
Why Do We Have Dev Rels Now? - shahsyed
https://zwischenzugs.com/2020/07/13/why-do-we-have-dev-rels-now/
======
timelincoln
Devrel here, (by the way it’s typically called a Developer Advocate or a
Developer Evangelist, don’t get me started on how many questions I’ve gotten
about the relation to religion lol)

I think the article does a good job describing what devrel looks like at
companies that are smart about selling to the new “tech business world” which
is desperate for a way to measure the technical credibility of potential
vendors.

But what’s more interesting from someone who knows devrel because I’ve worked
in it for 7 years, is that at a more general level it’s just a communication
layer that a business can have with an audience or a persona(in this case
developers), that is growing ever more important. Whether you’re a platform
(google Apple) and need more devs making stuff within your ecosystem, or
you’re not selling to developers but you need technical integrations by third
parties to enhance The value prop of your product, or you’re ACTUALLY selling
directly to developers and trying to expand their mental model of what is
possible with the low code tooling available today and why they can and should
trust it.

It’s a wide and interesting world in which almost every company is becoming a
software company, and almost none of these companies have any idea how to
communicate with developers or what they care about.

You’re right that devrel is like a pre-sales role somewhat, but we all know
developers are the hardest group to sell to in history, who else could more
easily go find a free open source solution or just make it themselves?? You
have to be able to communicate about the pros and cons of technology in an
honest and coherent way, and that is what Devrel is all about to me.

~~~
geerlingguy
> it’s typically called a Developer Advocate or a Developer Evangelist

And a lot of the dev advocates I see on social media (most seem to have a
strong presence there) also have an image of an avocado, since apparently a
lot of people confuse "developer advocate" with "developer avocado". Just
noting that in case you notice a number of people with avocados in their about
text and wonder what that's about.

~~~
randyzwitch
I wouldn't say it's about confusion, it's just a very online joke.

~~~
viejoqueso
It's not a joke, it's based on this article by Mary Thengvall.
[[https://www.marythengvall.com/blog/2018/1/31/developer-
avoca...](https://www.marythengvall.com/blog/2018/1/31/developer-avocados-the-
good-kind-of-fat)]

It resonated with a lot of the people in that role, specifically with
Microsoft Developer Advocates who I've seen share that article quite a bit.

~~~
randyzwitch
A humorous analogy based on something funny that a co-worker did seems like a
joke to me. I'm not claiming I invented it, just saying that it doesn't stem
from confusion.

~~~
viejoqueso
Again this is not a joke. More information written by other Developer
Advocates.

[https://blog.usejournal.com/the-birth-of-developer-
avocados-...](https://blog.usejournal.com/the-birth-of-developer-
avocados-61e4ac235033)

~~~
randyzwitch
From that article, it shows an entire thread of people talking about how a
typo lead to a stupid joke

[https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW/status/1009862568129781760](https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW/status/1009862568129781760)

------
di
Developer Advocate here (who works in _Developer Relations_ ). I think
"DevRel" is a big bucket, but what the author is calling "Developer Relations"
is just the most visible subset of the bucket.

The impression is that a "DevRel" spends all their time writing talks,
traveling to conferences, pitching products and speaking. This makes sense,
because the "DevRels" you probably see the most are the ones that are doing
these things, and you don't see them doing anything else. A lot of people are
surprised to discover that traveling and speaking is actually a very small
part of my job, given the number of talks I give, and how often they see me at
events.

I think part of this perception comes from the conflation between an advocate
and an evangelist. There is endless debate about what these terms mean in the
context of developer relations, but for me, the difference is this:

* Evangelists want users to know that a product exists: They're speaking to developers, about the product. They probably report to & work with Sales/Marketing.

* Advocates want products to know that their users exist. They're speaking to product owners, about the developers. They probably report to & work with Engineering/Product.

Both roles are equally important (and sometimes done by the same person), and
the "publicly-validated credibility" the author talks about is just as
valuable to the product team as it is to the sales team.

~~~
ghaff
I'd add that there's often a community management aspect to the role as well
and sometimes that's the title. In general, I find a lot of different titles
used which may or may not reflect what the person does day to day.

I even know people who are also product managers who do a fair bit of outward-
facing DevRel/Evangelism type of work.

And skill sets vary quite a bit too. I know folks who do a ton of coding,
creating demos, etc. And I know others who, while typically at least somewhat
technical, are much more on the relationship and community-building side of
things.

------
neogodless
For those unfamiliar with the term, it's in the article about two-thirds of
the way down.

> Commonly it’s just known as a ‘developer relations’ role (so ‘DevRel’ for
> short)

No, it's not a typo for Dev Reels, which would be an interesting alternative
to open source repositories, but I guess you'd have to get good at video
editing first!

