The value of technical conferences can vary widely based on their intent and how you attend

I was recently whining to the "home budget office" about being unable to justify personally paying the entry fee for this year's re:invent. AWS evolves so quickly that I feel obsolete after being heads down for a year not running my technical radar against their continual announcements. I wanted to use the conference as an info dump to stay relevant to keep future options open.

Would the information boost and brain stretching be worth the cost? The main question when thinking about attending a conference is the "information density"/"cost" ratio. Are there enough immediate takeaways to make it more than a technical vacation?

The default large vendor conference attendance pattern is easy but has low information density. This attendance pattern isn't justified if it is all I do. Attending the Keynote and the large talks can all be done at home. Thousands of re:invent sized event attendees watch the Keynote remotely anyway because there isn't a room for 40,000 attendees. The primary advantage of in-person session attendance might be the side effect that you won't be doing other work, a form of forced isolation from the daily tasks. This is not exactly a measurable high-order variable.

IMO, the most valuable general conference attendance pattern involves the most work. The Q&A sessions, the discussions after small talks, and the labs and trainings where you get the advantage of in-person help. (I'm looking at you AWS who sometimes just runs the already available online training with no in-person expertise or assistance) Sometimes you get the right person in a booth or the right questions answered in a Q&A. Those conversations answer questions or give you a whole new path of exploration. 80% of any conference value for me has been from those moments.

Large companies and strategic partners have their additional value track. They can have meetings or briefings with live product owners and engineering leads. I've attended a couple of those and they were crazy valuable for us in understanding partner/vendor direction and being able to impact future direction. Few get these sessions due to people's bandwidth. Conferences provide an opportunity because everyone happens to be in the same place.

Conferences aren't all the same. DEFCON is all about hands-on activities and living in the villages or attending talks that will never go online. BSides is about training and action recaps. Microsoft Build years ago was the "futures" conference with Microsoft throwing out a bunch of interesting ideas and tools that may or may not happen. It was always super interesting if not immediately relevant. Amazon re:invent is about their product 1/2 current and 1/2 coming in the next year. NFJS is about training and skills improvement. yada yada