Imagine a tech conference having no CFP, as they reach out to speakers directly. They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech, and 3 women speakers.
Now imagine my surprise that 2 of those women are FAKE profiles.
They do not exist.
Nada.
I contacted speakers I know about this.
They had no idea.
One of the fake women profiles is supposedly a core Ethereum contributor, and a staff engineer at Coinbase.
No such contributor, no one heard of her at Coinbase now or before.
Why do this?
Sad to say but going forward if you are invited to speak at a lesser-know conference: do your diligence… if other listed speakers actually exist?!
This is a paid online conference, large number of (paid) attendees, workshops sold out.
What a mess.
Just to be very clear this is about the organisers creating fake profiles.
To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers. Because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns.
Well, where Anna Boyko, Staff engineer at Coinbase and Ethereum core contributor is a speaker.
Her. She doesn’t exist. Except as a listed speaker at a prominent online conference!
Or another Java conference by the exact same organizer where Microsoft MVP and WhatsApp senior engineer Alina Prokhoda is a featured speaker.
Would you know there is no such Microsoft MVP and Meta employee.
Speakers listed on these conference had no idea I talked with…
This conference doesn’t have a call for papers because they follow the “Hollywood principle” (that sounds made up btw)
But then do AI generated images, fake names and titles for some fake women speakers profiles… and I cannot fathom WHY.
Absolute laziness and dubious ethics.
If you bought tickets to DevTernity (“DevTernity”) on 7-8 Dec you’ve been duped with fake speaker Anna Boyle who is still on the website. A made up profile, AI image, no such staff eng at Coinbase.
And some other listed women speakers don’t actually talk
And if you are planning to buy tickets to JDKon 2024 (#1 international conference designed specifically for professional Java developers.) on 22-24 May 2024: save your money because Alina Prokhoda doesn’t exist either.
Anything organized by “Dev events” is by the same organizer who creates these fake women speakers (and has some in the past as well) for some mysterious reason.
All their conferences:
I would avoid like the plague with such dubious ethics.
What do you know - after being called out, the organizer is removing some fake women profiles.
Here’s the archived website. Fake Anna Boyle (staff eng at a Coinbase, core Ethereum contributor) was there for only 10 months, while most tickets were sold.
The website had a public GitHub repo where you could see the full edit history that someone found and pointed to me.
You could see eg how fake Anna was added 10 months ago. Or how after being called out for what it is, the organizer removed fake women speaker profiles.
The organizer responded, claiming he tried so hard to get women speakers but it’s… too hard. For a paid (!) conference w a price of €789 / $870 per person.
Meanwhile others just… invite a variety of people, including so many women. They exist. If you actually care that is.
The conference website is up and fake Anna removed.
But fake Julia is still there. Listed every year as a speaker, never delivered a talk any year (and “dropped out” this year as well) @lizthegrey did some digging.
@lizthegrey The organizer claims they 1x accidentally added a fake speaker to their conferences. But actually:
2021 & 2022: fake Natalie & Julia
2023: fake Anna, Alina & Julia
All listed as speakers. Never delivered a talk. Not removed from the site till this thread.
Once a mistake, sure.
@lizthegrey Several speakers cancelled, already let the organizer know they won’t present.
I don’t blame them for not wanting to endorse a conference with a history of catfishing with fake women speakers for years.
As fast as the organizer was to remove fake Anna, they are still listed.
@lizthegrey Conference page lists speakers who have cancelled. Several others have asked to be removed.
No one with a sense of integrity will want to be associated with such a conference. One where organisers created fake speakers for 3 years in a row and still deny there was a problem.
@lizthegrey Speakers have been cancelling en masse and asking the organizer to disassociate them from DevTernity and JDKon. They are still on the site so are making it clear in public they have no further association.
Imagine duping such high profile folks. What was this organizer thinking.
@lizthegrey For years, this conference series (DevTernity, JDKon) has been duping speakers who care about diversity and nominate underrepresented speakers for non-diverse lineups.
Obviously on top of duping customers paying ~$800 per ticket for speakers who do not exist.
This thread started as fake speaker accounts at DevTernity and JDKon.
It ends with what is very likely a catfishing Instagram account operated for 5 years: Coding Unicorn. Growing it to 115K Insta followers to promote the conference.
I am hearing SO many stories about people realizing coding with AI tools (aka “vibe coding”) is a game changer after “reviving” an old side project or idea on the side and making so much progress
But… while I often hear the excitement on starting: not hearing “finished” often!
Almost like these tools were amazing at making rapid progress at first… but it still takes a ton of effort to finish things and feels like most people go back to leaving side projects unfinished (even if in a more advanced state?)
FWIW guilty as charged
I got a bunch of side projects “revived” and was amazed at how fast it was
Then I just… kind of let them on the side? Turns out the reason I don’t touch them is because… they are just not a focus. Even tho it’s less effort now: still effort!!
In case you missed it: it was Microsoft who voluntarily cannibalized their very very profitable Visual Studio business and released VS Code for free. And made it trivial to fork. VS Code + forks probably account for 80%+ of the global dev market in usage
Why did they do it?
This was clearly on purpose from Microsoft - give up one revenue generating area to keep winning in a much bigger one
Not squeezing all lemons is an underrated and very smart strategy, as @jakozaur puts it
Also why NVIDIA is “losing” in AI models to eg OpenAI, Anthropic etc
And before you show me the tech jobs going down graph that goes viral every week: know that most sectors see the “decline in jobs” from the pandemic peak: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engin…
And this is not about denying the impact of GenAI for tech jobs. We will see smaller teams do more (already are). More demand for “top” software engineers, and most likely less for entry-level and “average” talent.
We don’t know (yet) if we will see an explosion of smaller teams/companies and if we’ll see a demand surge to take over/maintain “vibe coded” businesses as they start to scale