I Stopped Attending Programming Meet-ups
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Also, not to sound rude, but I get enough of socializing with programmers at work.
I think part of it is I don't feel like I get enough socializing with programmers at work...
A number of tech meetups (no necessarily programming) are held at loud venues and involve alcohol. In other words, getting drunk under loud music while yelling at each other 'cause you can't hear and not hearing half of what other people say.
Exactly what I need after a twelve hour day. I never understood how this can be considered "networking". It's shallow, ineffectual and mostly useless.
If you can't make it, please be courteous and release your "yes" RSVP so that people on the waitlist can get in and so that the organizers can plan more accurately.
If you aren't likely to make it in the first place, please don't RSVP "yes" for the off-chance that you feel like going - please wait until you know you are going for certain to update your RSVP.
A good organizer knows this is statistical. Only a certain percentage of people show up in any given 'open' social meetup event. I've been going to these for years and the organizers tend to account for that. I'm surprised programmer-organizers wouldn't be even more keen on the statistical and probability aspect of organizing headcount.
We have had to turn people away at the door.
This is very rare, and I hate to do it.
(If it looks like we need to, I try to make an announcement before everyone shows up so we aren't turning away dozens of people a quarter of an hour after the start time. I have only done this a couple of times.)
I was talking more about telling somebody already inside that they have to leave because they were randomly selected (and using the police to force the issue if needed), similar to what recently happened with United.
Out here, especially with social sites, RSVP is taking on another meaning entirely. Those "slots" are fictitious (just like airlines overselling seats) and assuming attendance numbers will be what something like Meetup says they are is irrational. I usually factor in a 40% attendance rate - nothing wrong with that if it's more, but it's unlikely to be 100%, unless one holds an irrational belief their event is going to net more than another.
That's not to say it doesn't make planning for the event a bit more challenging, but I seriously doubt there anything anyone can do about it other than charging for the event, which may not be desirable.
You're right, that on aggregate, groups do factor in a poor showup rate.
And that adds to the cost of hosting. You risk buying too much perishable food versus running out of food and disappointing the latecomers.
There are options for dealing with this:
- Charge for the meetup (but then people with fewer resources can't come.)
- Track no-shows, and kick them out of the group (which is a burden for the organizers and can penalize people with really good reasons for not being able to make it.)
- But just saying something about it makes a difference in the showup rates (we tried it and it works).
So that's what I'm doing here.
Realistically this is the only option. No-shows tells people who show up that the numbers they expected to see aren't realistic and that they may be the only one that shows up the next time.
Charging for the meetup just irritates people, and sets them up for disappointment. Putting a limit on attendence and creating a waitlist works. (Although some of the people who were truely a maybe won't sign up)
I run various volunteer activities. Some do require people to sign up for free but we really make it clear to people to please give us notice of cancellation if it really matters to us.
You can charge a small fee. I know events that charge and offer to refund it if you show up. But for more casual evening events, this doesn't really work most of the time. People don't like to feel like they're locking themselves in which they tend to do even with a small fee.
If your group is so large that you have a waitlist, I'd be willing to bet there's a consistent statistic of RVSP vs Attendance that you could rely on. Maybe check records of your past events and see if there's much fluctuation?
We do a lot to get attendance up and to create events that people want to attend.
Showup rates started declining, probably due to people thinking it didn't matter if they didn't make it, and not canceling their "Yes". We started discussing the problem when we had a 40% showup with a large waitlist.
We considered tracking no-shows for suspension, but before we even started that, I started mentioning the fact that we were thinking about the problem to members, and making statements on meetup pages about us looking at no-shows.
We didn't have to actually change policy, but thanks to some simple communication, we got showup rates back to their average 66%.
As a best practice, we should probably continue to mention it from time to time to ensure we don't get back to those kinds of lows.
I organize a meetup and I'm always struggling with how to increase attendance of people like me (and you) - not in 20's, have a house/spouse/kids and a commute home to the suburbs.
In general I'm having problems connecting with anyone my age outside of work. They all seem to have very little capacity or interest to do anything other than go home from work and see their family.
