Data Symposium

Some final thoughts on my trip to the Bay Area.  Although it wasn't as bad as I feared it might be, I still consider the trip a total waste of time and money.  Ostensibly, the purpose was to attend a data symposium.  The only problem with that was that almost all the talks and presentations were totally irrelevant to my job.  Things like AI and machine-learning and other computer science topics that don't mean anything to me.  And the talks that I did attend just went way over my head.  And I definitely wasn't the only one that felt that way.  Although I didn't understand the topics, more than that is that I simply wasn't interested in trying to understand them.  I actually think the target audience for the symposium is really small, so it's absolutely ridiculous when there were over 1000 people attending - many of whom came here from all over the world, with the accompanying expense of travel, accommodation and feeding these people.  And it's made worse by the fact that there are so limited spots available to attend actual conferences that might be useful to my job.  But instead they spend an inordinate amount of money to host this event.  And they did so last year and are going to do so again next year (I've already decided I'm not going to go).  It doesn't seem right.  I guess the other purpose of this kind of event is for networking and team-building.  And it was certainly good to put some faces to some names that I work with but have never met in-person before, even if I don't particularly care for everyone.  But networking doesn't come easy for me - I'm not very good at making small talk.  I got introduced to a lot of new people, but most of them are Chinese with Chinese names that I quickly forget - and then they start speaking Chinese to each other and so I'm left out of the conversations and nobody really gets to know me.  It confirmed my belief that my inability to understand or speak Chinese has held me back, and will continue to hold me back, in my job.  It was particularly disappointing that our team seemed to be the only one that didn't have an organized team-building event - which perhaps says something about how important they consider us to be.  And that during my trip, it would have been nice to have seen or met my manager's manager and my manager's manager's manager (who I've never met)- both of whom are based in California and don't come up to Seattle nearly enough as they should do (if at all).  But nope, no sightings of either them during my time there.  Again, if they can't even attend a team meal then to me it just emphasizes that they don't care as much about our team as they should do.  I hope we get the opportunity to provide some anonymous feedback on the symposium.  I suspect the organizers and leaders of the event consider it a roaring success, and I think perhaps it would be useful for them to get a reality check.