"I learned something - try to explain it until you understand it yourself"
What the conference looks like to the viewer is clear to everyone, but what does it represent for the speaker? What causes well-known experts to be distracted from their main activity in the thorough preparation of the report? Why it is not enough for them to format a simple blog post? What return do they get? What most often becomes the starting point for the report?
We already spoke with Vladimir Krasilshchik (Yandex) about his experience of speaking, and now four people answered our questions at once, well known to visitors of Java conferences:
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- Alexey @shipilev Shipilev (Red Hat);
- Tagir lany Valeev (JetBrains);
- Ruslan Cheremin Cheremin (Deutsche Bank);
- Gleb gvsmirnov Smirnov (Plumbr).
Alexey Shipilev (Red Hat, ex-Oracle)
- How did you start performing? What brought this to life?
- I started speaking at technical conferences in Sun Tech Days in 2009, where we, together with Ivan Krylov, talked about optimizations in JVM. It was a seamless report from our American colleagues (drawn, of course, with their permission), with which they traveled to JavaOne, and our task was only to translate the slides and tell them. As my colleague Valera Ushakov said after the speech, it turned out quite successful "comic couplets about the JIT compiler."
But, in principle, I had the skills of public speaking before that: thanks to the scientific and practical conferences of schoolchildren and students, as well as the small experience of teaching in summer / winter visiting schools.
- There are a lot of conferences where marketers and sales people speak. Their interest is clear. And what is the profit statement for the engineer?
- It seems to me that an engineer may have several profits at once.
First, channeling profit. Engineers, as a rule, are “bursting with experience”: no matter who you look at, it’s like XL, then XXL ... Most of the engineers at least sometimes solve complex problems, gain experience in specific areas, study, compare, make technical decisions. This knowledge is accumulated and, as in the problem of a pool and two pipes, they inevitably ask to go outside. Each of them splashes out in different ways and at different scales: someone writes thoughtful phrases on Twitter, someone writes notes on LiveJournal, Facebook or his blog, someone buzzes on podcasts, someone speaks at conferences, someone just quietly brings up their wards.
Secondly, the profit is educational. Sometimes you want to dig in a specific place of a particular project or ecosystem and pull out some complete knowledge from there. It is surprising that in our reality this is most conveniently done in the form of a report at a training or conference.
Because:
a) The format of the report compels one to think over the structure: introduction, problem statement, solution, culmination, decoupling. In the format of a blog / article you can always fool yourself by saying "well, I am writing for myself." And the report “to the table” is basically impossible, because the performance involves the public.
b) The format of the report forces to meet the time both from above and below. Therefore, it is impossible to otkhalyavit, as in the post, writing after a five-minute introduction, "and the continuation in the next article ...", which never appears. On the report you have one chance a year to say something correctly and fully (no pressure!), It disciplines. Also, it is impossible to do everything in a post per kilometer, hoping that it will be useful.
This is not a new observation, many successful professionals in other fields have already discovered this trick: learned something - try to explain it to someone, study it again, explain it again, until you understand it yourself.
Thirdly, the profit is time saving. As the engineer gains expertise in a particular area, he naturally finds himself in a situation where he has to explain the same thing three hundred times in different places. A complete report on a specific topic is a good reference to the experience, which saves time :) Again, I constantly notice that few people want to read a long comment or article for an hour, but look at the recording of the hourly report - so please! Maybe the fact is that ignoring a video with tens of thousands of views is harder than a comment with three pluses in some tweaked blog.
- For the senior developer of career paths, there are not so many if you don’t go into managing people. How do public speaking affect your career?
“I usually ask at this place:“ And is career growth what it is? ” If we are talking about wages, the obvious point of growth is to become a Colombian drug dealer. If it’s about having a team of people working on your project, it’s not necessary to manage these people. In all the offices where I was fortunate enough to work, the technical and managerial ladders are separated, and growth in the technical field is possible without transferring to management. (Moreover, most of my colleagues know about the trap "from excellent engineers to mediocre managers"). If we are talking about just lagging behind you and letting you work on projects that are interesting to you, then the transition to management directly contradicts this goal on all points.
On the one hand, I don’t know examples when people were hired for high positions because they spoke at conferences. Mindful of post hoc ergo propter hoc, it’s worth thinking that publicly known developers are hired rather because of their technical skills, which they demonstrate and outside the reports. Because you want to hire developers who solve problems, and not just talk about them beautifully. There is a separate category of specialists, who are called differently - “evangelists”, “developer lawyers” and so on - for which public speaking and generally working with the external public is an essential part of job descriptions, but we are not about them.
