Why Aren't People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

Steve Jones recently posted an update about SQL Saturday’s status, and it includes some news we need to talk about: However, this year the number may stagnate or even decline slightly. Running events has become challenging for many communities. Organizers are busy, space is hard to find, and costs are rising…. The biggest challenge in running events is finding space at a reasonable cost. Many Microsoft offices are closing, which were strong supporters of events in the past. Steve gives a couple of possible reasons for the decline, and I’d like to throw out a few more. I don’t know which ones are larger or smaller than the others, but they’re just all reasons I’ve heard from folks over the last few years. Obviously, COVID was a factor. We spent a couple of years not getting together with others in person. A lot of people switched to working remotely, and we told employers that we could do just as good of a job (or better) remotely than in-person. Well, that backfired on training budgets: companies responded by saying, “Okay, then you can attend training events remotely instead, too.” I’ve heard from many clients that their travel budgets turned off during COVID, and never turned back on because of this. COVID made it harder to get in-person speakers. In-person events tried using remote speakers, but the experience was simply awful. As a speaker, I’ll never again present remotely for an in-person group, and I’m just not traveling as much as I used to. I used to hit as many SQL Saturdays as my schedule could allow, but now because almost all of my client work is remote, I can’t justify the expense and time of traveling to an in-person local/regional event. I don’t think the problem is that people switched to organized live online events with the same enthusiasm and frequency that they used to attend in-person events. People learned to get by with online sessions instead, but then Zoom fatigue burned us out on voluntary online get-togethers. We’re forced to attend so many virtual meetings at work – that the last thing we wanna do is sign up for yet more. Some online events have popped up, and they’re good – but it’s nowhere near the diversity and frequency that we used to get local & regional events. So this might be part of it – but it’s not the whole story. But some people switched how they’re learning. Some folks switched to recorded videos, individual live streamers, written blogs, or self-guided on-demand learning through AI tools like ChatGPT. (Yes, I’m being generous and assuming people are using it for learning here, not just saying “do my work for me,” but that does relate to the next point.) Some people stopped learning and/or networking. Some people got off that hamster wheel during COVID and chose not to get back on, instead deciding to coast based on what they know, or just coast until retirement. I’ve actually talked to folks who decided, “I’ve only got a few years left – I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, the same way, at the same company, until they let me go or until I decide to quit.” LLMs like ChatGPT made it easier to get by without actually knowing what you’re doing – at least in the short term – and that’s all these kinds of people care about. (I don’t say that with any negative feelings – I want you to work as little as possible, and retire as early as you practically can.) Some technologies slowed down. We used to attend user groups and regional events because there was a frantic pace of change in SQL Server: 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019 – that was a rocket ship of versions, four versions in five years! But after the pandemic, the release schedules slowed dramatically to once every 3 years, and the new features weren’t really groundbreaking, not requiring deep education to keep up. The cloud evolution slowed as well – I keep looking at my Running SQL Server in AWS & Azure class, recorded in 2022, and I just don’t see anything in there that merits an update in 2025. Some new tech (outside of relational databases) sped up. Microsoft’s analytics folks continue to throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks, and Fabric is evolving like crazy. However, because Fabric is new, there are few active local or regional events dedicated to it – just online and national ones. (Before you leave comments yelling about how many Fabric user groups you see, drill a little deeper to check whether they actually have meetings upcoming & past, and whether the topics are actually Fabric, and whether they’re online or in-person. Global politics have made travel harder and more expensive. Wars, economics, and immigration policies are all putting a dent in voluntary travel. As a Las Vegas resident, I can tell you firsthand that tourism numbers are way down, and my friends in hospitality & retail report some pretty horrific numbers. A friend of mine who works in a high-end Vegas retail store reports that their foot traffic is down 25% from last year, revenue is down 40%, and their Asian and Central American repeat customers are holding off on any US visits for now. I think that impacts national/international conferences more than it does local/regional ones, though, but I feel like I just gotta mention it here because someone’s going to bring it up. We had a new generation of people enter the workforce. Some people got hired into the data industry during COVID, and they simply never saw the benefit of attending in-person or regional events. The veterans might tell them, “You need to network in-person to get ahead,” but this new generation doesn’t see it that way as they were able to get their existing jobs online, and network online as well. Do I think they would be well-served by attending in-person local and/or regional events? Well, maybe – but now we’re faced with a chicken-and-egg problem. I can’t tell someone to attend events that don’t exist. We’ve never done a great job marketing the hallway track. I think the biggest value, and the reason I personally get really excited to attend local and regional events, is the ability to have casual, non-rushed discussions outside of the session rooms. Former coworkers, other speakers, people who know something about a topic I’m curious about – those are the lucky chance interactions that I don’t get as easily online. It’s hard to explain the value of that to someone who hasn’t experienced it, and because people don’t know the value, they’re not tempted to go to an event to experience it for the first time. Jeez, when I look at the entire list above, it’s like a perfect storm! What other reasons can you think of for the decline of local & regional in-person database events – or if you’re not attending ’em anymore, why not? Update: there are also comments on HackerNews.