Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 6: Speaking at Conferences

Episode Date: April 11, 2016

In episode 6, Jamison and Dave answer this question: I’d like to do some public speaking. How do I get accepted to speak at conferences? How do I give good talks once I’m there?

Hello everybody and welcome to episode 6 of Soft Skills Engineering. I am Jameson Dance. And I'm Dave Smith. And we are here to talk about the softer side of software development. I'm going to say the word soft more times. The non-technical aspects of everything that goes into this career. Turns out there are a lot of them. It's so soft. The fuzzy side.

So did you know, Jameson, that the S in S expressions actually stands for soft skills? Oh, wow. I didn't realize that you were laying the grounds for this podcast that long ago. Back in the 60s. Yeah. When I invented Lisp. I was not alive then. Neither was I. Wow. I can't believe you had such a big impact before you were alive.

It's awesome. That's impressive. Do you want to kick out our question? I think we just have one again for the week. Well, before we begin, can I share with you a comment from a listener? Oh, yeah, you totally can. This is one of many comments that reveals to me just how naive I am about careering and companies and stuff. And my whole outlook on life is shaped, as is everyone's, I think, by your experiences. And last week's episode, we talked about, no, two weeks ago, we talked

about personal brand. And listener Matt wrote in to share an interesting alternative viewpoint on this subject, which I thought was worth sharing. He said that either you're building your own personal brand or you're building someone else's. But every time you build something and put it out for the world, there is a brand that's going to be built. And some employers actively suppress their employees' individual personal brands from being built so that they are less marketable and therefore less poachable by other companies. And so he has said that at other jobs he's had to work really hard to somehow maintain some kind of reputation outside of his company because working for the company it wasn't going to happen you know they had policies and

contracts and things that made it so he couldn't do that so he had like side projects on github and stuff like that and i thought it was really interesting um and it also just revealed how naive i am about this stuff yeah that's such a good perspective i i didn't even think about if you work at a company that has 50,000 engineers or something um that that's your your world right and and you're not maybe as inclined to interact with a community of people outside and if you want to leave that company then all the people you know that work in software work at your same company yeah yeah yeah so super interesting yeah huh well thank you thank you for contributing that um with that should we get on to the uh the question yeah definitely i'd like to do some

public speaking? How do I get accepted to speak at conferences? How do I give good talks once I'm there? I like how those are broken up into two separate things because they're very different. So true. Having been on both sides, both on the submitting talk proposals and reviewing them, it feels a lot like a job interview where there's this set of skills that translate into being a good interviewee and, and performing well in a job interview. And it's so different from the set of skills required to be a good employee. Same thing with proposals. There's a set of skills that's like give a good proposal and a totally unrelated set of skills that's give a good talk. Yeah. And you're kind of like trying to make those align, but it's, it's hard.

Yeah, definitely. I've had the same experience. Can I tell a funny story about the first big conference talk that I gave. Please do. So this was two years ago. Yeah, that's right. About two years ago, I applied to speak at my first national conference. And I remember sending an email to the organizers saying, hey, I'd love to speak at your conference. And they were like, yeah, yeah, whatever. Get in line. Submit with everyone else. No big deal. And I felt a little bit dejected. I was like, oh, I thought I had an in with these guys. And I guess not. So then later, I convinced my employer to sponsor the conference and i sent a follow-up email and they were like yeah that's awesome like here's a special topic we think you should do because no one else has submitted about

it and i was like oh my goodness you were in those smoky back rooms so that's an example of deals of where the skills to get into get accepted are very different from the skills to actually deliver a good talk. Yeah. I wasn't even thinking about the skill of having a briefcase full of cash. It's so true. It's not a skill that I often employ. But boy, that's a good technique though. I'll tell you what, if you really, really want to get in, try to find some way to connect to get you out of the normal flow, you know, like if you can convince your company to sponsor, that's a great way to get a talk. I am sad about that. It's sad, but it, you know, it works. That will work for some conferences and not for others though. Yeah, some do a really interesting blind selection

process where they don't even know who the speakers are. They just base their decision on the content of the write-up, right? Yeah, not even that though. I think some talks or some conferences would be very turned off if you said, hey, maybe we'll chuck in some cash if you make it worth your while. It'd be like, no, that's not really what we're about. To be fair, I honestly wanted my company to sponsor this conference and I only realized after the fact that I had been the guy in the smoky room with a briefcase full of money. A likely story, right?

