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Comment by wpdn | Hacker News Reader

I'm specifically not asking about these people. Take facebook - they don't sell react. Why do they have developer advocates for that? In other words, if you sell cars, why have people who talk to other people about how ICEs are built?

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O i see what you mean,

I would assume Facebook having one successful dev advocate has many benefits:

-if FB is going to build products with React, it is in FB's best interest that there is a healthy React community constantly building new things FO FREE, so now Facebook can easily integrate good ideas/tools built for React into internal systems. I would assume this is huge.

-basically recruit smart/productive devs to FB by interacting with React community on a regular basis

-buys goodwill with dev community

-An additional line of communication into potential customers, when you have a potential sale going on with a customer, if your dev advocate knows important technical leadership people at customer that can help

But really i have no idea :)

Important to remember that things like React or Java, they aren't ever finished, they are constantly being worked on and improved on, so while there is a central brain trust (React has the React team at FB, Java has the Java Executive Committee comprised of devs from Oracle and other big companies like IBM, Twitter, others. these devs are eventually going to retire and will need to be replaced by community experts) these open source communities are still very much dependent on dev community assistance/feedback for the successes of these languages/frameworks to keep the gears churning.

Yep, this is close to what I was thinking too. I was wondering if this doesn't have the drawback of core team having to constantly deal with people from outside coming with their use-cases that have nothing to do with what the team's vision is. You know, "i was thinking it would be nice to have bells and whistles when you click this button" type of people. I would really love to get some insight into the efficiency of this (developer-advocacy-in-general) - seems like it's really worth it for companies.

I just thought of another possible explanation - apps and integrations are probably a big part of the revenue ecosystem so e.g. in case of react, if your product is built on it and your integrations/apps/whatever engine is also react-centered, it's kind of cheap to introduce new people to these concepts. I guess.

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