When Profit Overshadows Community: A Look at Golang Conferences
While reviewing the speaker lineups at several prominent Go (Golang) conferences, I noticed some recurring patterns:
Speaker Selection Driven by Influence: Many rosters feature the same familiar faces year after year. While these speakers are undeniably talented, it limits the diversity of perspectives shared with the audience.
Limited Opportunities for New Speakers: Although new voices are occasionally included, the majority of speaking slots continue to go to well-known names.
Lack of Regional & Cultural Diversity: Conferences often miss the opportunity to bring in global voices or regional contributors who can offer fresh, valuable perspectives on Go and its ecosystem.
Sponsor Influence: Corporate sponsorships sometimes seem to shape the speaker lineup and the overall conference agenda, blurring the line between technical discussion and marketing.
Lack of Representation from Non-Enterprise Contributors: Many conferences focus heavily on the enterprise application of Go, while often neglecting the open-source contributors or the individual developers who are responsible for much of Go's growth and innovation outside of big companies.
Ultimately, it would be refreshing to see more intentional efforts to bring new talent to the stage, representing a broader range of voices and experiences.
> Speaker Selection Driven by Influence: Many rosters feature the same familiar faces year after year.
This isn't exactly unique to Go. I used to attend a big Java conference once per year and some of the main speakers would be there year after year. And to be honest, I didn't think they were very good speakers in that most of what they peddled was opinion, flavor-of-the-year style talks and advice that lacked specificity and often wasn't actionable. Some of the bigger names would routinely present pseudo-research fooling gullible developers to believe in things that were not true. But the conference was well-attended.
The thing is: conferences are expensive to organize and are financially risky. You need to attract an audience. The easiest way to do this is to have a roster of well known names. If none of the speakers are familiar to most of the audience, it will be harder to sell tickets.
If you want to change this there is one thing you can do: give talks yourself or recruit someone with something interesting to say and get them to give a talk. Complaining about conferences being conferences doesn't help. You are just stating the obvious.
This unfortunately resonates with my experience. I used to attend GoLab, the event held in Florence, Italy.
Over time, as the event gained in popularity, speakers shifted from developers to developer advocates.
Last time I attended (2023 edition, IIRC) one of the talks was from some Intellij dev-relations person: the talk was about the importance of unit testing or something like that, completely devoid of any value for anyone who hasn’t started coding yesterday. The speaker was obviously not a technical person and gave a strong impression they were presenting content they barely knew anything about. I seriously doubt the slides deck was put together the night before. It was an utter disappointment. That was it for me. That’s a glaring example of what the OP is talking about but other talks I had listened to were only marginally better or on par with that one. That’s when I decided the thing was so much not worth the (hefty) ticket price + cost of transportation + accommodation.
It’s a sad state of affairs but not unexpected.