And now it's on your resume forever. It's on my personal brand. Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about, maybe do you want to talk about how you approach coming up with a talk idea? I would love to talk about that. That seems like the first thing.

It's absolutely the most important part of this whole equation. can i can i insert just a silly thing before we start with that because like have you ever been to a like a class or seen an online blog or video about how to do public speaking yes and if i'm if you've seen the ones i've seen they're all like okay smile look at the audience um pace yourself right but they never say step one have a good idea yeah and i get so upset with that because it's like that is absolutely the most important thing so how do you do it oh i was asking you i don't know you know i've never done it uh i have thousands of terrible ideas and then every once

in a while i i have a good one so the only good ideas i have come from things that i've experienced and so i you know you you do things at work as a developer you write code a new way or you as a team decide to try something different and then you poke around the community and see if other people are doing it. And if they're not, that's a, can be a good idea at the very worst, you know, the community will reject your idea, but at least it's new and not just like, you know, this is what everyone's already doing. And now I'm going to spend 30 minutes of your time talking about it at a conference. And those are also the easiest to deliver in my experience when you're talking about what you've done. It's like, it's like a story rather than a monologue.

Yeah. It's, it's pretty powerful to say, here's how we use these things to build a real app or to lower our number of bugs or or to split our monolith into services or something like that instead of just here's all these thoughts i have about it yes yes um i also think there's room for having an idea and using that to drive your conference submission i i've heard this from a lot of different people um dan abramov had a lot of uh-huh it basically changed his life when he did this he was just like here's a cool idea i'd like to work on it i am not working on it right now i'll submit a conference talk about it and i think he did this primarily so he would be motivated to work on it yep yep i've heard a lot of other people talk about it he is probably the

most uh this is like the the success story the most outrageous success story of it i've ever heard because it changes life he became famous he he wrote all these cool libraries he got a new job moved to a new country yeah so it worked really well for him but also he gave a really good talk And I think that's – I've done that before without the whole become famous and move to a new country thing. And it's really cool to pick a topic that you might not have the time to work on during work or it might be a little outside of your comfort zone. But you just have to do it because all these people are going to be staring at you waiting to hear what you say. Yep, exactly. The other way to get a good idea is to try to get – try to find a conference you're interested in going to.

and then try to connect with the organizers and say, what topics are you looking for? What themes at least? And get a feel for the conference. And I'm not saying that you should necessarily change your material, but try to find a conference where you align well with what they're going for. And a lot of times I've submitted, not a lot, but once or twice I've submitted a talk and they've been like, yeah, you know, I don't really want this topic, but we think you might have something else to say. How about these topics. Do you have anything you could say about that? And that's rare, but it points out the fact that organizers generally have a pretty strong idea of what they want ahead of time, at least

thematically. Sure. One other thing I want to point out is you don't have to be an expert on your subject. I think there's a lot of value in hearing from all different levels of experience. You should still be able to give a good talk, but you don't need to be the world's best Python developer to talk about Python, right? And it's probably more relatable to most people. Most people are not Guido, right? Most people didn't invent Python. Well, he gives good talks. But if people are near to your own skill level and experience level, it can be easier to transfer ideas to them. Yes. And our industry has more newbies in it than it's ever had. and so as a new person you should probably be reminded of that because you probably have

really valuable insights that a lot of other people could benefit from yep yep yep um do you want to talk about the normal process for getting accepted like just the mechanics of how it works i think you already talked about it's the suitcase cash in the smoky back room yeah let's talk about that uh how do you think it works well i've seen it done probably two or three different ways. But like, for example, ng-conf, they ask for very little upfront from each person. They say, okay, tell us your name, tell us your talk description, and like one paragraph write up. Whereas Python conferences like PyCon, they expect like an outline of your whole talk and really a lot of detail. It takes a long time to write a PyCon

