Identity Crisis – A Tale of DevRel | Hacker News Reader

Identity Crisis – A Tale of DevRel

dewanahmed.com

19 pointsmooreds6 comments

Feels like every single developer advocate/relations person goes through a phase where they write an introspective blogpost about their life/job and role.

They always hammer on the same couple of issues:

1) it's a tough job because developers communities are hard to build and more difficult to keep engaged. 2) people in management at their company don't understand the real role of a dev rel 3) companies are doing devRel just to say they do devRel and check a box

These 3 points are in every single devRel blogpost you read since 2012: it's crazy how it's never been improved since the days of Twilio/Sendgrid doing devRel at scale?!?!

IMHO if devRel aren't respected or seen like divas/influencers these days it's because that's the meme of devRel itself...and there's always a little bit of truth in memes, isn't it?

It is similar to how some people think that jQuery/PHP is for meme programmers or that Node.js is the only real dev language[1] meme.

So will DevRel be able to rise from the meme world and sit at the table with engineers or marketer leaders or VPs of whatever? Well, this blogpost shows that still hasn't happened.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nodejs-is-the-only...

Kind of an odd take. The first folks performing what we now call DevRel were engineers, founders, VPs, and directors. Even now a vast majority of DevRel practitioners are engineers. Which means they do more than one job.

As far as being disrespected or viewed as divas, it's ironically engineers that meme-ify DevRel folks.

As far as the three points, much like every engineer that writes a post about the pointlessness of code tests in the interview process, sometimes things don't change. Granted, those three points haven't been made in "every single devRel blogpost you read since 2012" since the term DevRel was really coined in 2014-ish. but that's not really the issue.

No, there are still many things unresolved in the DevRel industry. It's much bigger than it was, yet "pure engineers" slough it off as meme-worthy and management still can't see past it being marketing or pre-sales. So more people add their voice in an attempt to improve things.

You don't stop saying something needs to be fixed just because it's been said before. You keep saying it until it's fixed.

THIS. "You don't stop saying something needs to be fixed just because it's been said before. You keep saying it until it's fixed." 100%

Thanks - that sentence actually felt really good to write.

@orliesaurus, the challenge is that a subset of the DevRel community will ignore the caution and result in memes. The irony is that oftentimes the meme is pointed at DevRel, in general.

my suggestion to new and existing developer advocates: go deep in your technical expertise (first point of https://www.dewanahmed.com/identity-crisis-devrel/#but-there...). Sort of "So Good They Can't Ignore You" DevRel edition :)

@mooreds and other DevRel leaders make the same suggestion.

but DevRel folks, alone, cannot resolve this issue. generalization is typically a bad idea. can you name any role which doesn't have a meme part to it? you hear more about DevRel folks because we create content as part of our job and that's why our voices are a bit louder out there. I'm sure from fullstack Devs to SREs to data analyst - every role out there has similar (more or less) feeling about identity, value, and impact.

I've talked to a few folks about the career developer relations. I have been doing it since 2019, which doesn't make me an expert, but I've seen some things. Devrel jobs vary wildly based on company culture, size, and understanding of how developers work.

But the one piece of advice I'd feel comfortable giving anyone considering devrel is to work as a developer for 2-5 years. You'll have a deeper understanding of the space and how developers think and work.

Not doing this is like trying to deliver a product to real estate agents or lawyers without having been one. It's possible, but much more difficult.

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