The Value of Google I/O, for You and Your Company
I went to Google I/O for the first time this year, and it was amazing. They gave us a free Google Home, and there were all these insane fun tech demos and games and toys, all showing off cool stuff like machine learning and the Google Assistant, and there was a party and free beer, and they got LCD Soundsystem to play a concert for us, and and and and and…
All of that stuff was great. And when someone asks you what Google I/O was like, you start showing them photos of the cool stuff you saw, or you talk about the announcements in the keynote, or the talks you attended. But none of that is the real reason to go to I/O.
A friend told me a story recently. The Android developers of his company, when they returned from I/O, gave a presentation about their experience there for the rest of the company. At the end, somebody asked a question, “Sure, it looks like you had a lot of fun, but what did we gain from this?”
And no one had a good answer.
Why should we pay for you to go to Google I/O?
Google I/O tickets are hard to get, and they’re expensive. For those attendees who don’t live in the area, it’s even more expensive, because you need to pay for accommodation. And for those attendees who are flying from Ireland (like me!), or Asia, or wherever, there’s the cost of that too. Even if you get a free ticket through one of the GDE, GDG Organiser, or partner organisation routes, the other costs are still there. But it’s OK, because our employers pay for it, right? Through expenses, or conference budgets, or calling it training or professional development, or whatever other gymnastics of accounting they contort it into, they pay for you to go. It seems reasonable to assume that most software developers can’t afford to spend a few thousand dollars on a three day conference, so we rely on our employers to get us there.
Businesses care about money. To greater and lesser degrees, they care about what’s costing them money. To greater and lesser degrees, they care about investing in their employees. Invariably, some employers will question the value of sending you to a conference like Google I/O, when it costs several thousand dollars to do. This question might not be intended harshly. It might be genuine curiosity from someone who is excited by your excitement, and wants to know how it will affect your work and their company going forward. But if you can’t answer that question, and communicate real value gained from your attendance, your employer may reconsider paying for it next year.
“You can watch it all on Youtube!”
Videos of talks from I/O have been going up on Youtube since the first I/O in 2008. (Side note: I know this because I just asked my Google Home when the first I/O was, and it told me. Then I asked if there were any videos on Youtube from I/O 2008. It apologised, and said it couldn’t help me with that yet. So I opened a new tab in Chrome and looked it up myself. Like some sort of cave-dwelling savage.)
The keynote is streamed live. Nowadays, many (all?) of the talks are streamed live. The videos are all up on Youtube afterwards. So, logically, you can get all of that learning without attending the event, right? I disagree. You can get most of that learning without attending. There are still things that happen that can’t be replicated after the fact. You lose the chance to ask questions, for one. You miss the opportunity to speak with the developers sitting next to you (more on that later).
That’s not a strong enough argument though. No profound experiences are guaranteed from attending a talk in person, and you can get most of the value of a talk by watching the video. But that’s not all there is to attending a conference.
The real value of attending Google I/O is not the talks
The real value is the free Google Home they gave us this year.
Just kidding. It’s not the Google Home. It’s not the mocktail a robot made for you because you asked nicely, or the slow-mo Matrix-style rotating video of you and your friends putting on sunglasses at night, or the LCD Soundsystem concert (though that was incredible), or the talks you went to (which you can watch at home).
The real value of going to I/O is all those moments that happen off-camera, between the pictures. I/O gives you direct access to Google engineers and experts in a way you can’t get anywhere else. What with the sandboxes, app review sessions and office hours, there is no better opportunity to talk about the problems you face in your development with someone who can help. In some cases, they’re the people that work directly on the tool/library/framework you’re struggling with. Wondering how you could architect your system on Firebase? There’s a Firebase sandbox, where you can work it out with the experts on a big whiteboard. Having a problem with something in Android Studio? Head to the Android sandbox, find the Android Studio desk, talk to Tor Norbye or one of his team about it. Still have questions about Room or LiveData after the Architecture Components talks? Go find Yigit and the guys at the Support Library stall. They’re waiting there to talk to people just like you, looking for feedback, ready to answer your questions. They even have this weird picture of Chris Banes in front of an explosion, for all your selfie needs.
Making it Real
Have you, or your company, ever partnered with another company in some way? Have you worked on a project where you dealt with people online, but had never spoken to them or met them face to face? It’s so easy to forget that the people on the other side of the screen are people (as seen on The Internet), but when you meet them in person, that changes completely. When you can put a face (not just an avatar image on Github or Slack) and a voice to a name, your working relationship with them undergoes a drastic improvement. Conferences are a great place for these meetings to happen, and I/O is a big conference. There’s a reasonable chance your partners are going to be there.
At Zendesk, my team works on our mobile SDKs. We recently partnered with Fabric to add the Zendesk Support SDK as a Fabric Kit. Naturally this work involved communication with people in Fabric, and naturally most of this communication was done online. We got to meet them at I/O, and finally feel like we really know who they are. I’m already looking forward to our next collaboration.
