
What developer advocates do - lynnetye
https://www.keyvalues.com/blog/what-exactly-do-developer-advocates-do?
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swyx
Something i feel isn't easy to discuss are the possible downsides and
tradeoffs of the job. As someone not in the "core product team" of the company
its easy to feel left out of the cool kids club. We all want to make cool new
things. I have had to constantly remind myself that my value is not best
expressed in building stuff in private and in closed source, and its ok to not
be involved at every stage of every product initiative in the company.

~~~
johns
This is a very real problem, and one I learned to deal with for the just under
two years I was in evangelism. It was a big shift from 'doing the doing' to
trying to influence the doers (product, engineering) from the outside. What I
learned though was that I had a unique perspective into customer's needs since
I was a partner to them and not trying to sell them anything (thankfully the
company backed up this philosophy). Once I learned how valuable that
perspective was, I was able to use those learnings to get leverage with the
product team to effect change. So while it was a few degrees away from writing
the code to make a customer's life easier directly, ultimately I got the same
satisfaction from being the customer's advocate. And it made it possible to
transition to a PM role.

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wink
> As a burgeoning field, there are many people who still haven’t discovered
> what developer advocacy is and some who have already drawn false
> conclusions. (To be fair, that’s easy to do when you only have one or two
> data points.)

Was eager to read this article because that's exactly my experience - I think
I only ever met 3 of them and 2 of them didn't shine a good light on the
profession, acting quite arrogant at conferences (seems to be pretty common
among semi-professional speakers, sadly. When I did it I sometimes had the
feeling the people wouldn't even dare to approach the speakers, but I
digress..) and doing nothing but trying to sell their employers' products as
the best thing ever. Bonus points for acting arrogant if they were new to the
company and developers using it tactfully pointed out years-old flaws... [For
completeness sake, the third one was pretty awesome and didn't try to sell his
company all the time, just giving good talks and being knowledgeable in the
field where they operate.]

So yes, maybe the problem is that a lot of them are not developers having used
the product for a long time, or being too much on the people end of the role
instead of the coding end, or I'm simply wrong :P

But I didn't really feel a lot more enlightened after reading what they do.
Maybe I'm also just set in my ways too much where I prefer to communicate with
normal developers of said company and not someone who is abstracting stuff
away for the masses (blog posts, tutorials).

~~~
wccrawford
>But I didn't really feel a lot more enlightened after reading what they do.

I did. After all the advice that they don't really need to be expert coders
and only need to be able to have conversations about coding, and not actually
do much coding at all (let alone serious coding) it's obvious to me that
they're paid spokesmen who just happen to have a technical bent. They're
supposed to connect the company to coders who don't current work for the
company, either for PR or for recruiting.

The answer to the first question really set my teeth on edge. Complaining that
most of their job is staying in hotels and waiting in airports? Don't take a
travel job then.

~~~
goldfeld
Or just read some books at airports and hotels and become a smarter person to
talk to. Sleep enough so traveling doesn't take a toll on health. People
complain a lot when it comes to jobs, cushy ones even. And stay on their
smartphones for longer than they should.

~~~
kcmastrpc
The airport/hotel stuff is part of the job. I purposely take a day out of my
travels though to sight-see, even if the organizers and/or my employer would
rather I be at the event every single day networking. This is me caring for my
mental health and recharging. I'm an ambivert and I can't go full throttle all
the time.

On the note about getting sleep. I make _sure_ I have 8 hours set aside for
sleep, and 2 hours set aside for exercise every day. Nothing takes priority
over that. Interestingly though, I've read some sleep studies where the
scientists have discovered that our brains tend to stay in a more wakeful
state when we're in unfamiliar surroundings. Even though I may sleep for 8
hours, I feel like I slept maybe 5 or 6.

IRT coding knowledge, it's definitely slipped, but I'm building on other
skills now - it used to take me a week to craft a blog post, I can now do it
in a day or two. Presentations would take me weeks to create, I can build a
decent one in about a week.

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matchbok
Answer: Convince companies that they need to have one.

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romanovcode
They convince other companies to use their products - basically they are
salespersons with a different name.

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simonebrunozzi
My own thoughts from 2015: [http://brunozzi.com/2015/04/30/on-
evangelism/](http://brunozzi.com/2015/04/30/on-evangelism/)

~~~
milesward
:) Hugs

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Man, good to find you here! How's life? Let me ping you in private :)

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jklepatch
Very interesting!

I am actually wondering if it would be a good fit for someone(like me!) who is
building his developer screencast business on the side.

The only worry I have is that that kind of job would take too much bandwith
and leave me with 0 available time / energy fir my side business

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kingosticks
I actually searched for this exact question just yesterday. In the case of
Spotify the "community outreach" part involves policing their otherwise
unmonitored GitHub issue pages.

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keyle
note: the url with the '?' at the end, cute... But don't do it.

~~~
pests
The guidelines allow resubmission if it didn't get traction the first time.

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stakhanov
Am I the only one to whom "developer advocate" sounds like a career path
that's a bit like "dermatologist"? ...in the sense that it's people who went
to medical school but didn't quite cut it as REAL doctors?

~~~
stakhanov
I knew I was going to get downvoted for piercing the warm & fuzzy positive
reinforcement bubble here. But the first paragraph of the article suggests
that in order to have a career as a developer you need to become something
other than a developer. Let that sink in for a moment. If we had a bit of
pride in our profession, we wouldn't let that stand as a cultural attitude.

~~~
i_phish_cats
Says the data scientist? Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot.

~~~
stakhanov
As it happens I have always been a data scientist (since before there was a
word for it), and being a data scientist implies being a developer. I have
never been a developer trying to rebrand himself because he thought it sounded
cooler and would be better paid. As a matter of fact the role I'm in right now
is transitioning me into more of a pure developer/software engineering role
and I don't see that as a step down.

