The Sad Reality of the PASS Summit

Last night I was at the local bi-monthly SQL Server/BI User Group and witnessed a sad exchange:

Group Leader:  “Who’s going to the Summit next month?”

[Silence; no raised hands]

Group Leader:  “Does everybody know about PASS?” (Side note: we are an official PASS chapter.)

[A majority of hands go up]

Quiet Voice Off to the Side:  “I may go.”

…at which point the Group Leader explained how registrants should register as members of our local User Group because the User Group gets a small reimbursement.

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What didn’t happen was I didn’t ask the question that wanted to leap out of my mouth; I stifled it (The primary speaker who hadn’t even been introduced yet and I didn’t want to completely trash the room for him).

The question was:

“How many of you deeply desire to attend the Summit but can’t afford to pay your own way to Seattle after 3-5 years of being unemployed/underemployed/undercompensated at employers who have decided that training doesn’t fit into their business priorities even though they want you to keep bringing in new technologies?”

Every now and then I can exhibit a little self-control – it’s still a sad statement on the IT horizon in the Omaha area (and possibly even broader than that).

…and that’s the way it is, Wednesday October 6^th, 2010.

Sigh.