I make basically the same salary as I did before inflation went into overdrive. We were doing fine before, but are really struggling now. So, yeah, the economy, man.
Why would you put on a conference right now? It seems like really poor timing.
Your reaction is reasonable based on the limited context that I provided.
The first conference we did was in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. One could argue that things were better by 2009, or worse. Macro analysis is highly subjective, even 15 years removed.
The counterpoint to your reaction is that a small, socially-focused (networking that feels like hanging out with friends) weekend is quite possibly the highest rate of return possible with regards to short-term career advancement.
In real terms, we had 150 attendees and 6 of those people quit their bad jobs on Monday. A relatively huge number of people ended up becoming early Shopify employees. One of the co-founders of GitHub was a speaker... in 2008. The outcomes were broadly discussed at the time, so my anecdote above was directly a response to my genuine confusion that if someone needed to make more money... surely the best place to make that happen was at our event, not by skipping it.
Not every event can anticipate that sort of outcome, but ours reasonably could. I'm proud of that. It was also 15 years ago, and things have changed.
Conferences aren't universally in the doldrums. I attended one a couple months ago that beat expectations/available capacity and pre-COVID numbers--but it's in a hot area.
Anecdotally, it's a mixed bag though. A couple others I know have either come in on the low side or ticket sales have been slow.
I make basically the same salary as I did before inflation went into overdrive. We were doing fine before, but are really struggling now. So, yeah, the economy, man.
Why would you put on a conference right now? It seems like really poor timing.