~~~
zwischenzug
Thanks, I put a link in to help people on the first mention.

In my bubble DevRels are more of a thing than most people's.

I have never heard of 'Dev Reels' either!

~~~
neogodless
Ah thank you! It's a made up term to play off Demo Reel which actors use to
condense their best work into a quick video full of highlights.

------
NathanKP
I have worked as a developer advocate at AWS for almost 4 years now. I think
this article gets one half of the equation, the public facing part, but what
they are missing is the second half, which is that developer advocates also
serve as a bridge back from the end customers to the engineers inside your
organization.

My job is to be a credible technical voice to customers, but it is also to be
an accurate representation of customer needs and wants to the engineers who
are building the products. I go out and do customer facing talks and live
streams on Twitch, and use social media to talk about my company's products,
but then I listen to these customers when they come up to talk to me after my
conference talks, or when they send me messages on social media.

I take those learnings and go into product management meetings and tell the
PM's about customer problems, and I write proposals for things to build to
solve customer problems. I influence the customers to use my company's
products and use them better, but then I also influence the product roadmap to
have the right things being built for the customers, based on what they want.

So dev rel / dev advocates work in both directions. At its best it is a
bidirectional channel that translates internal knowledge into external
awareness, and external complaints and issues into internal awareness and
solutions.

~~~
viejoqueso
This sounds like you sit closer to product. But what about those who sit in
Marketing or Engineering

Where do you think DevRel should sit ?

~~~
the_thagomizer
I think DevRel should sit in a separate org neither marketing or product but
be a peer to both.

When DevRel sits in product it is easy to get carried away with whatever
narrative the product managers are pushing. Part of being a good advocate for
developers is being able to step back and look at something in the existing
ecosystem. Does it actually solve problems that users have? Is it usable? Does
it integrate well with existing workflows and tools?

When DevRel sits in marketing or sales it often feels like you are a prize hog
being pulled into sales conversations to add credibility to something that
probably shouldn't have credibility to begin with.

In my opinion, the primary role of DevRel is story telling and narrative. I
use narratives to explain to product teams how users currently work and how
their product fits into a larger ecosystem. I use stories to help them
understand bugs and design issues in context. And I use story/narrative to
help external developers see how a given product can solve problems or pain
points they have.

Sometimes I tell that story with words but I'm just as likely to tell that
story with code. It is much harder to dismiss a bug when you can see the
horrible contortions it requires you to go through in the code.

------
randyzwitch
In the two DevReal roles I've had, there is some aspect of marketing and
customer support, but not really "sales". For me, it's been a hybrid
engineering and product role, where talking to the users helps surface bugs as
well as ideas for new features.

So much less "technical sales" than "developer whose role includes public
interaction"

------
rmanalan
I've been a dev advocate since 2008ish and before that worked in pre-sales
(mostly crafting custom demos and prototypes for prospects and existing
customers). In my early days as a dev advocate, I was hired into marketing and
most of the work was public facing (blogs and conference talks). But then that
role soon moved into an official Dev Rel org where we did mostly 5 things:

1\. Build and maintain a plugin SDK and integration framework

2\. Help write docs and guides (we had a dedicated tech writer in our dev rel
org)

3\. Do public facing stuff: blogs, conference talks, participate in
hackathons, etc.

4\. Plan and host events: company developer conference, hackathons, meetups,
etc.

5\. Write code... could be anything... sample code, tech blogs, integrations,
bug fixes to product, new features in product, etc.

It was a hard job in the early days -- lots of context switching. Those who
were well suited for it were devs who communicated well, knew how to tell a
story, and loved the hustle.

In the past several years, I've seen this role evolve a bit more to be what
the author of the article describes: basically dev advos with a social status
who speak at conferences a lot. While I think that's an important aspect of a
Dev Rel org, I think a Dev Rel org should have a healthy balance of people who
are good at the public facing stuff and those who are highly technical and can
get in the weeds with other developers. A Dev Rel org with that combo can
deliver high-level and visionary stories to the public and also dive deep into
the tech with any developer/architect in the industry.

With the pandemic, we're having to reinvent ourselves yet again and trying to
figure out how to get the best signal-to-noise ratio with our audience. A lot
of people are trying new things out. For us, we're diving into video a bit
more as a medium. I'm not entirely sure how good virtual confs are going to
fair in the next year, but from what I've seen recently, I'm not optimistic
about the platform.

Other roles we've seen ourselves optimizing in lately... being a more useful
resource internally especially for our sales organization -- helping them
craft a better story, providing better demos that are reusable, writing long
form guides on the stuff you probably wouldn't have thought to write about in
the past.

------
swyx
i'll echo the other devrel people in this thread and note that this blogpost
actually does not do a very good job of explaining what devrels do and
therefore why companies have them.

there are very successful devrels with no twitter following. the blogpost also
conveniently omits the importance of content marketing to draw inbound
interest which works even without the devrel having a strong personal brand or
rolodex.

------
duxup
So a sales like role, but with someone with a bit deeper technical knowledge
who can speak to not just the nuts and bolts of features, but talk to the
customer about what they do with tech, maybe how, and etc?

Seems like a role that I've seen done by sales, sales engineers, product
managers, etc.