What I mean, I suppose is that this isn't a Free v. Paid issue. This is a leadership issue, and you're welcome to not go. But if you believe in the free meetup culture and it's ability to create community amongst otherwise reclusive technology nerds, then they could use your opinions in the form of leadership. A public blog post ripping on the people who give their time to meetups is something of an antipattern.
I tend to take an opposite stance. Paying for knowledge is a crap shoot at every level. I realize it every time I make a student loan payment on my useless advanced degree. The only reliable way to learn is to teach yourself through study and mixing with people who have different viewpoints or ways of thinking. Paying for something that will motivate you or do that for you is likely to be a con. It might not be, but why take the chance. Save your silver bullet money for retirement and use lead bullets instead.
And I sometimes pay for those meetups. But I'm usually price-sensitive enough and there's enough other meetups doing similar things for free that I don't pay.
I want to say that the meetups that do charge money are consistently higher value, but that's not the case. You just have to test them for yourself.
As others have said as well, if you're going to a meetup to do the equivalent of attending a lecture, you're probably not going to find them very valuable.
I did too, but the format is a class: chairs arranged in rows, facing forward, with one person doing all the talking.
I suppose we are supposed to do our networking before and after class, over pizza. But come on, we're programmers, generally shy and quiet. If we trade a few words or sentences, the degree to which we know each other is less than after an interview --- and interviews are notoriously bad for getting to know programmers.
Maybe arrange the chairs in a circle. Then, instead of planning a long talk, encourage participation. Even something as awkward as going around the room would be better than the lecture format.
I last went to a programmers' meetup about 3 years ago, and did that in order to specifically see a guy make a presentation about ElasticSearch. We were also using ES at our job back then, but at a much smaller scale compared to that guy's company did, so I wanted to learn additional stuff about how ES works and how it needs to be configured when the numbers increase.
It was a nice presentation, can't say I remember much from back then (I've also not used ES in the meantime as much as I would have liked), but some presentations do have a learning purpose.
True learning requires a lot of effort but I remember a meetup about shaders in a HTML canvas. I didn't know much about them, I know where to start from now at the cost of a couple of hours and a twenty minutes walk from home. However I know that attending meetups after work could be taxing. My free meetup has an almost perfect 50% no show rate and indubitably both the price tag and the time concur to it. But if I start it during the day, how many people would come? That's the territory of more well organized conferences.
Most of the meetings/conferences I went to ended with too much boozing and laughing about silly stuff and not nearly enough networking/exchanging ideas/helping each other to my liking. This was funny when I was in my late 20s, but I have different goals now.
Particularly, about the 'helping each other' part - I have the feeling that everyone is pushing their own agenda most of the time, and there is very little sincere interest in works of others - let alone helping/advising each other. More like 'let's get the compulsory presentation part down, do some quick networking... done? Let's get drunk'.
Maybe I'm visiting the wrong kind of meetings though. I'm guessing there's also a big difference between meetups in the US (never been to one, hence guessing) and in Europe (or elsewhere).
I haven't been in a long time, but they were great.
[1] Example of regular Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/bostonpython/events/234430898/
[2] Example for April: https://www.meetup.com/bostonpython/events/237146736/
Alas, to my knowledge, nothing even remotely similar like that exists here (or at the places where I lived in Southeast Asia), simply because there are not enough people who would participate, let alone organize/run such a meeting.
Thinking about it, though, it makes sense: Working 100% remotely/being a digital nomad means moving AWAY from places like NY/SF/Boston/Seattle etc. (where the action happens) because they are crazy expensive; This, however, also means moving away from hubs where Python Project Nights are possible due to the sheer number of Python guys.
To have the cake and eat it too, the digital nomad hubs should have enough x (x=Pythonistas, Rubyists, whatever) to able to organize such meetings/hackathons etc. However, once that would happen, prices would skyrocket, and you would have to move again...
I don't want to derail this discussion to a digital nomad problem, so tl;dr: seems like my global location, rather than my attitude or bad choice of meetings is the culprit; To put it other way: living at tucked away islands might be romantic, but it also means no quality meetings... :(
There are good meetups and there are bad meetups.
