Asking Good Questions at Conferences

Joe's Nerdy Rants #54 - My thoughts on asking questions at conferences, plus weekend reads and other stuff

Nov 02, 2024

Jepson Taylor, asking good questions at Gitex 2023.

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Somehow, this has informally become Part 2 of my posts about public speaking and conferences. In the last newsletter, I talked about becoming a public speaker. This time, I flip it around and give advice on asking good questions from the speaker.

It’s conference season, so I’m writing about what’s on my mind right now. That either means conferences, giving talks, or my book. I’m working on the latter daily, so I treat my personal newsletter as a well-deserved break (or procrastination?) from the book.

I’ve been speaking nearly nonstop for the last few years, only taking short breaks during Winter holidays and in the Summer. As I write this, my Fall tour takes me somewhere in the world giving a talk, usually as a keynote speaker and other times as a panelist. In either format, there’s usually time for audience questions. There might be a short Q&A after a presentation or audience questions addressed to a panel. In either case, I prefer not to know the questions from a panel moderator or the audience ahead of time. Perhaps it’s because I’m incredibly comfortable with free-flowing conversations from podcasting or being hit with curveball questions. But in either case, I don’t like things to be scripted. Spontaneity is something I embrace.

That said…

Speaking is hard work. Answering questions on the fly is also hard work. Would you imagine that ASKING good questions also requires work?

As much as I like spontaneity and answering interesting questions, I also have a very short patience for poor questions. If you’re going to ask questions, please display some self-awareness and ask a good question.

In a public setting, asking a good question isn’t just to get someone to think. It also serves the purpose of efficiently moving the dialogue of the Q&A forward. Bad questions irritate not just the speaker or panel but the audience. Bad questions are often self-serving and selfish, and they take away from purpose of the discussion. And the person asking bad questions becomes “that person,” who the audience remembers not just at the event but for many events after. A reputation for asking bad questions is a public stain. Avoid it at all costs. And you’ll probably not get asked to ask a question again, depending on where you are. So, don’t be the person who asks bad questions that get on everyone’s nerves. Instead, here are some tips on asking good questions.

Keep your question brief, preferably to a sentence or two. Choose your words efficiently.
Ask an open-ended question. What, when, why, or how are good openers for your question. This keeps the dialogue flowing. Avoid questions that can be answered with a quick yes or no.
At least pretend you’ve listened to the discussion or talk and ask a relevant question. Stay on topic.
Keep the flow going. Build on other questions, or ask your own that will ideally tee up someone else’s question.
Be positive in your phrasing. This will get a better response from the speaker.
Please listen to the answer. Don’t scroll on your phone while the speaker answers your question.

Don’t

Try to show off by “schooling” the speaker or panel. Don’t be contrarian just to look cool in front of your peers. This is a no-win situation for you. The speaker has the stage. You don’t.
Go off on a rant. Ask your question and keep the voices in your head private.
Promote your company, product, or service. Nobody - I repeat, nobody - cares.
Be tangential and meandering.
Ask overly complicated, multi-part questions.
After you ask your question, please don’t immediately ask another one. Let others ask their questions.
Don’t repeat questions others have asked.
Interrupt speakers during their talk. I can’t believe I have to write this, but it happens. If you do this to me, I will mercilessly mock you until you cry or leave.

Some questions are better than others. Ask the better ones.

Thanks to Antti Rask, Russell Willis, and Eevamaija Virtanen for the input on this post.

If you haven’t checked it out, the Data Engineering Professional Certificate is available on Coursera! Learn practical data engineering with lots of challenging hands-on examples. Shoutout to the fantastic people at Deeplearning.ai and AWS, who helped make this a reality over the last year. Enroll here.

On another note, the popular Data Therapy Session calendar is posted here. It’s an incredible group where you can share your experiences with data - good and bad - in a judgment-free place with other data professionals. If you’re interested in regularly attending, add it to your calendar.

Finally, I’m traveling and speaking a lot. My schedule is at the end of this newsletter. I hope to see you somewhere in the world!

Hope you have a fun weekend!