In all my works, reports at conferences were perceived as part of existence: to dine regularly, sleep regularly, speak at conferences regularly. It is assumed that senior developers always share experiences, and sometimes this translates into participation in conferences.
On the other hand, after our first conferences with Kuksenko, our HR (Kate, hello!) Asked us to come to her as soon as possible after signs of hunting from other companies, because the recent conference included us on the shortlists for hiring local companies . It should be understood that in hiring staff we would very much like hiring to look at each individual person, but in practice at least the primary dropout is based on at least some metrics - the number of known projects, the number of stars on GitHub, Twitter followers, the number and the popularity of reports and articles, teaching experience and other things.
The presence of reports in the track record has at least one reasonable role: if you hire a senior developer, you also hire a mentor for junior developers. Therefore, you would like to hire a person who has demonstrated an ability to explain, while listening to him.
- Where do you get material for reports? What gives more texture: work, own projects, something else?
- It is difficult for me to distinguish between “work” and “own projects” :) Rather, it is worth dividing it into what we specifically do and what others do.
The first class of reports I call “See what wealth we are doing,” and this is really talk about current projects, problems and solutions in them. On the one hand, they are advertisements, because they give the public an idea of ​​the product, and on the other hand, they are technical ones, because they give an idea of ​​the approaches to solve problems. Such a report is potentially cheaper to do, because you are already digging into problems, but there is a danger of falling into a collection of anecdotes, "but we measured it like this, and here is the data," "we rearranged two challenges and it became better." "And what?", - the respectable public will ask, and it will be right. A good report from this class is a technical overview of the product, explaining its fundamental and random advantages and disadvantages from the point of view of the target audience. In other words, this is the format of the technical report on the work done.
The second class is “See what wealth I have found.” These are reports that are immersed in a specific project or issues that existed before us. I would like to make such reports, including when your current project is still interesting for you, but you're already tired of talking about it. (Well, how many times can be interesting to talk about QuickSort? Three times maximum.) They are usually more digestible, because this is the look of an advanced amateur for amateurs - it is much easier to get into the same educational base. However, in such reports it is quite easy to review important aspects, therefore it is super important to have the opinion of real experts. In other words, they require a hard review of reports, unlike the first class, which requires a hard personal discipline :)
I think that even in the absence of cool, rich projects in which you personally participate, you can always talk about outsiders, you just have to look carefully not to talk nonsense about them. I would say that in my repertoire the ratio of reports of these two classes is 70:30.
- Surely you participated in the conferences and as an ordinary participant, and not just as a speaker. Can you compare what is the difference between these two formats?
- I explain from personal experience. As a speaker, you spend half of the conference in your thoughts, “Eprst, how can you tell it correctly,” and the second in your thoughts, “Eprst, because you could tell more correctly like this, and now wait another year to correct it.” That is, it is exciting even for experienced speakers, because the report itself is a little knot in universal memory that cannot be played back :)
In addition, it is assumed that after the report (and sometimes before it) you are met at the conference site by people and they are
I'm here by nature introverted. When I am a participant at a conference, I think: “Now I’ll talk to people, because I’m eating food instead of YouTube for this, I’m watching reports”, and you come and include various rationalizations, what to eat, drink, sleep, just lie down in the corner, and in the end you find that you haven't really talked to anyone. Speakers are built into the mechanics of a good conference so that they are constantly substituted for contact. As a speaker, you will, of course, be exhausted at the end, but you will be glad that the process mechanics didn’t give you a shuffle :) I would start with the preparation of speakers in principle: at the conference they are key elements of the informative program, they don’t need a speaker -hide hide and stand in the crowd.
- After the conferences, audience reviews about the reports are collected - what are you getting, and how useful are they? Have you ever been unexpected - for example, to ask for a job there for you?
- I think that the purpose of any report is to influence the public’s brains. Reviews help assess whether it turned out or not.
Unfortunately, many of them are more emotional than content. What a sin to conceal, it is very pleasant when they write to you that your report is cool, because you are you. But to improve the report, this is an empty comment, because you want knowledge to remain even after you turn off the reality distortion field. However, some level of emotional emotion, both positive and negative, is still good. Because otherwise it means that you spoke before a room full of zombies, and you can’t believe the rest of the responses!
Negative substantive reviews for a verified, rehearsed, and revised report are quite rare, and it is they who are actionable insights — they should be expected, but it’s worth hoping for their absence. If you have in the report illogical transitions, juggling and other demagoguery, then you will almost certainly write about it. In addition, they will also be read by the program committee, to which there will be questions about the disastrous report ...