~~~
hinkley
They used to call it Technical Sales in the circles I travel.

~~~
Alex3917
Tech Sales is focused on closing accounts, whereas Dev Rels do things like
teaching developers how to use a company's APIs at hackathons. It's like the
difference between conversion marketing and brand advertising.

------
binarysneaker
Like others, I wasn't familiar with the term, but once you'd explained, I know
exactly the type you're talking about. Having worked in consultancy for
several years, these people are fairly common. They attend meetings with new
clients, hobknob at events, and form the bulk of the companies social output.

In my mind, they exist to win business, and provide confidence when clients
need it.

------
goatinaboat
"Hello fellow developers! I myself am a developer, just like you! I was just
developing something the other day in fact, when I came across this amazing
product..."

As long as they keep handing out the swag people will put up with them, but
noone _likes_ being evangelized at. They are the modern day snake oil
salesmen, err, people.

------
1auralynn
In my (somewhat cynical) opinion, formed from my experience as a business
owner who has been targeted by countless "developer relations" types, the
greatest value that they provide to their organizations is getting free/cheap
developer labor for testing and implementing various API's/SDK's

~~~
1auralynn
Or worse, they want you on their marketplace!

------
mprev
Check out DevRelCon online conference taking place right now: 2020.devrel.net

------
avipars
I think it legitimizes a company and shows that they have a great developer
team that can communicate with the outside world

------
test6554
One thing that prevents people from working remotely in other countries is the
differences between laws, regulations, and certification/licensing practices.

A doctor that can work in India might not carry a US medical license. A lawyer
that practices in India might not have passed the California Bar.

These protectionist regulations cover a wide variety of jobs and industries,
and remain a blocker even when robots could be on site, and controlled by
remote workers.

------
shahsyed
Let me kick off the discussion by sharing the Twitter thread I had with the
author:
[https://twitter.com/shahdeys/status/1285545733425442819](https://twitter.com/shahdeys/status/1285545733425442819)

Edit: fixed spelling and grammar

------
akshaybhalotia
DevRel here - my formal designation is Developer Relations Engineer. Much of
my job comprises of what di's comment [1] speculates as an Evangelist and
Advocate combined. I am a part of the hiring panel and describe the work
opportunity as follows:

1\. a third of the time, you'd be speaking to users (of course, typically
developers) to help them understand and integrate with our technology, find
solutions and debug issues for them, and make the most out of our stack - this
could be thought of as a hybrid between a developer support and a customer
success role, where to be able to manage customer success you need to
understand a developers problems / persona / psyche.

2\. another third of the time, you'll build internal as well as external
tooling, and documentation etc around our core offerings - be it SDKs /
packages for our APIs, sample / demo apps, quick hacks to use the API from a
Google sheet plugin, or dirty dashboards to dig in a particular user metric
that is in focus for the month from somewhere across 4 table joins.

3\. and the last third would be dedicated to providing proper product and
engineering feedback - I feel this to be the most important part of my work,
which is to pass on, debate on and participate in well-structured feedback as
a consequence of being in direct touch with the customers. This feedback is:
a) highly relevant coming directly from the user's pain points but via the
value add of a filter from someone who understands the product's proposition
and ideology, and b) actionable, as it simply is not "could we provide feature
X" or "there is something wrong in module Y" but more like "could we decouple
this process from that API call so that users could use feature X in so and so
way" and "module Y at step bla is looking for a non-existent entry in the db -
most likely cos this certain flow might have triggered it, how quickly can we
fix this".