submission. And then they'll iterate with you. They'll be like, okay, can you change this or add more detail here before the submission even happens they'll assign like a mentor to every person who submits a proposal and they'll go through it with you at least a couple emails and so I've seen everything in between yeah yeah it sounds about right and then that'll usually be like a month or so or two months and then you'll get an email saying yeah either got in or you didn't get in one thing that we should point out is you you shouldn't write your talk before you get accepted. It's helpful to have that extra detail as a conference organizer for the Python conferences you were talking about, but they still probably rejected most of the people that gave

them all that extra detail, right? And if you have spent the dozens to hundreds of hours to produce a really high quality talk, there's nothing guaranteeing that will get accepted. So you kind of, in my experience, it's most successful if you create a proposal you're excited about and then you leave it at that unless it's something you're kind of actively working off on on the side but you should make the proposal you you kind of wait to hear back and then you start actually preparing for the talk once you find out it's accepted just you're just saying so you don't end up wasting your time yeah um have you ever been able to give a talk more than once at a conference or prepare one and not give it and then later propose it and get accepted this year i'll give for the first

time in my life i'll repeat a talk yeah uh it's it's a lot less stressful yeah i'll bet i've almost never repeated a talk and just like you said you've only you're only gonna do it once this year for the first time ever yeah it's so crazy in our industry how uh people can't give repeat talks you just can't you know i it's weird i think they can for the right talk only the celebrities right like the no i don't think so not in my experience really yeah i mean not from not from the talk proposals that i've seen just like perusing conference websites or youtube playlists or something so you think that in our industry people are okay with giving a repeat talk even though it's almost always available on youtube already oh yeah yeah for sure there this

is a whole the whole performance arts aspect of conferences that doesn't get talked about very much we we like to pretend like it's all about the raw technical ones and zeros but it's more of a human thing and there's even if you can see it on youtube it affects you differently if you're there and it that's true affects the atmosphere of your conference even if someone could theoretically already see that same content on youtube that's really interesting so we should probably point out jameson actually has organized a conference before just just one right so he has direct experience selecting speakers and putting together the agenda so he knows he knows what he's talking about. Yeah. And we haven't really, uh, it's, it's not a black mark for the committees that

I've worked with to see a talk submission that's been given already. It can actually be really helpful because you can see sometimes a video of them giving the talk and that's, it's terrifying to just pick these strangers to represent your conference. Maybe they can write really well, but they have a hard time connecting with the live audience, right? So they can give a good proposal but they might not give a good talk and so so it's actually yeah it's helpful cool uh we have tangented okay so how do i give good talks once i'm there second part of this question do you feel like we answered the first one absolutely is there anything else you want to say about it uh let's see oh um i did want to talk about rejection really quick

i've applied to speak at probably 15 or 20 conferences and i've been rejected from probably two-thirds of them so that's normal like i would say if at first you don't succeed keep trying don't worry don't get too discouraged yeah my experience has been similar it's been uh from the conferences i've seen they they usually get 10 times as many submissions as they can accept so it's not like a a strong black mark against you yeah you can feel like it might be that way, but it just happens just from numbers. Okay. One, and then one other thing I'd like to say, you mentioned that Python conference process. If the conference that you're submitting to doesn't have that process, I would recommend finding a friend that you

trust and like, and just kind of running your ideas by them and asking them to proofread. Actually, I wasn't even thinking about this. Dave, you did that for me. Oh, I did? A few months ago yeah yeah i did you get accepted i did yes endorse i applied i i think i i decided to submit like an hour before the deadline and then you read it like 20 minutes before the deadline and we're like maybe change these things and it worked so uh wow yeah that's you're the first person that i've read their proposal and they've actually been accepted i have i have i have kind of a bad track record actually i've done several people and i've been like that's gonna be going for sure and then they were like i got rejected well i did have to ignore your advice about all

the swear words to put in uh i just edited those out but the rest of the advice i took the only problem with your talk jameson is not enough swears yeah yeah but just just getting some feedback on it before you submit can be helpful good idea okay that's that's all i got to say on that okay how do i give good talks once i'm there how do you ah this is a tough one i think um first of all i want to point out i think james and you and i might disagree on this but the quality of your delivery is not as important as people might think in our industry you know if you're a professional speaker like a motivational speaker it's all delivery quality almost but in our industry i tend to look past that and i go for the the actual content of what

