Is Conference Speaking Worthwhile?

Over the past few months, a few people have asked me about my experience speaking and blogging, specifically through the lens of what type of opportunities it has opened up for me. My thoughts on this have been rattling around for a while, so I wanted to share them broadly in case other people have similar questions.

Some background

First, a bit of level-setting about exactly how much speaking/blogging I’ve done over the past couple of years. Since April 2017 I have:

1. Given tech talks at eight different professional conferences. These talks were generally well received and were well-reviewed. If you're curious about the topics, you can find all of them on my speakerdeck page
2. I’ve also published ~10 blog posts on technical-ish topics.
3. That content has gotten featured on a couple of Twitter lists and one of my decks was “Featured” on Speakerdeck for a day.

That works out to around 1 conference talk a quarter and one blog post a quarter. That roughly translates to "more content than your average bear, but certainly not a lot."

What has all this done for me?

First, let’s start by talking about the benefits.

• Strangers on the internet have said I’m cool: Every once and a while I’ll get a tweet from someone saying they read my blog post or saw one of my talks and they enjoyed it. That’s awesome, and it makes me feel really good whenever it happens.
• I’ve gotten to go to lots of conferences: This seems obvious, but it’s actually really important. My guess is most companies will fund you to go to one conference a year; I go to around four a year without paying for them. That means I get 4x the opportunities to immerse myself in content, grow as an engineer, and take stuff back to the my team. That’s been huge for me, and has definitely contributed to my breadth of technical skills.
• My company has paid for me to fly lots of places: Work has covered every conference I’ve spoken at, even the international ones. This means that if I want to, I can extend my time in a new city for a couple days and pretty much only pay for the hotel. That’s pretty cool, and definitely something I appreciate.
• I’ve gotten to meet a lot of cool people: By speaking at conferences I’ve gotten to talk with a lot of people I would’ve never otherwise interacted with. Most of the time these conversations are 30 minute hallway chats and I never see the person again (that’s okay!) but occasionally we’ll tweet at each other. Either way, conference speaking has brought me in touch with a lot of lovely, intelligent, and thoughtful people, and I’m grateful for all of them. As a bonus, many of these people were willing to talk candidly to me about opportunities when I was job hunting, and their referrals fast-tracked me into the interview process.
• I've been forced to formalize my thoughts: Oftentimes my proposals are about non-technical topics, so once they get accepted I need to do a bunch of hard work to turn them into ideas which are digestible by others. This process of turning “weird amorphous brain soup” it into “coherent narrative” makes me better at that topic. I could probably do that via other means (reflection, journaling, etc), but speaking is the one I use.
• I’ve gotten connected to some internet famous people: The “conference speaking circuit” (at least with in Android) is surprising small. Once I’d been to 3 or 4 conferences, I’d crossed paths with a lot of folks who were making cool Android stuff. None of them offered me a job immediately (although some did compliment my talks, which was nice of them!), but it definitely make it easier for me to ask them for thoughts/feedback on software topics.

What HASN’T this done for me?

Now that we’ve talked about what conference speaking has done for me, let’s talk about what it hasn’t done for me.

• I haven’t made a bunch of friends I talk to regularly: Some people seem to have close friendships with their speaking friends, but I don’t talk to most of mine regularly. We mostly get together at conferences have dinner, talk about tech, and occasionally share thoughts on Twitter, but not much more than that (which is cool!). I’m super grateful what we DO we share, but it's definitely a different kind of relationship.
• I haven’t gotten internet famous: I was expecting that after I gave my first couple of conference talks, I would have people lining up to hear what I had to say; that’s just not the case. I currently sit at ~550 Twitter followers, no one has ever reached out to me to speak on a podcast, and I’m certainly not a “thought leader”.
• I haven’t gotten invited to speak anywhere (or even accepted more frequently): This sort of goes along with #2. I haven’t been invited to speak anywhere yet, and my proposals still only get accepted ~25-30% of the time. Maybe one day I’ll get invited to speak somewhere, but it’s not something I’m expecting in the near future.
• I haven’t gotten any job offers from speaking: I sometimes see a meme of “Speaking got me my next gig” floating around as ‘why you should speak’. I don’t doubt that this has happened to other people, but it has never happened to me. Speaking has given me access to people who could refer me, but I still got rejected during the interview process. Maybe it takes more time for strangers to start giving you job offers from talks, but I don't know what the tipping point is.

So What?

So, where’s all that leave us? Good question! I don’t know! I think my takeaways after two years of conference speaking are roughly:

• Public speaking is cool, and I’ll keep doing it: There’s a lot of upside to public speaking: you get to meet nice people and someone else pays for you to travel around and learn stuff. All of that is fun and if you’re into it, go do it!
• Becoming internet famous is hard: I went into speaking expecting to give a couple of good conference talks and immediately have opportunities rolling in. That hasn’t happened, and I’m not sure how to make it happen. My guess is if you want to reap the rewards of internet fame, you need to tailor your content or just produce lots of solid content.
• If you want to get started, work it into your day job if you can: Creating content is hard work; some people claim to be able to throw together slides the night before a conference, but it takes me at least 15-20 hours to create a polished talk. I manage this by setting aside ~1-3 hours a week to “create content for recruiting” which means writing conference proposals, slide decks, or blog posts. If you can swing that, I’d suggest trying it.
• (Slightly more speculative) You get what you put in: I get the sense that many people who really trumpet the value of public speaking/blogging put a lot of their time and energy into it. If you really want to get those same benefits, my guess is you’ll have to invest similar amounts of time. I’m not sure what the cost/benefit curve looks like, but if you find out, please do let me know!

Discussion, links, and tweets

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