If you want "helping each other" style meetups, you need to look for ones that are office-hours style, where they have tables and conference rooms and people sitting next to each other trying to help each other.
If you have organizers that want to make a regular commitment to running them (and basically being the on-hand experts) then you should be able to get space from firms that would like to host Python programmers (and we do have members get hired out of our group by our hosts sometimes, but that is certainly not a guarantee).
If your area can economically support these things, but they aren't there, then you just need a catalyst to get them started. I would think a lot of areas in Europe should be able to start these kinds of things.
tl;dr: it's not.
Snippet from an email conversation with a local guy (author of GrapheneDB):
"Nomads apart, this is a small city, and while there are some active developer meetups, it's hard to get enough momentum, people willing to do talks, etc. I did run a Rails/Ruby meetup years ago, but it ended up being mostly people from our team + some curious guys. Eventually, I ended up not wanting to push it any further and focusing more on the business side of things."
So even though a lot of parameters are OK, the size of the city (400k in this case) seems to be enough to hamper things...
"So at my organization... {2 minutes of uncomfortable and unnecessary context}... would this solution work for us?"
after presenter mentions some syntax offhand "Can I use a special character here? What about casing, does that matter? What about {some contrived example, unrelated to the topic}?"
Really turns me off of a given meetup group if I know this person is a regular.
I'm a member (but not an organizer) of a meetup that doesn't do it, and our regular filibusterer will take up minutes of time with no urgency during Q&A. Really annoys me too.
You usually get what you pay for.
Our meetups are free, but they do take time out of your day. In exchange for your time we offer:
- Free pizza and beer (just Tuesday nights, not at weekend office hours - but we usually have free tea then.)
- Access to potential employers (usually the ones buying the pizza and beer or providing the space - we give them 5 minutes to make a pitch about themselves, and allow them to stick around and take questions from people who are interested).
- Access to other Python programmers who are at every point on the learning spectrum, including experts who can help you.
- There is also the opportunity to help other people who are usually deserving and appreciative, frequently just trying to learn on their own.
- (No one will bug you if you don't want to be bugged. We have a code of conduct, but I've never seen us have to invoke it.)
- From time to time, we have speakers, tutorials, workshops, and other kinds of presentations and learning opportunities.
- We also offer you the opportunity to provide these kinds of learning opportunities for others.
I have been a member of our meetup for 6 years, and a coorganizer for the last 3 years. I have learned a lot, mostly on my own, but I've also had a lot of opportunities to help others learn.
I haven't paid a dime (I think I've donated a couple of twenties) and I haven't been paid a dime. But I've met a lot of people and it's provided me with a lot of experience that is hard to match.
I've helped people build websites, do web scraping, and do data munging and analysis. I've given talks myself. As a result of all of this, I'm teaching at world-class universities.
Meetups aren't for everyone. A lot of my opportunities have come from being there. They say a lot of success is in showing up. Well, I do that, at about half of our office hours (I even ran them every Sunday for a year), and I still try to show up, even though I've given myself permission to not do it.
You get out what you put into it. If you solely want a learning experience, pay for college classes. If you solely want to get experience programming, do free work until you can charge for it, and charge for it. If you want pizza and beer, go buy it. You don't need a meetup for those things. But if you like all of those things, you can show up, and we don't charge you money for that.
That's a pretty good deal, in my humble opinion.
I think that both Aaron and myself (and, indeed, all of the organisers) use the meetup as an opportunity to meet programmers needing mentorship.
Many of us have personally benefited from the generosity of others, and we feel an obligation to offer newcomers this same opportunity.
I don't have any real skills, but I do know a lot about Python, and I attend the weekly meetups to share this knowledge with others.
I'm there every week (barring conference & work travel,) and I'm there to help.
Dude, I wish some Europen CONFERENCES offered the same (and for 100s of €s, not for free). I'm not kidding - even big ones are shit compared to what you are talking about (they might have more booze, food, or other material stuff (as I said, there's a hefty entrance fee, so what) but I could only dream about networking like you described above.