they're saying and um i found that even the most boring dull talks might have some of the most rich engaging interesting content and it's okay like yes the talk would be better if the person was a little more of a better presenter but it's not a deal breaker in my experience i have not ascended to that plane yet i need to be entertained yeah i don't know it definitely helps but i've also seen talks that are a lot of entertainment and not a lot of content and i actually feel a little frustrated by those sometimes really i enjoy them and they help break up a long conference and they make it fun but at the same time i'm like it wasn't really a lot of content there so well i think this reflects that there's room for all types yeah i think that's

a good way to put it um i the probably the person who's influenced my speaking style the most is this guy named ben ornstein he's a rubyist and he does i don't know he talks and does other stuff but he has this quote where he's talking about delivering good talks i think he says above all else be entertaining because no one will remember what you say if you're not entertaining yeah and that resonated for me because if i spend 100 hours i can come up with 30 entertaining minutes so i think that fits my my style and skill set but i could also see that terrifying some people who think like i i don't come up with jokes i don't i don't make an audience like laugh or or i don't know i just have good ideas and talk about them and i i agree with what you're saying or what i

made what i interpreted you to be saying in that you should find what your strengths are and and cater to that instead of some ideal conference speaker that that might not fit with who you are yeah yeah yeah we can't not everyone is super entertaining and that's okay but i agree with you james and like an entertaining talk will definitely hold my attention more but for me it's not the number one but maybe this just points out that audiences are different like different audience members have different priorities and will respond better or worse to your style and entertaining can mean a lot of different things too right um you can tell jokes but you can also just be engaging and you can have uh i don't know you can you can

how would i put it have you ever seen any of brett victor's talks i don't think so he's the guy that's popularized the whole movement around live feedback and editors oh okay uh he gave this talk called inventing on principle where he showed this awesome javascript canvas editor where he was building a game and tweaking variables in the game okay and then on the other side of the screen there was his game that was like live reacting oh yeah i think i did see stuff he did yeah so he is not like a hilarious man at all he's he's very serious and he he you can tell he takes these ideas very seriously like he thinks they're going to change the world but he's just fascinating to listen to um without having to like crack jokes

about semicolons or something. Okay, sounds like the kind of talk I would enjoy. Yeah. You know what, now I shouldn't say, I do like the funny talks too. I mean, everyone loves WAD, right? Yeah. So regardless of your style,

whether you're gonna be good at entertaining, telling jokes, or just be enlightening with content, I think there's some techniques you can do to get better no matter what. And the first one, in my opinion, is practice. And for any big talk I give, I've almost always first scheduled to give that talk either at a small group like at my company

or to a local meetup. And that has been enormously helpful. The talk I end up giving at the big conference is generally probably half changed from the talk that I gave to the small group. Yeah, I have a similar experience. How many times do you practice it? Is a set number of hours, set number of times through it?

Well, this will probably depend on the person as well. And it'll depend on how nervous you are presenting. But I am actually one of these weird people who feels really comfortable with it. I can usually just do it once. Just give the talk once and then spend a couple of hours tweaking it based on the feedback that I got. And then I'll be good to go. Um, and then depending on how short the talk is, the shorter the talk, the more I have

to run through it. Like last year I spoke at ng conf, I only had 20 minutes to cover what I thought was a 40 minute topic. So my timing just had to be perfect. So I went through it, I don't know, maybe 10 times with a stopwatch, just, you know, not even speaking it out loud, just saying it in my mind and going slide by slide. So it depends. I don't know what the right number is, but For me, I found that a higher number is better, no matter what. The more I've practiced to talk, the better it's turned out. Yeah, it'll never get worse if you practice more, right? What about all those kind of like tactics, like hooking your stuff up to the projector

or where you look into the audience or I don't know. Do you have any advice around? Oh, good question. There's the broad stuff, like have a topic you're comfortable with, practice it a lot, be smart. So in the moment. But what about all those, yeah, those little things? I have no idea how to do this stuff.