This, in order to give valuable advice and recommendations, almost never occurs in reviews - it is customary to talk about it on the sidelines,
Tagir Valeev (JetBrains)
- How did you start performing?
- If we talk about Java conferences, then I first spoke at Joker in 2015. It all started with the fact that half a year before that I rather spontaneously went to the JPoint. Before that, I thought Java conferences were not particularly interesting and useful in the sense that reports can be viewed on YouTube (albeit with a delay), and much of what is being said can be gleaned from articles, and much deeper. However, after that JPoint, I changed my mind. The most valuable thing at the conference is the degree of hardcore. There you can meet very interesting people who are doing very interesting things. Live communication with speakers and participants is something that you can’t get by watching YouTube and reading articles.
A couple of months after the JPoint, I spontaneously accumulated fragmented material on the JIT compilation of the Stream API. It was interesting to me that there with speed, I researched myself, read articles and pestered by mail Vladimir Ivanov from Oracle. At some point, the puzzle was formed, and understanding came. Usually I fix this result by writing an article on Habré. Then he even sketched a draft, but somehow I did not like everything. It turned out too long and a bit not in the format of Habr, or something. I realized that an oral presentation would be better for this story, and I applied for a Joker. It turned out not bad, and I understood that it was interesting for me to make reports.
- What is the engineer profit from speeches?
- I will not speak for all engineers, but for me it is more of a passion than a way to get some kind of benefit. It is even more important for me to attend the conference, listen to other reports, than do my own. But when you report yourself, you climb a new step. It’s so easy to talk to other speakers on an equal footing - something for which I participate. It is clear that the performances contribute to fame and some rating, at least in the eyes of HR departments. Job offers immediately begin to pour from all sides.
- Where do you get material for reports?
- Until now, these were their own projects. Basically, the material was collected when communicating on Stack Overflow and in the process of working on the StreamEx library. But now the material on the Stream API is running out, so at the nearest JPoint I ’ll talk about the work on inspections in IntelliJ IDEA.
- What is the difference between attending a conference as a participant and a speaker?
- Actually, I am more a participant at every conference than a speaker. Speaker I am only on my report, and the rest of the time I go to strangers and listen to them along with the participants. The difference is not very large, except for the need to tell your report. Well, there is aftepati and you can drink tea in the speaker room, it's calmer there than in the general hall. There is no need to stand in the queue at the cloakroom. On the other hand, different people are constantly coming up and asking for something, forcing people to take pictures against the background of a press wall or to give some kind of interview.
- What reaction did your performances cause? Were there unexpected consequences or, for example, sharply negative feedback?
“After conferences, the number of stars at the StreamEx library on GitHub increased, new users came. I met the team of the podcast "Debriefing", now I sit in their chat . There was almost no negative feedback. Among the reviews to the reports came across critical, but where do without them?
Ruslan Cheremin (Deutsche Bank)
- How did you start performing?
- It was a fortuitous accident. I wrote a series of posts about Disruptor - the first more or less consistent series of posts about performance, benchmarks, and anatomical studies on live JVM. In the comments here and there Alexey Shipilev appeared, he suggested to me that on the basis of this series make a presentation on JavaOne Moscow. I remember that I was very tense: JavaOne - it was something unthinkable cool, just a year before I went to participate in it for the first time, and did not feel at all like an expert, ready to speak there. I can't even imagine how I persuaded myself. :)
- Why do marketers want to speak at conferences, of course, but what is the profit for the developer?
I do not think that there is any clear line between developers and marketers. Every time I speak - whether from the scene, on the blog - I explicitly or implicitly encourage people to think like I think, to pay more attention to those things that I consider important. In a sense, I sell myself, my values ​​and way of thinking - quite marketing and sales :) And in a more direct sense, it is also present: even if I don’t mention Deutsche Bank in my reports every minute (but I checked now - of course it is signed on each slide), anyway everyone knows where I come from. And in this sense, my profit is obvious.
A little less obvious, but for me, just as important a profit is the ability to put thoughts in order. In the process of preparing for each of my reports, I’m doing a lot of clarifying research that I, for myself, hand in my heart, would be too lazy to do - because it seems to be “understandable”. But I do them, because I anticipate possible questions - and sometimes it turns out that not everything is clear :) Every time it turns out that 30 percent of my knowledge on the topic was unearthed a week and a half before the report, during the final licking of the wording. This is information that I might never have known otherwise.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/319854/
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