For some of you this post will probably sound like a rant. But what the hack…
I started my public tech speaking more than 9 years ago and since then I talked in numerous international conferences, user groups, Meetups and more. I really enjoy speaking and I recommend that to whoever want to share his knowledge and experience. The big bonus in speaking is meeting a lot of people who care about their profession and want to learn new stuff (and even old stuff from time to time) which can enrich their knowledge.
I remember my first session preparation like it was yesterday. The talk was scheduled as 2 hours session about ADO.NET data services in a user group. It took me around 6 hours to prepare the slide deck according to a few blog posts that I wrote. Then, it took me around 8 more hours to create all the demos. Since 2 hours are a lot of time for a session and it was my first talk ever, I started to practice my talk. If you could see me practice, you would probably laugh. At the end of each working day and for two weeks I went to an empty conference room and talked to… nobody in particularly… and from time to time to the office cleaners who cleaned the conference room while I was talking to myself (and laughed at me as the person who talk to empty rooms…). As you can understand, it took a lot of time and effort to prepare the session and since then while the time it takes to get ready to sessions was decreased, it still takes a lot.
So why am I writing about that experience?
Today I’m a freelancer. While I’m still doing public speaking, I’m delivering less sessions than before. The reasons for that is the time and effort it takes to create a quality talk. Don’t get me wrong here, I want to share my knowledge and experience and I’m still doing that but less than before. From time to time I’m co-organizing Meetups and events with other great community leaders (Uri Shaked, Shai Reznik, Oren Rubin and more) or delivering talks in Meetups, local events and international conferences.
But… and this is a big but… One thing bothers me a lot lately. I’ve been approached by a few local commercial conference organizers who suggested that I’ll give talks. Since these are commercial conferences and people pay in order to attend the conference, naively I asked the conference organizers if they pay the speakers. The answer was no. So I refused… and then I was told by the organizers that it’s enough that the conference puts my name in their website and I get public awareness of my services… and someone even said that I’m a little greedy…
Here are some of my thoughts about the subject:
- I already contribute to the development community by speaking in free Meetups and by organizing community events.
I’m still doing that and I will continue doing that because this is where I prefer to spend my unpaid time and how I get my exposure. - Most of the conferences that I speak in are targeted to developers and not to decision makers.
Decisions makers, the ones that will probably hire me for consulting job, don’t usually attend these kind of conferences and therefore the way to get their attention is in other medias. More than that, from my experience, the majority of developers who attend conferences don’t ask their bosses to contact a consultant after they saw him/her talking in a tech conference. - I helped to organize a free community driven conference last year (ng-conf Israel) and I learned a little about conference organizing. Since it was community driven conference, most of the budget we had was spent on the venue and food. The budget that was left after the venue payment helped us to give some giveaways to attendees. In commercial conferences there are a companies behind the scenes which try to earn money.
So what do you think? Should commercial conferences pay their speakers? Am I wrong here?