I used to read Usenet posts, personal websites, and early blog posts of people “in the industry” when I was studying computer science in college and it always seemed like they were at yet another conference either as a speaker or attendee. Same for the grad students I worked with - always working on presenting a paper for a conference.
I work with Linux - both on workstations and in embedded systems, including cybersecurity. Do you know the number of conferences that I was approved to attend before COVID? None.
No Debconf, no Linux Plummer’s conference, no Linux.conf.au, no Linux Security Summit, no SuSEcon, no Red Hat Summit, hell, there was a regional conference that some of the LUG folks were going to attend that they wouldn’t approve. I’ve paid my own way to some of these because I find them helpful to keep up with new things with my limited time, and the break from work has been nice.
The straw that has broken the camel’s back is that I applied to them to pay for me to attend the Linux Security Summit in a few days and their condition was that I work from the conference as I would if I was working from home, which defeats the entire purpose of going. I’ll likely register for the online sessions so I get SOMETHING out of it, but they won’t even pay for that so it’s again out of pocket.
Did you expect to go to more conferences as part of your work, and did that pan out for you?
