In fairness, I've been to rather expensive conferences that had talks that didn't start on time, seemed to have whole tracks that were only loosely related to overarching conference topic, and had many presenters who either started too slow, or went too fast.
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.
Do people go to meetups to learn something? I guess I always treated them as networking events to expand my sphere. Sure, it's interesting to be exposed to a new technology that I can then go and investigate on my own time, but I have never expected to truly "learn" something at a meetup.
A slightly different debate, but as a digital nomad (who also happens to be a programmer) I can totally relate.
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).
My least favorite thing is the always-in-attendance Master Bikeshedder.
"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 coorganizer of Python meetups in NYC.
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.
Interesting point of view but...
> 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...
You need to ask why the organizers of the Meetup are doing it. If they are corporates, of course they will plug their products. That's the sole reason for them to invest their time. With this in mind, one can easily distinguish between good and bad meetups before attending.
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 think it's a bit much to expect meetups, especially free ones, to explicitly teach you concrete skills that are exceptionally well done. If someone is doing it for free, then I can accept the fact that they spend considerable time promoting themselves or generalizing their message (and specializing it for a paid audience). In general, my expectations for free education sessions are pretty low.
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.
Honestly, if you don't like the way certain Meetups are organised, the quality of the talks, etc. you can always help to make them better. Just prepare a talk such that most of the attendees can learn something from it. I am sure most Meetups will be happy to have you!
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.
I can absolutely sympathize with the post's author, having been to my share of poorly-run events and those with poorly-communicated goals/topics.
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.
You have to pay for meetups in Japan and they are universally worse than the ones in Seattle. Frankly, I love meetups: free food and drink and a chance to hang out with people who like exactly the same stuff? Sign me up!
I recently drove down to Minneapolis, MN for Systems We Love. I'm not sure if that counts as a meet-up. I went because the first one was interesting and it looked like the type of thing I am up for.
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.
People often misinterpreted the "point" or value of meet-up.
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.
As somebody that ran a successful meetup which I grew from 0 to 1500+ members (now 2700) on meetup.com the article feels like it misses the point of the meetups.
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.
Gee, there is almost certainly nothing the author could do about this tragic waste of his time except volunteer to give a talk and
* 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.
Went to a JS meetup in Pittsburgh. The co-host asked me if I was there just to ride the coat tales of actual programmers (because I was/am new to programming). That experience has been enough to keep me away from them.
I ate their pizza anyway.
You don't go to programming meet-ups to actually learn anything new. It's a place for networking. Nothing more. The same with tech conferences and MBA programs. They're all networking events.
I cofounded a meetup a little over a year ago and so far we've seen a lot of success. When we started it we actually made a list of things similar to this article that we wanted to avoid. Here are a couple of ours:
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.
I attend Meetups because I enjoy meeting other people that are interested in things I'm interested in. I really don't care if the event doesn't start on time or they forgot the pizza.
A lot of meetups I've attended do hands-on sessions which most definitely are useful for learning things.
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.
I haven't been to a programming meet-up for a very long time. It was pretty fun when I was in San Francisco, because I felt like there were startups everywhere, and everyone was excited about lots of cool technologies. And I got so many free shirts.
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.
Last year I went to a lot of meetups. It felt kinda nice at the time but I'm wondering if it really was worth it. Learning by doing is the best way to really learn stuff and I dont have enough time to do that. I think this year I'll try to do stuff rather than go to meetups.
Funny how so many programmers think programming meetups are for learning something. There're not. They're about meeting people who could, at some point, become collaborators, colleagues, co-authors, friends, mates, bosses, or candidates.
If you won't ever need any of those, meetups are terribly inefficient and ineffective for just transferring knowledge. Skip them.
I think you've got to try different meetups and find ones that work for you, especially if you are more interested in learning things than in networking. The few Ruby meetups I've been to, for instance, were well attended, but they seemed more industry/newcomer focussed and talks were not particularly engaging for me. In contrast, the Boston Haskell and Vim meetups were super vibrant and full of energy and interesting talks. One presentation by John Wiegley changed my whole development workflow. In Minneapolis I'm struggling a bit more to find vibrant programmer meetups, it seems to be a much more quiet, conservative tech scene here.
A great organizer makes all the difference. Meetups were more interesting to me when there was less great content on the web. Now you can find tutorials on everything, so meetups are networking and not much else.
But the low to zero cost of meet-ups means there’s little incentive to produce quality presentations.
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 used to go to meetups to actually learn from presenter. Then I realized I can learn much better and faster using online videos/books.
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.
I did my first ever tech talk at a meetup just a few weeks ago (http://bit.ly/2oIWHiH). I hope I prepared sufficiently and didn't suffer too much from most of the pitfalls discussed, but I have been to plenty of meetups which are exactly as the OP describes. Almost all of them seem to be thinly veiled networking / hiring events from my experience.
From my experience with the Chicago Java User's Group. They've done a fantastic job at getting speakers I'd like to go and see. (And sometimes they get spring speakers .. can't win them all :))
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.
Well someone is choosing shitty meetups...
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?
I guess one of the benefits of living somewhere rural by HN standards is that there's few local meet-ups that are relatively well attended, everyone gets to know each other, every other meeting is at a bar, etc, etc...
Some great points in this article. I've found that meetups happen a bit too frequently. I think instead of monthly, they should probably be quarterly.
I went to a ZFS preso for the Vancouver BSD meetup and it was great and I learned a ton. You win some you lose some.
Better write a blogpost about it.
Oh man, I will never forget that Erlang meetup with Julia in 2014. Man oh man. Julia didn't want to be there, naturally. BlackRock is a Julia shop now.
I always mean to go to meetups to meet other programmers in my area, but 99.9% of the time I don't actually do it. Every single meetup is in the evening after work, when I'm tired and just want to go home. Maybe this is less of a problem when you're in your early twenties, single, and used to staying out late. But at this point in my life, not getting home to my wife until 9 or 10 so I can maybe making some soft connections just doesn't seem worth it.