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DevTernity, fake speaker recruitment scandal exposed

Haebom
There is a country called the Republic of Latvia on the Baltic Sea coast. It’s certainly a country that’s fairly unfamiliar to Koreans. In fact, it only established diplomatic ties after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and for most people, the only recent news about Latvia is that it’s where the film director Kim Ki-duk passed away.
Whatever the case, since 2015, Latvia has been hosting a developer event called DevTernity. It was the largest of its kind in Latvia, and even among the Nordic countries, it was considered a top-tier developer conference. Even though the tickets were paid, the event would sell out every year—it was a major event for developers in the Nordic and Baltic regions.
The conference was scheduled to be held from December 7 to 9, 2023, and it looked like it would quickly sell out and wrap up on a high note.
At least, that’s how it seemed—until one conference attendee sensed something odd. Gergely Orosz, who had been attending DevTernity for several years, started to notice something was off.

"Why are the speakers listed on the program missing from the actual conference?"

So he began tracking down the missing speakers. As it turned out, all of the vanished speakers happened to be women, so Gergely Orosz started looking them up on LinkedIn, GitHub, and other sites, matching them to their supposed companies or work shown on the DevTernity website. To his surprise, he discovered that these women simply didn’t exist—they were never real in the first place.
Anna와 Alina 둘 다 존재하지 않는 사람, 커리어 입니다.
Orosz realized that this had been going on for years, ever since DevTernity announced they would balance the gender ratio of their speakers for diversity. He brought it to light by posting about it on social media and his blog. Now, those speaker profiles are being deleted or replaced, and the fake accounts are gradually disappearing one by one. There’s an active debate happening on Wikipedia about the matter, too.
I found this such a strange and bizarre incident, and it didn’t seem to be known in Korea, so I wanted to share it. If you’re going to promote diversity, shouldn’t you do it sincerely? Why go so far as to create fake profiles just to look politically correct...? I can’t help but wonder. If a speaker of a particular gender was needed, there would have been plenty of ways to actually invite one, whether through direct outreach or even by paying a speaker’s fee.
Gergely Orosz criticized DevTernity as a paid conference with organizers who were lazy and only pretending to be politically correct.
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