One reason tech talks are specially boring to me is that the vast majority are about tooling/implementation, instead of topics/ideas. Another is that a surprisingly (to me) amount of people who do these talks do it just for content creation purposes.
> Another is that a surprisingly (to me) amount of people who do these talks do it just for content creation purposes.
Well, creating even a mediocre talk takes a LOT of effort. As a speaker, what do I get out of it? Presenting at anything "open source" almost certainly means I'm not getting paid for it. And, unless I can give a talk at least twice, I can't amortize the cost of it.
My two biggest problems in giving a tech talk are:
1) The audience is all over the map
If you give a talk about doing something in USB on Linux, some of the audience won't know what USB stands for. Some of the audience probably write driver code. This is a VERY difficult audience to communicate to.
2) Covering something meaty but not taking 3 hours.
Choosing USB on Linux again. To not take 3 hours, I have to dispense with the USB basics and launch directly into the specifics on Linux. Even that probably means that I'm talking about character devices on /dev that a lot of people have never dealt with. And after that, I can get down to talking about the cool thing that I actually wanted to talk about.
Yep. And lots of people don't pay attention to the difficulty rating which is usually there. (And what is there is often inaccurate--relative to what?)
I've given talks where I've simultaneously had feedback that the talk went over someone's head and that it was too high-level/fluffy.
