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Academics is the one area in person conferences are actually useful...
Intelligent people are often antisocial but if you force enough of them into a small room to beg oligarchs for funding, they occasionally get to speak to other intelligent people from other fields.
We'd be better off just giving them vacations and letting them nerd out together for a couple weeks and get wildly different viewpoints for whatever they've been stuck on.
It's at least more beneficial than sales conferences
Academics can be approximated as particles in that productive collisions require increased concentrations.
So had to be stopped might get dangerous ideas can't be smarter than the money men they had to beg
Don’t you go taking my boondoggle from me. Conferences are a perk, and everyone knows that but doesn’t say it. It’s like a company sponsored vacation.
My boss at my last job sent me to a conference for the first time. It was more like an expo really. He didn’t give me any tasks since he had never been to one himself. The coworkers I went with attended every year, so I looked to them for guidance. It was basically three days of free fancy meals and booze and checking out cool tech demos with like 15 minutes of work that could have happened over the phone.
I got back and my boss had expected me to not only make contacts for ongoing issues (which I did), but to have held meetings somehow with the vendors and worked through a concrete plans and timelines. As if any of the sales people at the conference could have determined a realistic timeline even if they were willing to take time away to meet with me. It was listed on my performance review as the reason for my “poor” rating.
The next year he went alone, and after coming back went “Well that was a waste of time.” No apology, naturally.
What an absolute moron
I truly hate that man.
One time I objected to two of the three lies he put in a performance review which I could prove were false, he went back and removed those two items and added five more.
One time, I came into work and he had put a post-it on my monitor that said “8:02”. It was 8:02 and 15 seconds, which meant he had sprinted out to stick the note, then ran back to his office. I didn’t have actual office hours, he refused to give them to me because he expected me there before he got there and stay after he left, which was a twelve hour window that moved based on his mood.
There was a sudden ice storm one day and everyone stayed home. He demanded I come in and I said my car couldn’t get up the hill to the road, so he came to pick me up in his Prius with normal tires. After sliding to work there was literally no one else there, and he made me work the full day and two hours of overtime before letting me go home. He also made me keep the lights off since “It wasn’t worth the electricity for only one person.”
I’m much happier now.
Wow. That dude sounds like an absolute moron and/or sadist.
And yet still mostly work.
I don't feel that traveling for an event to another office of your company is useful - I flew to US from EU to sit in one room with the same people I usually see in Teams. But what is really useful is:
yeah its the small convos where things get interesting. also hardware in person is better than remote where you can really check the thing out and maybe get them to open it up and such.
Oh, I was working in Mobile development, and even working on a phone app can be better offline. Our qa came up to me and demonstrated how screen content was twitchy when he touched it - interactions like that, some lags, and other shitty behavior sometimes can't really be demonstrated if you are just sharing your screen