What developer advocates do | Hacker News Reader

What developer advocates do

keyvalues.com

93 pointslynnetye28 comments

Something i feel isn't easy to discuss are the possible downsides and tradeoffs of the job. As someone not in the "core product team" of the company its easy to feel left out of the cool kids club. We all want to make cool new things. I have had to constantly remind myself that my value is not best expressed in building stuff in private and in closed source, and its ok to not be involved at every stage of every product initiative in the company.

This is a very real problem, and one I learned to deal with for the just under two years I was in evangelism. It was a big shift from 'doing the doing' to trying to influence the doers (product, engineering) from the outside. What I learned though was that I had a unique perspective into customer's needs since I was a partner to them and not trying to sell them anything (thankfully the company backed up this philosophy). Once I learned how valuable that perspective was, I was able to use those learnings to get leverage with the product team to effect change. So while it was a few degrees away from writing the code to make a customer's life easier directly, ultimately I got the same satisfaction from being the customer's advocate. And it made it possible to transition to a PM role.

Not being on the product or engineering team can definitely be a challenge. What I learned at Algolia is that it's critical to build trust between engineering and dev relations. Dev rel needs engineering to be engaged in community initiaves (and to help code stuff) and product/engineering can get great feedback from dev advocates working in the field about the real developer experience :)

> As a burgeoning field, there are many people who still haven’t discovered what developer advocacy is and some who have already drawn false conclusions. (To be fair, that’s easy to do when you only have one or two data points.)

Was eager to read this article because that's exactly my experience - I think I only ever met 3 of them and 2 of them didn't shine a good light on the profession, acting quite arrogant at conferences (seems to be pretty common among semi-professional speakers, sadly. When I did it I sometimes had the feeling the people wouldn't even dare to approach the speakers, but I digress..) and doing nothing but trying to sell their employers' products as the best thing ever. Bonus points for acting arrogant if they were new to the company and developers using it tactfully pointed out years-old flaws... [For completeness sake, the third one was pretty awesome and didn't try to sell his company all the time, just giving good talks and being knowledgeable in the field where they operate.]

So yes, maybe the problem is that a lot of them are not developers having used the product for a long time, or being too much on the people end of the role instead of the coding end, or I'm simply wrong :P

But I didn't really feel a lot more enlightened after reading what they do. Maybe I'm also just set in my ways too much where I prefer to communicate with normal developers of said company and not someone who is abstracting stuff away for the masses (blog posts, tutorials).

>But I didn't really feel a lot more enlightened after reading what they do.

I did. After all the advice that they don't really need to be expert coders and only need to be able to have conversations about coding, and not actually do much coding at all (let alone serious coding) it's obvious to me that they're paid spokesmen who just happen to have a technical bent. They're supposed to connect the company to coders who don't current work for the company, either for PR or for recruiting.

The answer to the first question really set my teeth on edge. Complaining that most of their job is staying in hotels and waiting in airports? Don't take a travel job then.

Or just read some books at airports and hotels and become a smarter person to talk to. Sleep enough so traveling doesn't take a toll on health. People complain a lot when it comes to jobs, cushy ones even. And stay on their smartphones for longer than they should.

The airport/hotel stuff is part of the job. I purposely take a day out of my travels though to sight-see, even if the organizers and/or my employer would rather I be at the event every single day networking. This is me caring for my mental health and recharging. I'm an ambivert and I can't go full throttle all the time.

On the note about getting sleep. I make sure I have 8 hours set aside for sleep, and 2 hours set aside for exercise every day. Nothing takes priority over that. Interestingly though, I've read some sleep studies where the scientists have discovered that our brains tend to stay in a more wakeful state when we're in unfamiliar surroundings. Even though I may sleep for 8 hours, I feel like I slept maybe 5 or 6.

IRT coding knowledge, it's definitely slipped, but I'm building on other skills now - it used to take me a week to craft a blog post, I can now do it in a day or two. Presentations would take me weeks to create, I can build a decent one in about a week.

Answer: Convince companies that they need to have one.

They convince other companies to use their products - basically they are salespersons with a different name.

My own thoughts from 2015: http://brunozzi.com/2015/04/30/on-evangelism/

:) Hugs

Man, good to find you here! How's life? Let me ping you in private :)

Very interesting!

I am actually wondering if it would be a good fit for someone(like me!) who is building his developer screencast business on the side.

The only worry I have is that that kind of job would take too much bandwith and leave me with 0 available time / energy fir my side business

I actually searched for this exact question just yesterday. In the case of Spotify the "community outreach" part involves policing their otherwise unmonitored GitHub issue pages.

note: the url with the '?' at the end, cute... But don't do it.

The guidelines allow resubmission if it didn't get traction the first time.

I mean, it is a question...

Am I the only one to whom "developer advocate" sounds like a career path that's a bit like "dermatologist"? ...in the sense that it's people who went to medical school but didn't quite cut it as REAL doctors?

I knew I was going to get downvoted for piercing the warm & fuzzy positive reinforcement bubble here. But the first paragraph of the article suggests that in order to have a career as a developer you need to become something other than a developer. Let that sink in for a moment. If we had a bit of pride in our profession, we wouldn't let that stand as a cultural attitude.

Says the data scientist? Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot.

As it happens I have always been a data scientist (since before there was a word for it), and being a data scientist implies being a developer. I have never been a developer trying to rebrand himself because he thought it sounded cooler and would be better paid. As a matter of fact the role I'm in right now is transitioning me into more of a pure developer/software engineering role and I don't see that as a step down.

I think you're reading things into that paragraph that aren't there, or aren't familiar with the terminology it uses ("individual contributor" is a label for career paths where you stay a normal developer, precisely as a counterpoint to notions that the only way "up" is by leaving the profession): it does not say you need to become something else.

> Am I the only one to whom

Judging by your downvotes, yeah.

I dislike this caste system where some folks are higher than others because of the tools they use at work. This is the shitty attitude that makes several companies look down on front-end developers, for example.

That sounds like a good reason for disliking the notion that people who use PowerPoint and business cards in their jobs are a higher caste than people who use code editors and source control, so it seems like we're pretty aligned in our opinions here...

you're the one that started to denigrate one job against the other...

Not all developers are terrified of speaking to real customers. This job is perfect for an extrovert developer.

Are developers really terrified of speaking to real customers, or are the managers terrified of letting developers speak to real customers? Personally, I've seen more of the latter than the former.

I hope for your sake you never need a dermatologist.

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