I worked as a SWE for 6 years, then DevRel for 2, and it became a huge hassle to get back to plain SWE. This was true even though in DevRel I spent almost all my time coding on demo apps and client libraries. Recruiters just see something other than SWE and assume you forgot how to do real engineering in 6 months and push you towards roles like partner engineering. Ridiculous but true. I eventually got back to SWE but I just wanted to offer a counterpoint that it’s easy to go back because that can vary.