technically good, but unfortunately the delivery really didn't help the talk come over well.
As others have said, it's generally better to build up to a conference presentation through doing smaller events like user groups and maybe lightning or rookie track talks, before trying for a main track slot.
Like many here, I totally and vehemently disagree with the fourth reason for rejection (the "n00b"): if someone has a proposal that is worthy of presentation, they should be given the opportunity to present -- regardless of their age or experience. There are many reasons for this, including the most obvious one that if every conference insists on experience, no one will be able to get that experience. But the reasons for not depending on prior presentations run much deeper: if you are going to evaluate a proposal based on the speaker's prior presentations, you are tautologically unblinded in your review process. Having an unblinded review process is a grievous mistake: when conferences aren't blind in their reviews, they end up confirming their own biases more than selecting the best possible work. (I have always felt this way, but my feelings on this were galvanized by my own experiences inside the sausage factory[1] -- and for the conference that I am currently organizing[2], we are emphatically double blind.)
I understand the problem of creating engaging presentations as well as compelling content, but there are ways to achieve this other than being prejudicial. For example, if you want to create an invited talk or two for those whose presentations the program committee particularly likes, great. And if you want to provide presentation coaching for those who you accept who haven't presented before, even better. (I have provided this coaching informally in the past, and have found that a little coaching can go a long way.) But a blinded review process must be viewed as a constraint on the problem: to do any less is to deprive ourselves of the new ideas and presenters that provide us our collective vitality!
"if someone has a proposal that is worthy of presentation, they should be given the opportunity to present -- regardless of their age or experience"
At the same time, it sounds like they had many, many submissions that were worthy of presentation, and this was a bigger conference. There are smaller conferences which are not as inundated with presentations to which newer speakers can apply, and from there apply to the bigger ones.
It's just like everything else in life, where you have to prove yourself on a smaller scale before being allowed on bigger things.
Sorry if my wording was confusing: I mean that they should pick the most qualified based on the proposal -- not that they should expand the scope of the conference to accommodate every plausible submission.
As an aside, I do not understand why my comment is being voted down; is a double blind review process that controversial?!
I've never been to a conference that didn't have a high percentage of first time speakers. In many ways that is what provides the value of a good conference. One of the largest ACM conferences is SIGGRAPH, in which graduate students generally present.
As long as there's content, and the speakers receive some communication about being prepared, practicing, and ensuring they will meet the time limit, how is there so much worry that it's preferable to reject good abstracts than take the risk??
On top of that, it seems like risky presenters with good abstracts could easily be given the opportunity to send in a video of them speaking or have a phone call with a conference organizer.
Given these things, it's seems sad to trivially reject based on inexperience, it hurts the conference more than the applicants, and of course gives the impression the conference cares more about style than substance. I realize that's a rash decision making wild generalizations based on a small amount of text... OTOH that is probably how some of those less experienced applicants feel.
Pretty harsh with the noob, we have all been there in a very distant past, aren't we? Just accept the most promising noobs and pack them all into the same session with a navigate chair and a senior speaker ready to rescue every single talk.
I think it's more "a paid / sponsored conference isn't the best place to get presentation experience". Especially when you have a plethora of experienced presenters to choose from.
The experienced presenters tend to talk about the same things, over and over, at conference after conference. Selecting for "noobs" injects diversity into what is otherwise a well-worn conference circuit by many of the non-noobs.
On the other side of the coin, people tend to ask about the same things, over and over again -- so a professional presenter will hit more of the points that people are interested in.
How has no one mentioned the gears in the background on this page yet? It's a touch distracting, but there is some smart stuff going on to make them line up.
Sadly the CSS is optimized, which makes understanding its implementation a little tough, but i suspect it'd make for fun reading!
> This presentation would have been accepted if we had seen speaker talked at local meetup groups, had a recorded presentation we could view, or maintained a blog so that we could foresee of how he would present his ideas and build an argument.
Perhaps we were outliers, but @buu700 and I were accepted to BlackHat and DEF CON with no prior speaking experience outside from a dry run of the talk to a single meet-up.