You guys in the US are seriously spoiled compared to Europeans...
The fact is that you can pay a lot of money to do just about anything, but running conferences (and meetups, to an extent) is, for some organizers, a business.
They're trying to create and capture value out of mostly thin air.
But as a community, we can create a lot of value for ourselves. It may not pay a lot of salaries, but we can create an awesome experience with each other.
We just have to get organized ourselves.
The same organizers of the groups I help co-organize run PyGotham, NYC's Python convention.
We are a bunch of unpaid volunteers for the most part, but we create an awesome conference year after year.
It takes a lot of our free time, and we do it on shoe-strings and through the kindness of corporations and non-profits. But we get it done. You can do it in Europe too.
https://www.meetup.com/learn-python-nyc/
Here's the link to the meetup that does talk nights:
https://www.meetup.com/nycpython/
We have two separate groups so that people who just want to go to talks can easily avoid emails about office hours.
And there are other meetup groups you should check out. Some are good, some are not so good (in my humble opinion) but here is not the place for me to rank meetup groups in NYC.
I really like the emacs group (I've volunteered to coorganize, but I'm not an organizer yet), and since I don't think enough people come, I will mention them:
> I’ve decided I’m no longer attending programming meet-ups
Who is "I"? The "About" links to https://python.sh/2017/2/bureau-of-programming ... which doesn't really answer the "Who" question.
To your post - meetups also perform a social function - that's the offset for mixed quality presentations. That's if you like socialising with peers of course...
Yea, that is mostly why I attend meetups. It's just nice to get a chance to meet up with a bunch of people interested in a specific topic, have a beer or two, and talk about that and related topics.
This post is not helpful for those who genuinely try to build a community in their domain. Also, a good talk compresses many days of reading and a-ha moments into one hour. It's just a lot of work to prepare a good talk.
Background: I'm one of the organizers of a machine learning meetup in my area. We (organizers) are PhD students, so building a strong and connected ML community in our surrounding is an intrinsic motivation. We decided not to affiliate ourselves with a company. Otherwise our quality control for talks would inevitably be overruled at some point.
I don't think it's fair to expect what often amounts to volunteer effort from the part of the organizers to provide the same learning experience as institutions that have paid full-time employees.
Meetups however are a fantastic way to get outside of your social circle (work, school) and meet new people. One of my favorite general meetups is Civic Tech, since it's a mish-mash of people in the tech, academia, public sector, and non-for-profits.
If I do it all for them, they don't learn, and it's a bit of a waste of my time.
What I like to do is to help people get over a blocking problem on a project by teaching them something they didn't know yet. We usually take their code from a non-working state to a working state. Then I point out other problems with their code, tell them what they need to work on (usually involving reorganization of their code), and then I can (and do) focus on other things.
I don't run into a lot of dependent help-seeking types in real life at office-hour style meetups. They generally understand that I'm going to work on my own stuff, but they can come get me if they run into a roadblock.
Here in Vienna we have a couple of hands-on Meetups that require you to bring your laptop and actually do something. Less people attend - but those that come are usually very motivated. This is a good place/way to learn something new.
However, I've also been to some that are run quite well, with clear & focused topics, and where I have learned something practical or gained insight into a particular subject from a speaker's unique perspective/experience.
And, yes, many of these events have a strong element of networking which is clearly helpful given the job offerings and job seekers routinely in attendance. Though I've no first-hand experience in the matter, seems like a good starting point for a match between people who are being proactive in their professional development and employers who value that.
"Some common characteristics of programming meet-ups" really should be restated as "Reasons I stopped going to programming meet-ups". These would be an excellent checklist for perhaps starting one that addresses these issues since there are many who would agree and appreciate if someone (else) did it right. You don't even need to be the permanent organizer, just an initial facilitator or catalyst to get one off the ground.
Plus it's pretty important to keep up contacts just in things go sideways at your current gig.
