How Do You Afford Conferences?

There are a number of conferences that I consider essential for developers: PDC, TechEd and VSLive. I love what comes out of PDC the most even though I never had a chance to attend one. Which brings me to my point...

The mentioned conferences each cost between $2,500-3,500 including a hotel package. Now, I assume those are "special hotel rates" for attendees. SVLive! in Orlando would cost you $3,595 for a "Gold Passport with hotel package."

If you want to attend two of these conferences a year, get "edified" by the evangelical machine and meet lots of interesting people, you're looking at, what?, $7000/year. Per person. What I'm trying to understand is how companies afford this expense and how they justify it. If you are in the senior management of a large company that's probably not even a question. I think smaller companies that need or want to send a couple of developers to these gatherings simply can't pull this off. The last two companies I worked for were relatively small, yet profitable, but still—this was out of question.

I realize you can pick a "package" without workshops and stuff like that, but you probably don't attend a conference to pussy around vendor booths, talk to their clueless marketing reps and stack up on product slicks. So we're back to the full package. The company I'm with right now is a small, dynamic, heads-down, no-bureaucracy-bull software shop with very skilled staff. Still, with the cost of conferences so high attending them is nowhere in sight.

Can someone share his/her experience of coaxing a budget for conferences? How do you justify the cost to your superiors? Do they dole out cash willingly to have you educated on products that are still in raw betas or due in a year or two?

I've only been to one TechEd. The year I went, I had just started with a new company. It was part of the compensation deal we agreed on. They would send me to any conference I wanted to every other year, all expenses paid. Unfortunately, I ended up leaving after the second year and moved to California to work for a dot-com.

I went to a Java Conference in Santa Clara, but since that was only 30 miles away, the company didn't have to pay for a hotel. It wasn't as fun as TechEd though.

After the dot-com bust, you were lucky to find a job that paid, let alone send you to a $3K+ conference.

I would have liked to have gone to the PDC/TechEd this year but my current employer is keeping tight control of their budget. Luckily our end of year bonuses are still pretty good.

Kiliman

I hear you. I co-own the company I'm with right now, and we all are holding on tight to our budget.

I am going to VSLive 2004 in NY. I work in NY, so even with the Gold Passport, I'm only paying $1395. What a bargain, right?
Well, like you, I work for a small company and these trainings(or conferences) don't come easy. My company has any employee partaking in external training(read: cost money) sign a contract that says I will pay back the amount if I leave within a year of taking the training course. That's alright for me.

Also, I know $7000 is a lot of money to fork over, if your company can't do it, you can pay for the thing yourself and it's tax deductible. So the company only needs to cover for your time away.

Well, I'm just happy VSLive is in NY! I wish PDC was in NY too!