One delivery -- and the talk as delivered in both conferences ended up being far different from that specific instance. Now if the article suggests that just doing it once is fine, cool, but if it's suggesting a track record of past smaller conferences, I'm inclined to disagree, as are the reviewers for the largest conferences.
It helps, but being bereft of it certainly doesn't disqualify you.
Had you presented to the meetup before applying or only after you knew that you were accepted in the conference? Even having done a talk once is far better than most applications.
Delivered it deliberately in preparation for a submission (i.e. before we even submitted the talks but knowing full well that that would be the end goal). Both the talk and delivery were engineered with those audiences in mind, so we restricted recording and distribution of the talk at the prior OWASP meetup until after it was published at BH/DC.
It didn't go all that smoothly at DEF CON (which I'll freely attribute to us both being conference noobs), but it went pretty well overall, all things considered.
Don't know if we'll have anything interesting to talk about next year, but I'm looking forward to potentially doing it again.
Indeed, I've been on program committees were we have picked first-time speakers. Usually because the subject seems very compelling, and there is very little overlap with other submitted talks.
If the situation is: We have 5 talks on "Getting started with Xamarin". You pick the experienced speaker, but there is only 1 talk on "Implement your backend in Swift" it is much more likely to get picked.
I don't think the article is saying those without experience shouldn't apply. It's just saying that, if you don't have experience, even if your abstract was good, that's probably why you weren't selected.
"We found every submission to be of high quality. We will now explain why your talks are actually garden-variety by using landscaping metaphores"
Jokes aside. The issues raised are very good, but I can't help but think biased to a certain intended crowd. How does the panel(?) stay objective? Are the different views on topics and how to formulate the synopsis (exaggeration) perhaps relevant to a certain type of conference attendee and so deserving of a separate conference track?
From the viewpoint of a self-supporting individual (not having someone else foot the bill) who would only be interested in learning about new topics in a field, does anyone here think it is worth hundreds to thousands in cost to attend a conference, and why? Is there anything there one would definitely miss about advances in the field if not attending? Or is it more about (essentially) self-promotion?
To add a personal anecdote, I was accepted to speak at a large regional conference as my first speaking gig. I explicitly stated I did not have any previous conference experience. I attribute this partially to having a relatively niche topic.
I was lucky enough to give the talk twice at a local user group prior to the conference, which helped with the actual conference talk, I am sure.
Just to reinforce the last point regarding blogging and presenting locally, they are 100% correct. I've never actually submitted a talk for a conference but I've been speaking to local programming groups fairly regularly as well as blogging for the last 3-4 years. Regularly is a couple of times per year or slightly more often.
I don't get paid to do any of it, I just really enjoy talking about this stuff. Through these talks and blogging I've been recruited by 3 different companies to contribute to their company tech blogs and I was invited to speak at a rather large and exclusive conference where I was the only speaker not from a HUGE company on the docket.
It happened because I was giving the talk locally, somebody affiliated with the conference drove in from about an hour away to hear it and then stuck around to invite me to speak. I never considered that conferences would recruit but apparently they do.
If you're very new to public speaking but dying to give it a shot try submitting an entry to KCDC. It's one of the biggest dev conferences in the Midwest and they do accept rookies with very little to no experience from all over the globe. A good friend of mine had his first talk at KCDC a couple of years ago. No blog. No github account. Just a very good topic and a willingness to push limits and share his passion. It's also opened up a ton of other opportunities for him.
Everyone is a n00b at some time. But being a conference n00b doesn't mean you're not an expert on the subject of your talk, that your content is not original, that you're not an excellent speaker, or that your talk would not be excellent. All it means is that you're a n00b to public conferences. The wholesale discounting of candidate talks based on such narrow criteria is foolish.
So many of these articles never cover what 'good' looks like, only bad. What does their perfect pitch look like? Which abstracts blew them away? What topic surprised them most (in a good way)?
Both good and bad examples are important, but articles like this that include only the rejected outlines just feels quite discouraging.
Try to improve your talk by presenting it first in a meetup, get some feedback, and most importantly find the right levels of detail for each part of the presentation.
The topics need to also be aligned consistently around a larger theme, that is closed by a concrete conclusion that people can ideally apply in their life.
