Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
Listen, if you’re a conference organizer and you’re having trouble finding speakers that aren’t white, male, idiots like me; the solution is probably not to invent speakers out of whole cloth. And yet, that appears to be the solution Eduards Sizovs found to his conundrum with the DevTernity and JDKon conferences.
First flagged up by Geregely Orosz, the DevTernity conference sported speaker profiles from two women who didn’t seem to have any online presence next to several very famous male speakers like Kelsey Hightower and DHH.
One speaker, Anna Boyko, was listed as a Staff Engineer at Coinbase, except Coinbase has never heard of her. And the other, Alina Prokhoda, is purported to be a Microsoft MVP and Senior Engineer at WhatsApp, a fact that Microsoft and Meta refuted. This appears to be a pattern going back several years.
After Gergely’s initial Twitter post gained traction, several of the speakers and sponsors started pulling support for the “sold out” DevTernity conference, which has now been officially cancelled. Eduards Sizovs claims that some of the profiles where “testing profiles” that accidentally slipped into production, which even if true, means he was unable to secure more than one woman speaker for his conference.
He went on to say that finding women speakers was, like, really hard, to which Scott Hanselman over at Microsoft replied with his 920 podcast episodes featuring a range of guests from all backgrounds and genders. Sadly, because of AI generated content, it will be even easier to fake speakers in the future, and perhaps even have them speak at some point. Though if Anna Indiana is any indication, we’re safe for a while.