Ask HN: Does your company do internal developer conferences?

3 points by smithgeek 10 years ago | 4 comments

Is this something that a lot of companies do? I've recently noticed a few companies that have publicly written about having an internal developer conference (for example http://www.rackspace.com/blog/leveling-up-developers-at-rackspace/) and am wondering if this is a common occurrence. I know that there has been several times when I've attended conferences where I wished that a certain group of people could have seen a specific talk because they could have learned a lot. That group is also the least likely to want to attend conferences, so having something company wide would kind of force them into it. I can also see the benefit of forcing developers to share ideas between departments. So I think it is a really interesting idea.

I'm also not sure how you get enough people that are willing to speak. Many devs I know don't want to do public speaking or don't think they have anything to say. I also don't know how difficult it would be to get management buy in for such a thing.

Obviously this doesn't make as much sense for startups, but for larger companies it might. If you have any experience with such a thing I'd love to hear about it.

saras 10 years ago |

Disclaimer, I'm a dev at Rackspace and helped run 2015's instance of the internal conference example linked in OP.

Speaking only from my own experience, this kind of internal dev conference can be especially useful for large companies (like Rackspace) that have teams of developers spread across the world, who may never otherwise work side-by-side. You mentioned management buy-in: a key selling point is that even outside of the talks+workshops, an internal con provides a discrete, intentional space for these spread-out teams to work together for a few days, outside of the pipeline of their "regular" work. Essentially you are bringing the benefit of hackathons & sprints to internal projects, using the structure of a conference for framing.

As far as "how to get devs to speak" -- lots of devs do like speaking (or teaching workshops), and maybe it's easier to do that for an audience of immediate peers and coworkers? But for many public speaking IS hard, and a way to mitigate that barrier is to consider the idea of an unconference [1]. When you move away from the standard tech talk format (stage, mic, podium, etc) and towards an "unconference session" (white board, circle of chairs, participant-set agenda), you can get a surprisingly high level of participation.

I'd be interested to hear of any experiences with this kind of thing at a smaller company, but essentially I think the core advantages (sprints, intentional technical discussion, knowledge exchange/training) are things that can be scaled up or down at will.

1) e.g., http://transparencycamp.org/about/tips/

frostmatthew 10 years ago |

At VMware we have an annual conference called RADIO (Research and Development Innovation Offsite), I haven't been myself but everyone I know who's been speaks incredibly highly of it. Here's a blog post[1] from a couple years ago that gives a little insight into it.

[1] http://blogs.vmware.com/cto/radio-a-different-kind-of-high-p...

MalcolmDiggs 10 years ago |

I haven't seen internal conferences, but I have seen a number of smaller companies (even startup sized) creating internal knowledgebases on best-practices, how-tos, etc. Some times in Wiki form, some times as just a shared google-drive folder full of writeups. Not quite a conference, but they serve a similar purpose.

smithgeek 10 years ago | |

Yeah, I've seen the wiki thing quite a bit and think it's a good thing. I guess part of the reason why the conference idea intrigued me is that it's not easy to actually get people to go read those pages when they're just links sent out in an email. I've actually tracked some of the links I've sent out and a 10% click rate was pretty common. There could be a lot of different reasons for that so I can't necessarily draw any specific conclusions. However, if you took a day and told people you have to go to one of these presentations maybe they'd actually pick something up.