It can be difficult to get "hard data" about a topic, as most of us certainly don't have that available in our day to day work. The best you can hope for is to find somebody else's academic research, and then riff on it in an understandable, enjoyable, manner, I guess.
> We had several great pitches from people who have never given a talk before; we asked about presentation experience as part of submitting a talk and we did a little googling too. It’s crummy to turn away such a good presentation, but it’s also risky to entrust your conference audience to someone who has never presented before
I don't care about how a presenter presents their information at a technical conference. If this was a conference for public speaking and entertainment I'd think it's important then.
"If you want to present at a big conference, then you must have experience doing smaller conferences or presentations."
You can gain experience by presenting in local meetups, making videos and posting them online, doing short tech talks at your job, etc. Doing those first will net you a lot of valuable skills and experiences.
In order to be a presenter at a conference with enough visibility that they receive six good applications for each slot, you must have already been a presenter.
For a big conference (as this seems to be), yes, definitely. Partly because conferences can sadly be quite risk averse, but also because presenting is a real skill, and assuming you're already great at it and jumping in at the deep end won't help anybody.
If you are looking to get into public speaking there are no shortage of meetups desperate to get speakers booked in, on any topic you like, in almost every city in the world (try meetup.com). Once you've done one or two you'll hopefully have some video of you usefully presenting complex ideas to an audience. From there getting into a conference gets drastically easier. Spend a little time and start with that. Having some initial visibility before jumping straight to huge international conference scale is typically a requirement, and a pretty reasonable one.
I don't want to put people off public speaking; it's super rewarding professionally and personally, and we as an industry do desperately need to hear a wide variety of ideas from as many people as possible.
It's not immediately easy though, just because you're a great developer/designer/PM/other. It's famously scary, and a quite substantial skill in itself, and if you jump from zero experience to trying to present hard concepts to an audience of hundreds of people who are paying hundreds of dollars, you'll struggle, and it won't do you or your audience or your confidence any good.
Spend a little time warming up. If you're already great, waiting a month and talking at a local meetup first will just be extra practice. If you're not, you'll want to find that out in a small friendly room of nice people, not on a huge stage in a vast auditorium live streamed around the world.
For a big conference, one that attendees spend lots and lots of money to travel to and attend, the pressure on the organizers is to make sure that all the presentations (and presenters) are at some baseline level of quality so that attendees will go away happy. They are much less concerned with providing opportunities and teaching moments to aspiring conference speakers, which hopefully everyone agrees is the right set of priorities for an organizer for that type of conference.
There are all sorts of ways an aspiring presenter can get experience or demonstrate ability that don't involve catching a break from a sympathetic organizer whose job is looking out for the attendees that spent thousands of dollars to be there.
There are conferences specializing in giving rookie persenters chances. KCDC, for instance, takes chances on a lot of new people every year.
Another good way to start is user groups: Many will let anyone speak as long as they claim to have a relevant topic. After a video or two of those, you move up until you are eventually invited into conferences that invite speakers, as opposed to ask for submissions. Even for a talented speaker, the road from one end to the other will take about 3 years, speaking at least 5 times a year.
I for one don't think is worth it at all, but I have friends that have 10+ speaking trips a year.
You don't just drop someone without presentation experience onto a stage in front of hundreds or thousands with a laptop and a projector. That's a great way to get negative reviews for the conference from the attendees.
Much like you don't hire someone with no experience writing software to come in a write you a brand new point-of-sale system for your chain of a thousand stores just because they're enthusiastic.
I think you're making an assumption that I disagree with the conclusion of the article when in reality, I don't. My initial reaction was that it was overly exclusive and in a way, it is. They don't give a chance to those with no experience doing this kind of thing, which makes the bar for someone with no experience that much higher.
However, I don't think this is wrong, especially for such a large conference. If this were a smaller conference then I think it would actually be overzealous, but that is not what I think in this case, which is why I said it was only my initial reaction.
I would also like to add that the example summary given shows more than just enthusiasm, it shows knowledge of topic as well as the ability to convey that information in a concise and reasonable way. So, a more apt comparison would be not hiring said person to build your brand new POS system just because their academics were good and make a nice resume (just without job experience).