Developers
At I/O, you’re constantly surrounded by people whose brains are soaked in the same stuff as yours. Every one of the hundreds of people in every talk you go to most likely works in your field, and you never know who you’ll be sitting beside. The people in front of you in the queue, or sitting beside you when you’re eating lunch, or at the bar or absolutely anywhere — they’re always worth saying hi to. It might be an awkward ten-second exchange of pleasantries with a stranger, or you might realise you’ve read everything they ever wrote on their blog. You might overhear someone sharing thoughts and impressions about a talk, giving some insight you hadn’t picked up on, hearing what they do, what they struggle with, what they’re looking forward to. It’s ear to the ground, finger on the pulse. It’s that magic tree in Avatar. It’s the hum of the worker bees, except the hive is the global developer community of your field. It’s the developer zeitgeist. You simply can’t get that anywhere else.
Google Developer Experts get free tickets to I/O, so you see a lot of them there. One of the things that makes them GDEs is their contribution to the developer community. So think about all your favourite blogs and podcasts and libraries; their authors are probably at I/O. Some of them are probably even giving talks there. Others might be regular speakers in your local developer community. You have the chance to speak to them and ask them questions. They’re friendly people!
Community
I was lucky enough to attend the Global Developer Community Organiser Summit, the day before I/O started. While this isn’t relevant to everyone, as one of the organisers of an Android developer meet-up, it was an incredible experience to mingle and talk with organisers of Google Developer Groups and other communities all over the world. And just like the main I/O conference, the true benefit for me was not in the scheduled talks, but in these organic conversations that happened in the moments in between. The table full of strangers I joined for lunch was the best part. I spoke with people running events in Romania, Kuwait, New York, Malaysia, Poland, India… the list goes on. We talked about what kind of events they run, what format, how often, how many attendees they get, what problems they face, how our communities differ in form, size, or behaviour.
Getting Closer
The thing that surprised me the most about going to I/O was how much the distance between myself and Google seemed to disappear. Admittedly, I was suddenly 1km away from the Googleplex instead of the usual 8,000, so I was literally much closer, but I don’t think that’s it. It’s not just Google that felt closer, it’s also the big players of our wider developer community.
It’s easy to feel that we exist in some sort of feudal hierarchy where Google reigns on high from an ivory tower, with the writers of your favourite blogs and the podcast people below them, and some indeterminate number of other ranks between you and them. Maybe this is partly a symptom of living so far away from the epicentre that is California. Maybe it’s just imposter syndrome. Maybe the realities of the world promote or enforce aspects of it. I’m not sure, but regardless, the feeling is there.
At I/O, those barriers seem to fall away. I got to ask Chet Haase and Tor Norbye (two high-profile Android leads at Google and hosts of the Android Developers Backstage podcast), what they thought developer communities could be doing for them, what they saw as the goal or value of such communities, and their answer was basically: “give us feedback”. They want us to tell them what they’re doing right and wrong, and how they can help us. This was a repeated theme in my conversations with Googlers. When I talked to someone in the sandbox about a problem I have in Android Studio, he asked me to file a bug report for it. And not in a “go away” kind of way, but in a genuinely interested way. They can’t fix it if we don’t tell them about it.
I thought see if I could find someone to help me with some Google Play Services/GoogleApiClient stuff I’ve struggled with. This, I figured, was a long shot, since it was 3pm on the last day of the conference. Things were winding up, people were departing. I didn’t see any stalls in the Android sandbox that looked particularly likely to have answer for me, so I asked one of the Googlers if they could point me in the right direction. They tried, so I went and asked at the desk they’d directed me, who sent me on to someone else, and from there to another one. In the end, I never got my answer. But what I did get was four or five of the Android engineers in the sandbox — the people I’d been watching speak on stage all week — who dropped what they were doing to try to help me. They didn’t know the subject matter so they were trying to find someone who did. They were grabbing other Googlers to ask them if they knew, pinging Hangouts groups to check if anyone there could help… It was great. It didn’t feel like an ivory tower then. It just felt like developers trying to help other developers. That’s a huge sea change from the way it normally feels.
Developers, developers, developers, developers
I think developers have an almost instinctual need to help other developers. Individuals, in general, want to help other individuals. Just look at StackOverflow. Google I/O is full of developers like that — like you. All of them trying to become better and more effective at what they do. I’ve always liked the phrase, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” As our environment improves, so do we. I/O is a chance to be part of that tide, as well as being a boat.
Apart from all that, I/O offers a chance to make and strengthen industry connections. It gives you visibility on the most current industry trends. You get direct access to the authorities in your field and the producers of the technologies you use. It raises your company’s brand and brand-awareness. It is an opportunity to get and provide feedback, on your projects and on Google’s.
And yes, it is a hell of a lot of fun. So don’t let your employer think that’s all it is. The true value of I/O is intangible. It can’t be captured in pictures, and if it could, they’d be really boring pictures.
Signing Off
This all comes from my own personal experience of one year’s I/O conference, which isn’t a whole lot to go by, but I hope it is of value to somebody. I’d be very interested to hear what other people think, the parts they agree or disagree with, or anything I may have left out. Do let me know.