(we also want to expand on community building, events & talks and such, but
don't find the right time or motivation to do so, being an early stage
startup, although this should not really be an excuse for maybe not putting in
the right effort)

I have been in this role formally for only 4 months out of my 6+ working
years, but have always felt this coming. Main reasons I attribute to this:

1\. I have discovered a wide variety of fickle interests - this area of work
covers understanding business(es), being up-to-date on technology (at least
the internal frameworks and architecture), relationship building, regulatory
knowledge (since I work in a heavily regulated domain), product thinking, and
a lot of other things.

2\. I suffer from short attention span - not ADHD but it is super simple to
distract me, so I haven't been able to find my deep work vibe yet and this job
allows for that.

3\. I have worked as a developer and didn't feel I was "cut for it" \- yes, I
said it. Deep tech does not interest me, I've never worked with a front-end JS
framework like React or Angular or anything of that sort, and no, I do not
aspire to be a data scientist or principal architect someday. All of those are
very valuable works and there are a lot more people out there other than me
who love it more than I do and certainly do it better than me. So why not
leave them to it and I do what I do best - which is to talk to people about -
"why" should you use this offering, "what" to do to make it work with your
system and not to figure out "how" exactly. Nonetheless, it excites me and I
keep reading up on advancements and certain concepts of languages /
technologies. Just like I do for a hobby - like board games for example - I
play, can teach and sometimes think about them but I'm not a designer or
researcher. (Boy, if only we had board-gamer relations as a job, which also
paid as well as a tech job...)

Particular disadvantages I feel:

1\. I am not a multi tasker - it is not easy at all for me to run parallel
threads, which is very much required: partly as a "job hazard" and partly
because I'm also not good at time management (refer point 2 above).

To add to this, I have very minimal and unrelated to job Twitter following. I
generally write very less on the internet and not even at work (although I
want to increase this particular output from myself). And I haven't had a
speaking engagement either. So these are not a part of or prerequisite to the
job, but definitely make for a good addition.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23908042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23908042)

------
agustif
if I want to be a DevRel, what should I do?

~~~
johns
If you have available time, start doing the job. Write, teach, talk, stream,
etc. about technology that you like. Grow your communication skills and
audiences. Then when a company you feel passionate opens up a DevRel role,
you'll have your 'resume' ready to go.

~~~
agustif
This is pretty much what I was thinking about doing...

BUT. After almost 10 years without social media or putting out content, I do
feel a very relevant impostor syndrome.

Clickbait and Medium ruined blogging for me (as a reader).

But I should start my own personal blog anyways i guess..

------
morelisp
You know how they took operations, re-christened it "DevOps", and made it the
responsibility of the dev team without commensurate increase in hiring or pay
or education?

That, but for account management.

~~~
sigstoat
> That, but for account management.

account management seems different. the developer relations folks have more
purple hair and technical skills.

account managers are suits who come in at the start to sign the contract, and
again later when everyone involved has fucked up to try and salvage the
business relationship.

~~~
TheHegemon
> the developer relations folks have more purple hair and technical skills.

I've never heard the term "purple hair" before. Is that literally meaning
like... more alternative?

~~~
larrywright
Not OP, but I think it’s a general observation that a lot of the high
visibility devrel folks tend to have fairly colorful personalities. This often
extends to hair color. Charity Majors would be a good example of this kind of
person (though she’s not in devrel).

So yes, alternative. Colorful hair, lots of visible tattoos, etc. A contrast
to the sales folks, who are typically the opposite.

~~~
swyx
she's not "in" devrel but certainly every time she speaks she is performing
that function (very well i might add)

devrel isnt really limited to people who formally hold that title. anyone in
the company speaking to customers and potential users is doing devrel.

~~~
larrywright
That’s a good point. She doesn’t have that title but it’s definitely what she
does.

------
tenebrisalietum
I think this article is incomplete without mentioning oppressive IP laws that
enable copyright to basically support multi-generational legacies. Patents:
I'm not sure how patents are extended past their 17 year limit but if they
are, it's the same thing.

"Intangible assets" are more or less propped up by these laws. Would Microsoft
be a $250bn company if copyright on Windows and Office only lasted 10 years?

You can't count on most physical assets outlasting the typical copyright term.
So this is where all the value and power is moving to because it's literally
protected by law and never decays.

