Reflections on 2 Years Running Developer Relations

DevRel has its values in several contexts, and I think as a role it proved that it is important, and we have companies that without it would not be so successful.

That said, the problem for me was when the centi-billion-dollar corporations started to use DevRel to do two things that I really distaste, that is, put marketing and its subdivisions as gatekeepers with engineers, and the sometimes very infantized way that they treat engineers of their clients.

For the first point, back in time, if you're using, let's say, SQL Server 2012 and you're in a hairy scenario of spinlock in your instance, you could get a call with a senior PFE and in some scenarios, some of the core engineers of SQL Server could join in on it.

Now with the DevRel, it started to be our entry point to communicate with those companies, and most of the time it adds one extra layer of context building for something that needs to have the most direct and urgent access to it.

For the second point, the high number of beginner/pure feature showroom events it bad by itself. On top of that, seems that most of the DevRel of those big corps cannot modulate their communication style and look appealing to the common audience for DevRel.

One example happened in some mandatory DevRel scheduled meeting about a CI tool. One of the mainframe Dev teams has the average age of 58, and out of 1h30m of feature pushing and a lot of Star Wars and pop culture references in the slides, everyone got almost nothing from it.

I like this point, for people hiring DevRel:

"Look in your community. Find users of your product or users of your competitor’s product. "

I'm a current DevRel-er myself, and someone recently reached out looking to fill a DevRel role. I told them that I wouldn't actually be a good fit for their product (a CLI tool, and I'm not as die-hard of a CLI user as other devs), and suggested they look within their current user community. That's not always possible, especially for new products, but if a tool is sufficiently used, it's really nice to bring in someone who's genuinely used and loved the product before starting the role.

My hiring history:

* Google Maps DevRel, 2006-2011: I first used Google Maps in my "summer of mashups", just making all kinds of maps, and even used it in a college research project. By the time I started the role, I knew the API quite well. Still had lots to learn in the GIS space, as I was coming from web dev, but at least I had a lot of project-based knowledge to build on.

* Microsoft, 2023-present: My experience was with VS Code and GitHub, two products that I used extensively for software dev. Admittedly, I'd never used Azure (only Google App Engine and AWS) so I had to train up on that rapidly. My experience with the other clouds has helped me with this MS cloud fortunately.

this is meta and not directly addressing Pedram's points (though thanks for the shoutouts in there - the three pillars here are as good as any) but I wrote up a reaction here -

https://dx.tips/devrel-is-back

I observed a long term decline in the devrel trend last year but it's noticeably perked up a bit to the point that I noticed this post on the front page of HN.

probably nothing? (no it's definitely something going on)