It was interesting with the AV presentation being a bit of a unexpected surprise. I guess I didn't expect hard core learning (nor should you given the items covered), but I did get a lot of food for thought and strange ideas. I'm always happy for the sparks these days.
It had plenty or opportunity to network[1], but I get the feeling the main networking occurred after the event at the bar. That is to be expected and frankly I have no problem with that, but I was a bit tired from the drive and didn't feel up to it so I cannot really say.
The food and beer were good as was the facility. I enjoyed myself and its nice to be around people who like technology.
I got to wonder about the nature of meet-ups in a world with YouTube. I get the feeling that the social side of the event really needs be a draw to pull people out of their lives. I get the whole unconference thing, but I wonder if it even goes beyond that. What makes you say "I need to be there" as opposed to I'll DVR (YouTube) it? I felt compelled to go because it was something national in MN and the first one looked like it rocked. If it wasn't already a thing, I'm pretty sure I would have ignored it. I really don't have an answer on this one. Although, for me it was a chance to be around technological people again. Maybe if you day job has a rich environment, meetups just don't have the compulsion.
2) Strangely, I did not run into one person I knew from working as a consultant in the cities in the later half of the 90's or as an employee in the 00's. Maybe it was the nature of where I worked or maybe its age.
The one and only good thing about meet-ups is to meet and talk to other programmers, in a fun, social environment.
Don't waste time listening to the speaker, or care about the stated "purpose" of the event.
Just treat meetups like a bar full of techies, where the alcohol is free.
The presenter being late, disorganized, and talking down to the audience is a pretty simple problem to fix. Screen your presenters! Don't let people who you know would give a bad talk speak. With our meetup, we would send some guidelines along with some information on the kind of audience we tend to attract. This along with front-loading the socialization addressed nearly all problems the author had.
Our meetup was and continues to be sponsored and we never felt the need to give them a plug. We thanked the companies for hosting us, encouraged people to talk to each other and that's it. None of these problems cost a penny to fix.
I have seen other comments here mention that a meetup is not about the talks that it is only networking. While, I agree that is the main benefit for going, I tried pretty hard to have cool talks with topics attendees were unlikely to run into online. I loved to spotlight people who had passion projects previously working in obscurity. I loved introducing academics to an audience of mostly industry people, and vice-versa. People would come up to me afterwards surprised to here that someone in town had solved a problem giving them pain for months! Bringing talks about things they might not see on Twitter or Hacker News.
Want to know what I actually worried about? I worried about diversity. Although 50-60% of the speakers booked were women we had trouble boosting that ratio above 10-20% for the audience. I worried about attendees with kids that couldn't make evening meetups. I worried about people who worked somewhere hard to commute from. My co-organizer actually started organizing events that occurred during lunchtime. These had just as good if not better attendance than the evening talks. So do know those can work.
I think meetups are a fantastic medium to meeting people who like similar things as you. And if none of the meetups around you are working, you can always just start one that does.
* Provide a proper description to the organizers * Ask the organizers that they skip pizza that night or handle the logistics himself * Prepare properly for the presentation * Be considerate of your audience when presenting * Ask that the organizers tone down the commercials * oh, well, I guess you're hopeless on this one
Seriously, meetup groups tend to be community oriented and driven and members almost always have a voice.
Or just don't go, that's really fine, they are definitely not the most time efficient way to learn to program.
I ate their pizza anyway.
That's funny coming from the Javascript crowd. :)
Then there are meetups built around a presentation. During the presentation there is little to no socializing. Yes, if there are presentations either you have little regard for your own time, or you should be learning something (usually some high level concepts, new approaches, etc). When a presenter hasn't properly prepared it is simply robbing people of life for nothing.
Ultimately in things like this it's like a website that is "free" but full of ads -- there are often unstated and dishonest motives that corrupt the whole thing. Whether it's the bloviating presenter who is mostly interested in trying to build their own legend, or someone just trying to use the thing as a cheap veneer to pitch some service or product.
Edit: See jpfr's comment. He organizes the meetups to "build a strong and connected ML community". That sounds like networking to me.