Like, for example, my first big talk I gave, I remember looking at the recording later and thinking, that poor cameraman. I was walking across the whole stage, like pacing nervously, and the camera was just following me. And I'm like, that poor guy with the camera, he had to keep track of me the whole time. So I don't even know, like, is that bad? Is that good? I couldn't tell. I think that's good. People probably thought you were more of a thought leader because you were walking around on stage. watching the video, I got a little seasick because it was like zoomed in on me and the background is moving around a lot, you know? Yeah. I do like to make eye contact with my audience. I like to look at people in the eyes as if I was talking to them. And I'll like zoom

in on one person, look at them for a minute, zoom in on someone else. And I really appreciate it when the audience is looking back at me. It helps me remember like this is a human connection interaction. This is not like a speech that I'm giving, you know, like a state of the nation kind of speech you know it's like this is like i'm just it helps me feel more human to human yeah yeah i think there's some little things that once you do it once or twice i i think they kind of become second nature but if you've never given a talk before like plug into the projector sometime before the first time when you stand up to give your talk yes like go early in the morning or something and test out your av definitely yep they might have i've seen all kinds of weird stuff

where the resolution messes up your slides or there's some crazy DRM on the projector and it just blacks out the projector. Or you're running Linux. Or you're running Linux. And it'll never work anyway. You recompiled your kernel to get those sweet hacker points because you didn't have any real work to do.

Or you have to borrow somebody's laptop who has a weird Chrome extension installed and it messes up your presentation. Oh dear, yeah. I lent someone my laptop and I had cloud to butt plus installed on it, which is a Chrome extension that replaces the words, the cloud with my butt on all webpages. And this person's slides were in HTML running in the browser. And I felt simultaneously so sad for that person, but also it was hilarious.

I felt the exact same way. I was horrified because the person was kind of nervous already. The bottom line is you do not want last minute changes when you're about to give your talk. Yeah, you want to know where you're going to stand on stage and know maybe they have a separate monitor to put your presenter's notes on or maybe you don't even know that your presentation software has presenter notes, right? Yep. Like you should practice those kind of mechanical things so you can just walk up and know what to expect. Speaking of mechanics, this is going to be ironic because I think we're going a little over time, but I'm going to talk about going over time. one time i gave a talk and they said you have 20 minutes and they had a person standing at the back

of the room holding up warning cue cards like 10 minutes left five minutes left and so on but i never saw them the whole time and i was i went five or six minutes over my 20 minute budget until finally he walked to the front of the room and stood up in front of the podium and held up the like you're over time cue card and i was like oh my gosh i just had completely forgotten to keep track of the time so yeah be respectful of your organizers and you know don't go over just don't like unless it's amazing you don't you can't go over it's just not very respectful yep um maybe one more thing is you mentioned did you mention meetups did i i did invent that okay i want to also mention meetups they are a really good low risk low cost way to get into public speaking the

But usually the criteria for getting accepted is you just say, hey, I want to speak on this thing. And then they say, OK. Yeah, they usually don't have people lined up to talk at those things. Yeah, some of the really famous meetups, like probably Brooklyn JS or some of those very curated ones, they're almost more like tech conferences. But most local meetups are just talk to the organizers, say you want to speak, and they'll give you some time. And usually the organizers are desperate to have someone volunteer. So they'll be happy that you volunteered. Yep.

It's a friendly environment. There are fewer people, so it's probably less scary if you're worried about the crowds. And it's just a great way to do it. I think, did I give my first ever public thing at a meetup? I probably did. Yeah, probably I did. Let me add one more thing to the meetup conversation. Sure.

When I do a talk at a meetup that I'm planning to give at a bigger event, I will tell the audience beforehand, hey, this is my talk for X conference. will you please stay afterwards and tell me what you thought good or bad i want any criticism or any feedback you can give me and people will they'll line up afterwards and be like oh yeah this was great this was bad um i did that once and and i got i got fabulous feedback i was like oh man people told me things like this section of your talk feels like you just bolted it on i couldn't make any sense of it and i was like oh thank goodness you told me that before i presented it to 600 people yeah a lot of that's super valuable a lot of the value for me is just how I feel while I'm giving it also true because the way I prepare I I often the first time I give

it don't really know what the whole talk is going to be like until I just go through it all and then I notice weird stuff but having good feedback from people is really good too is there anything else you want to and want to talk about any more ideas or tips yeah giving good talks I have one more so I probably have a lot more but I'm I'll just share one more sure um it's really important that you make your, so remember how at the beginning of the show, I said, I hate all these blogs and videos about how to public speak. And now that's the only thing I'm talking about. So remember, have a good idea first, but after that's done, after that's done, it's really important that you look like you're not nervous. And I know this is going to make people nervous.

