Goodbye, Forever, Probably
whitep4nth3r.com
whitep4nth3r.com
I've known some great DevRel people, but it's a difficult role. The company can frequently have very different ideas about what DevRel should look like than the person hired into the role. The best DevRel people I know spent their time doing things to fill in gaps left by the company such as providing better documentation, example repos, and filtering through all of the noisy chat across Discords and subreddits to get additional feedback into the company. For the right person it can be fun, but playing cleanup crew and trying to keep customers happy by patching all the holes left by other teams gets old.
I don't know this person specifically, but from the way they write it's obvious that they like doing Twitch streams, podcasts, and workshops, but they don't like doing it for a company:
> After all these years I can finally say out loud: I do not want to be the face of a company. I do not want to speak at conferences or on podcasts or do workshops in order to try and sell you a product. I do not want my value determined by arbitrary gamified metrics like how many video views or blog post views or company sign-ups I generate in a landscape that is completely out of my control. I do not want to be perceived. For being perceived is breaking me, and I need to put myself back together.
This paragraph is basically "I hate DevRel work".
Unfortunately, doing those things for a company is the point of the job. If they hated this, then burnout was inevitable. Streaming to a couple hundred people on Twitch and traveling the world for workshops and getting paid for it sounds fun to a lot of people pursuing DevRel, but the part about looping it back to a company's best interests has to be at the core of it.
For example, this DevRel person talks a lot about their Twitch stream and all of the work they put into a game on it that also used Sentry (their DevRel employer). It's all very cool and impressive work, but for a company like Sentry with 100,000+ customers there are millions of engineers across those companies that make up their developer base. Streaming to a couple hundred people on Twitch doesn't even register as interacting with the community.
Reading some of the linked posts there's an ongoing frustration with being asked to provide metrics and prove value, which gets to the core of what I was trying to say above: What some people want to do for DevRel for a small audience (Twitch streaming, podcasts, workshops) is often at odds with what the company expects them to do for their large base of active developers and users.
Even the ones who didn’t actively push whatever company they worked for like a commission based sales person, the only reason they are in the room in the first place is to support whatever company technology they work for. I always found it to be a bit gross of a job.
Anyone have a different experience?
It seems that the expectation today is everything is written or created for an audience and probably for monetization or “influence”.
> As for what the future holds for whitep4nth3r, I’m actually not sure. I know I’m not that important in this vast and strange ever-evolving world; I know this won’t affect many people in the grand scheme of things, but I’m sure some of you will be wondering if I’ll still be around.
So I'm not sure your criticism makes any sense
dead-dove.jpg
It is also a post located on her own personal website, which naturally contains information about herself and is focussed around herself.
I don't think there is any 'mistake' here.
I personally thought the post was quite interesting and I honestly felt a strong desire to subscribe. It's a shame they're shutting down.