Many are built around the core principal of providing interesting enough of content to draw people. Because meeting other people in a given field is ridiculously easy. But if you say "let's all meet at XYZ and socialize", generally the turnout will be abysmal because most people are not there to just to socialize, and actually need some prescribed value to justify their time. So most are built around some premise of providing a value. It's the disconnect between the promise and the actual that causes issue.
Maybe there's a community tech space in your city?
1. We only allow 3 sponsors a year at a predefined cost. This covers our cost with a little buffer for unexpected expenses.
2. We promote our sponsors on our slides, website and a mention in each meetup. They also get one 5 minute promo during their sponsorship period. We also WILL NOT give them our email list.
3. We have it consistently on the same day of the month, time of day and location to avoid people wondering where we're going to be.
4. We have multiple backup presentations ready in case our speaker doesn't show. We NEVER cancel a meetup.
5. We always provide food and drinks and have designated people to handle it.
6. We solicit ideas for topics constantly and schedule them a couple of months in advance. We do not allow sales presentations and we vet all of our speakers beforehand.
7. We recently started a short lightning talk at the very begninning (5 minutes or less) to encourage members to break out of their shell and present a useful tip.
8. We offer 2 full day training events during the year. We generally do this during the work week as we found local companies are more than happy to give the devs the time off for free training. All of the content is created by devs for devs in order to make it as practical as possible.
These are a few things that we do. The biggest thing to remember is running a good meetup is not a couple of hours a month job. It's a big commitment.
As for presentations, they vary a lot. But inevitably you learn something you weren't previously aware of.
If you need to go deep on an emerging technology then you need to stick your headphones on and spend an afternoon absorbed in it.
This post has actually inspired me to check out some more meetups conferences. I might see if I can fly in for the React Native conference in Portland [1]. Firstly, because React Native is my new favorite tool, after using it for the last few months. And secondly, because my wife and I have just decided that we might like to move to Portland one day, and we've never been there before. We might go check it out for a weeks.
I find these worth it, and most other programming meetups not really worth it. I will still attend a lecture-style meetup if it's about a topic I'm pretty interested in though.
Also, non-programmer meetups I find very valuable and try to go to as many as I can afford to. I've met several of my close friends through those. There's less pretense of networking at them and you can form real connections with people.
If you won't ever need any of those, meetups are terribly inefficient and ineffective for just transferring knowledge. Skip them.
If in any case you did attend a meetup and you found the presentation lacking, is it right to think that the presenter / organizer would definitely appreciate if you provide an honest feedback that would make the next meetup better? I know most meetups are free and the value that it provides for everyone can be increased by the participants adding value on how to make it better.
I also greatly appreciate face-to-face critical feedback.
For example, I've been told that going back and forth in my slides is hard to follow, and I'm trying to avoid that. (Though I think it's frequently unavoidable.)
I've also been corrected on a minor point before - and I appreciate that as well, I don't want to be guilty of spreading misinformation.
But I have seen (very infrequently) poorly prepared talks, or talks by people clearly unqualified to give them. I don't want to be that guy. Maybe the author of the main post here has standards that are too high, or maybe the meetups he's attended just have no quality control.
But I don't know of any group that intentionally wants to have bad talks - it reflects poorly on the organizers as well as the speaker.
So I stopped caring for the topic of presentation and started go for networking and socializing. But it was just too much to sit through an hour long presentation just so that I can socialize afterwards. A lot of attendees leave immediately after the talk. I could show up an hour late but that feels weird. So I stopped going to meetups completely.
Feedback is collected from the organization team and it is taken seriously. There are speakers that are asked not to come back.
I've never seen a speaker that wasn't prepared at a CJUG talk.
To me it sounds like the writer of the post has seen a poorly managed meetup.
Here we usually get:
- A quite accurate description
- Time to chat with people and an on time presentation
- Hot pizza upon arrival
- Humble presenters willing to take their own time to teach us something for very little exposure
- 1 minute at most of sponsor specific content (with the occasional bad filtering of presenters, but those are rare and get a bad rep. quickly..)
- Great Wi-Fi
Maybe you should think of moving to Montreal?