Comment by Aurornis

> Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.

That GHC has had a lot of problems in the past several years. The ticket prices were getting excessive and the conference itself was wandering off course.

Even the current website looks like something that would be hard to justify under most conference travel budget requests: It’s hard to find the actually technical content among the speakers, even though they’re claiming 700+ speakers.

Some of the top selling points are finding employers who are hiring and growing your network. Most companies have tightened up their conference budgets to focus on educational material, not events focus on recruiting people to other companies. Everyone knows conferences will have companies recruiting, but when recruiting is one of the primary selling points it’s more job fair than conference.

The conference has also been problematic on many levels in the past few years. It made news headlines in 2023 for conflict about too many men showing up and arguments about whether or not they were really transgender. The police have been called. They’ve been flirting with political ideologies like Thiel-associated key speakers trying to make the theme of the event encouraging young women to drop out of college. The operations have been a mess from a lot of the reports.

Everyone in these comments is assuming anti-DEI, but everything I heard about the conference was a growing dumpster fire and cash grab for years. I think they finally collapsed when they tried to grow too big after years of bad experiences for their sponsors combined with companies facing increasing AI spend who weren’t interested in spending thousands of dollars to send employees to a conference where recruiting to other jobs was one of the main selling points.