Comment by xmcqdpt2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xmcqdpt2 | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like this article suffers a bit from a lack of perspective. The way DevRel works is nearly identical to marketing in other sectors where the consumer is sophisticated and technical.

For example, scientific instruments companies also sponsor technical innovation, they also have scientists in marketing / education roles going to conferences, etc. If you are selling NMR instruments for 10 M$ each, you also invest in good relations with the community, because you want the person who has just received a massive grant to think of you and your great work and call your sales dept. You aren't going to get anywhere cold-calling random academics who mostly aren't in the market for a NMR right now.

I don’t get the impression that Christine is saying software DevRel is the only role that looks like this — just that standard “consumer” marketing tactics don’t really work on developers.

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily based in a “lack of perspective”, but perhaps more just choosing to not expand the thesis to encompass the broader world of technical marketing in non-software industries. I think that’s fair, given that the author’s experience is centered on the software world, and not every blog post needs to begin with a cross-disciplinary literature review.

yeah, while reading it what popped into my head is that people just love to label things to help them feel different.

what they're doing is marketing.

The pretense that their role doesn't exist because of the sales pipeline they generate is slightly crazy.

DevRel are in sales and marketing.

Are engineers writing code for the core product in sales and marketing? What about product management?

Many non-sales/non-marketing roles primarily exist for the purpose of generating or enabling the generation of a sales pipeline. This doesn’t make them automatically equivalent to marketing and sales roles. One look at “a day in the life of” across these functions shows that they’re quite different.

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