Receiving feedback on your talk

Rabea Gransberger: Did I ever have somebody attending one of my talks who made me feel uncomfortable? I don't think so, but I like to hear some criticism about my talks as well, so that would be fine for me.

What I think is sad is that you usually only get the good feedback about your talks and you rarely hear why people didn't like your talks.

For me, it was very nice when Heinz was sitting in one of my "Effective IDE Usage" talks because I learned many of the things that I was showing from him.

With the "Java 9 Modules" talks that I was doing, I don't think anybody was there from Oracle, but I did talk to one of the guys from Oracle at Devoxx in Antwerp, and he said that he liked my talk from a recording he had seen.

I had this one moment when a talk was rejected and I actually got feedback about why. It wasn't useful because the feedback was just questions. The organizers had questions but because they couldn't contact me and ask those questions, they rejected the talk. I would have felt better had I just had a simple rejection, without any explanation, in that case. That's something that I have to work on myself. I always like it when I get some critical feedback, but it's also hard to actually read it.

Geertjan Wielenga: If you're at a conference and you're doing a talk, and someone asks a question that you don't know the answer to, how do you deal with that?

Rabea Gransberger: I'll say that I don't know the answer, or I'll ask the audience if they know the answer. This has worked out well, even in a big room.

I was giving a talk in Stuttgart and I had a very big room with 500 people attending. I offered back the question, which was related to code reviews, to the audience. At that conference, they had people walking around with a microphone, so it was possible for somebody else to answer the question.

For me, it's completely fine if speakers say, "Come to me afterward and we'll talk about it," in cases when the answer is longer or the question is too specific for the whole audience.

There was a very funny aspect about my code reviews talk because most of the questions that I got after giving the talk were about teams that didn't talk to each other. They did code reviews, but they only talked through the comments of the code reviews and they didn't talk to each other. The team would try to solve social problems during the code reviews, which wouldn't work. So, the main answer was to just talk to each other in person.

Geertjan Wielenga: Let's discuss technical glitches: when you're at a conference, it often happens, right?