Yeah. I just got nervous. Yeah. If you look comfortable and relaxed, people will get more out of your talk. One of the ways that I do this is I remember the audience wants you to be successful. Sometimes I think we get this idea in our head that the audience is just waiting for us to trip up so they can make fun of us or, you know, that's like the worst case scenario. They're all going to laugh at you, right? But that's not the case. They're actually there to cheer you on and be thrilled when you do a good job. Every audience I've ever had has been like this. They've never been like, oh gosh, he's going to screw up. And when he does, I can't wait to laugh at him, you know?

So remember that. I think that helps me be a little more calm. That is great advice. So to wrap up, I would like to ask you about your worst technical public speaking experience. And I can go first because I've been thinking about this for a little bit. Okay, you go. Is that okay? Yeah.

Okay, my first ever talk, it might have been ever, it might have been my first non-meetup one. it was at this local unconference run by this awesome guy named, I think it was run by Mike Moore. And you just put your topic up on a note card and stuck it on a whiteboard. And then people would kind of vote to hear what they talked about. So it wasn't super organized as in you didn't have to have a really polished presentation coming in, but you needed to have some idea of what you wanted to talk about. And I was like, what would people want to hear about? And I just picked cool buzzwords like machine learning in Ruby because I was in a machine learning class in college. It turns out that there's not any good stuff to do machine learning in Ruby or there

wasn't when I gave this talk. So you were just totally unprepared. I was unprepared. It was basically like how to shell out to all these C programs in Ruby that do the machine learning for you. And they had this thing where halfway through your time, they could vote to discontinue it or not oh no yeah it was like are you interested in hearing more on this extend it um and it did not get extended it was it was rough poor jameson yeah but i i failed to prepare i didn't have a good idea like there are all kinds of things i did wrong and it was a really good experience and no one was mean about it sure sure it was a bad topic so you learned a lot i did learn a lot yeah this was years ago all right i'll share mine then so uh now that you've embarrassed yourself

completely yeah i feel comfortable so i once got a 90 minute talk assignment and that is like that is twice as long as i ever want to give a talk and i knew it going into it and i tried to get the organizers to get me cut in half and they were like no this is our format everyone does 90 minutes and i was like okay well i guess there's gonna be a lot of fluff in this thing so i tried to lay the groundwork because i knew the audience was going to get lost like i knew it and so i like had a map and i was like okay here's what this talk is going to be you are here i'm going to do some background information then i'm going to delve into the topic and then i'm going to give you know and i'm and i marked it all out for them about halfway

into the talk let's just to protect the innocent i'm not going to tell you the topic but let's say the topic was x it's just a variable um halfway through the talk someone raised their hand and was just like, so what is X? I was like, oh boy. I had so much filler to try to spread it to those 90 minutes that they just got lost. And I knew that would happen, but I'm like, oh geez. So that was probably my worst ever. Yeah. Well, you can't do worse than we did. I think that's how I want to close it. We've created this big list of things that you have to do this make sure you don't do this and that can be intimidating i'd say the most important thing is um people want to hear from you you have good stuff to talk about and like everything it'll

get better with practice absolutely those are i don't know those those are my non-intimidating public speaking for developers go forth and speak yep do it you'll be great and you'll be even greater the more you do it all right jamison where can people find out more about our podcast They can follow us on Twitter. We are SoftSkillsENG. We're on all the, I don't know, iTunes and Stitcher and all those podcast aggregation things. We're on all of them. Or you could, yes, we have aggregated the aggregators.

Or they could probably follow Dave, I think you're DJ Smith on Twitter. What's your Twitter thing? It's that with a 42 on the end, the number four and two. What is 42? It's my favorite integer. Oh. It's also the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. That is true.

Okay. And I am Jergeson on Twitter. So if you want to talk more about it, you can follow us. We'd love to chat. Now, I said our podcast, and I meant that inclusively. This is your podcast. We'd love to have your questions. So if you have anything you'd like to ask, as was this question today, feel free to send

us a message to our Twitter handle or send us a direct message, whichever you like. Yep. Great. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. See ya.