Thanks,

Joe

P.S. If you haven’t done so, please sign up for Practical Data Modeling. There are lots of great discussions on data modeling, and I’ll also be releasing early drafts of chapters for my new data modeling book here. Thanks!

Cool Weekend Reads

What happens inside LLMs when they hallucinate? (Tech Talks)

Snowflake’s Fall to Earth 📉 (OnlyCFO's Newsletter)

Moving to a World Beyond “p < 0.05” (Taylor & Francis)

Vector Databases Are the Wrong Abstraction (Timescale)

A return to hand-written notes by learning to read & write (Google Research)

Review of the DataEngBytes conference and how it relates to the Occam Data Framework (Occam)

Microsoft’s GitHub Unit Cuts AI Deals With Google, Anthropic (Bloomberg)

LinkedIn launches its first AI agent to take on the role of job recruiters (TechCrunch)

New Show & Upcoming Events

The Joe Reis Show

5 Minute Friday - Asking Good Questions at Conferences (Spotify)

Wes McKinney (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - Is AI a Hail Mary for Tech Debt? (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - Speaking at Conferences (Spotify)

Vijay Yadav - GenAI-Ready Data (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - Playing Not to Lose (Spotify)

Navnit Shukla - Data Wrangling and Architecting Solutions on AWS, Writing Books, and More (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - Notes from the Field, Early Fall 2024 Edition (Spotify)

Ilya Reznik - How to Lead New and Existing ML Teams and More (Spotify)

Jordan Morrow - How to Write Amazing Books (Spotify)

Venkat Subramaniam - Moving Beyond Agile as a Buzzword, Learning to do Less, and more (Spotify)

Paco Nathan - Hacker Culture, Cyberpunk, AI, and More (Spotify)

Bill Inmon - History Lessons of the Data Industry. This is a real treat and a very rare conversation with the godfather himself (Spotify) - PINNED HERE.

Monday Morning Data Chat

Note - The Monday Morning Data Chat’s last show is Monday, November 4th. It’s been a great run, and we wanted to end it on a high note. Stay tuned for what’s next!

Paco Nathan - (Spotify, YouTube)

Weimo Liu - (Spotify, YouTube)

Matthew Mullins - (Spotify, YouTube)

Ricky Thomas and Paul Dudley - (Spotify, YouTube)

Andrew Ng - Why Data Engineering is Critical to Data-Centric AI (Spotify, YouTube)

Tevje Olin - What Should Data Engineers Focus On? (Spotify, YouTube)

Rob Harmon - Small Data, Efficiency, and Data Modeling (Spotify, YouTube)

Joe Reis & Matt Housley - The Return of the Show! (Spotify, YouTube)

Nick Schrock & Wes McKinney - Composable Data Stacks and more (Spotify, YouTube)

Zhamak Dehghani + Summer Break Special (Spotify, YouTube)

Chris Tabb - Platform Gravity (YouTube)

Ghalib Suleiman - The Zero-Interest Hangover in Data and AI (Spotify, YouTube)

Events I’m At

Austin - MLOps World Conference. November 7-8. Register here

NYC - Data Galaxy Event. November 13. Register here

Forward Data Conference - Paris, France. November 25. Register here

AWS ReInvent - Las Vegas. Early December. Doing the after-conference scene. Let’s meet up.

Seoul, Korea - TBA. Mid-December.

CES - Las Vegas. Early January 2025.

Data Day Texas - Austin, TX. January 25, 2025. Register here

Data Modeling Zone - Arizona. March 4, 2025. Register here

Winter Data Conference - Austria. March 7, 2025. Register here

Netherlands - TBA. April 2025

Much more to be announced soon…

Thanks! If you want to help out…

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Would you like me to speak at your event? Submit a speaking request here.

You can also find me here:

Monday Morning Data Chat (YouTube / Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). Matt Housely and I interview the top people in the field. Live and unscripted.
My other show is The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). I interview guests on it, and it’s unscripted and free of shilling.
Practical Data Modeling. Great discussions about data modeling with data practitioners. This is also where early drafts of my new data modeling book will be published.
Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Matt Housley and I, available at Amazon, O’Reilly, and wherever you get your books.