Many people don't agree with me and that's OK. I literally couldn't care less about demographic checkboxes when listening to a talk about technology. The number one priority should be having thought provoking, relevant, and high impact talks about technology at a technology conference. Seeing these talks and engaging in conversations about the technology should be the number one priority for attendees.
Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers. If someone doesn't want to go to a conference on concurrency and distributed algorithms because a demographic de-jour isn't speaking then that person isn't passionate about the subject of the conference and the conference is better off without them there.
That may seem harsh but I'm just throwing my opinion out there for the sake of diversity of ideas ;)
I literally couldn't care less about demographic checkboxes
Then you are not the audience those "demographic checkboxes" are there for. (Neither am I.)
I'm a white male engineer, and I've never had the experience of going to a tech conference and wondering whether I'm supposed to be there because I don't see anyone else who looks like me. That experience is common for engineers who are women, POC, or in various other demographics.
For all I know you might be a member of one of those demographics, but if you "couldn't care less" then I assume you haven't had that experience either. That doesn't affect your right to an opinion, but it does mean you are not fully considering at least one reason that demographic diversity is important.
Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers.
I haven't met a single hacker or engineer who wasn't also a person, and other things that matter to people include feeling welcome and accepted.
If you're accustomed to feeling welcome and accepted at technical conferences, it's easy to say that feeling welcome and accepted doesn't matter to you at such conferences. If most conferences didn't make you feel that way, it might matter to you more to find one that did.
One way to make people feel welcome and accepted is to reduce the extent to which they feel like the "odd one out", in as many senses as possible.
As autarch points out above, this isn't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that replaced quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have more than one criterion to optimise for. Multi-objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal.
A warm, diverse, welcoming, and accepting technical conference that contains no interesting technical content is less a technical conference and more a purely social gathering. There's really nothing wrong with that, but at that point it's no longer meaningfully a technical conference.
Perhaps there's a desirable balance to be struck here.
That was the point I attempted to convey with my last paragraph:
this isn't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that replaced quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have more than one criterion to optimise for. Multi-objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal.
Hopefully we can agree that a conference which had interesting technical content and was welcoming to a broad range of people would be better than a conference that had only one or the other.
I think we mostly agree. The difference is I believe what makes people comfortable at a technology conference isnt superficial hangups about race and gender, it's the ability to talk shop about that technology and have meaningful discussions surrounding that topic.
The jist of my opinion is this: The subject technology should always be the highest priority at a technology conference.
> The difference is I believe what makes people comfortable at a technology conference isnt superficial hangups about race and gender
If you consider the feeling of being, say, the only person of color at a conference to be a "superficial hangup", then perhaps your beliefs about what makes people comfortable have not been closely examined. It sounds like a statement about what makes you comfortable.
Because you're the one saying race and demographics don't matter, yet you're likely a member of the race and demographic who hasn't had negative experiences because of their race/demographic. You don't think it's important because you've never really had to think about it.
>yet you're likely a member of the race and demographic who hasn't had negative experiences because of their race/demographic.
It's funny that you can say that right after someone implied I was a member of an over-represented group and then used that assumption as leverage against me in an argument. So that statement is demonstrably false.
Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers. If someone doesn't want to go to a conference on concurrency and distributed algorithms because a demographic de-jour isn't speaking then that person isn't passionate about the subject of the conference and the conference is better off without them there.
That may seem harsh but I'm just throwing my opinion out there for the sake of diversity of ideas ;)