It was a lovely design idea, but I found it distracting as I was reading. A bit like how a running video elsewhere on the page draws the eye, the cogs moving as I scrolled distracted from the text.
If they just were behind the title and opening paragraph, they would scroll out of view relatively quickly. You'd get the nice effect, but stop being distracted.
Before any of the rest of this, I want to say that this is a useful article for people as conferences actually do think like this, but my comment is then to point out that not all conferences do, and that I generally prefer attending ones which don't.
> The premise is good, but the abstract is so short we have no idea where this is going to go. Even if the speaker were experienced and a known conference superstar, it is hard to give the presenter a speaking slot without more detail.
When you go to a performance by a standup comedian, you don't read an abstract first: if there is even a title it is probably arbitrary or a gag.
When I go to a conference and am choosing to bother going to see a talk, I select talks based on who is speaking, not based on their abstract.
In my experience, a good speaker is interesting no matter what they are talking about, and otherwise the talk ends up being disappointing no matter how on point the abstract is to my interests.
You might then ask: "but surely the good speaker is capable of making a good abstract?", but the best talks are also coordinated and topical and deep.
The person whose talks I most enjoy and now never miss is essentially incapable of making an abstract ahead of time, as his talk is based on his thoughts and passions at that moment, and are about topics so compelling that after the talk I would have a hard time summarizing it other than "you really should have been there".
You might then ask "but is the speaker actually good if the audience member can't summarize the talk?", and I will claim the exact opposite: if you can replace the talk with a summary of the content and (maybe) the slides, you should not be wasting anyone's time with a talk.
This is something both many conferences and many attendees fundamentally seem to not "get": they ask for peoples' slides, as if they have meaning. One may as well ask for a photograph of the empty sets for a play they missed instead of a video of the performance, that is how much content you can recover from the slides and abstract of a good talk.
> It’s crummy to turn away such a good presentation, but it’s also risky to entrust your conference audience to someone who has never presented before.
But this is also how you get extremely loyal speakers who will speak at your conference for free while refusing to even bother speaking at other venues. It is also how you manage to show your audience "something new" instead of "the same old people that every conference gets to speak as they are the safe bet / known quantity".
The absolute best regular conference I go to, by far, gets all of this: the couple that runs 360|iDev works with new speakers to hone ideas (many speakers I have talked to are incredibly grateful to this conference for giving them "their break"), but doesn't even bother with an approval process for known good speakers, and they then aren't afraid to have sessions at their conference with neither a title nor an abstract, just a name, a bio, and a "placeholder" title and abstract that are devoid of content. It is seriously the only conference where I really find myself interested to bother attending any of the talks past "I guess I absolutely need to try to see this so I can talk about it with other people tonight sigh".
Expanding into the category of atypical conferences, XOXO takes the cake, but it is half-festival, was never sure if it was anything more than a temporary concept, and doesn't really have a "topic" that is easy to describe. But, the Andy's hand-nurture first-time speakers based on core attendees and prior speakers "nominating" people they really want to see give talks, many of whom are artists or bloggers who might even "perform" in various ways but have never given a talk. The schedule has names and bios, but not a single title or abstract.
- Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers, and it's an excellent way to get practice at presenting in a lower stress environment. It's not always small audiences either, I've seen and given talks with 50 or more attendees at a local meet up. As for getting accepted, organizers are always in need of talks, and organizers are not getting 6 submissions per month, they're usually lucky if they can fill every month with a talk, so you're much more likely to be accepted.
- Maintain a blog. Writing articles on your blog is practice for writing a talk, and gives you a steady stream of ideas that can be turned into a presentation fairly easily.
I'm going to add a couple more:
- Give a lightning talk at conferences you attend. As well as giving you practice, you are also visible to all the attendees, including people who will be selecting talks at future conferences you submit to.
- Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted.
These steps aren't going to make it so that you're immediately accepted at large conferences, but they give you the start the article is claiming you need. And finally, if you're rejected, don't give up. Conferences do take chances on new speakers (although probably not all new speakers who submit a talk), and being rejected doesn't mean your talk is bad, or that your skills are bad, just that you didn't get it this time.