[HN Gopher] Identity Crisis - A Tale of DevRel
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       Identity Crisis - A Tale of DevRel
        
       Author : mooreds
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2023-05-27 16:45 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.dewanahmed.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.dewanahmed.com)
        
       | mooreds wrote:
       | I've talked to a few folks about the career developer relations.
       | I have been doing it since 2019, which doesn't make me an expert,
       | but I've seen some things. Devrel jobs vary wildly based on
       | company culture, size, and understanding of how developers work.
       | 
       | But the one piece of advice I'd feel comfortable giving anyone
       | considering devrel is to work as a developer for 2-5 years.
       | You'll have a deeper understanding of the space and how
       | developers think and work.
       | 
       | Not doing this is like trying to deliver a product to real estate
       | agents or lawyers without having been one. It's possible, but
       | much more difficult.
        
       | orliesaurus wrote:
       | Feels like every single developer advocate/relations person goes
       | through a phase where they write an introspective blogpost about
       | their life/job and role.
       | 
       | They always hammer on the same couple of issues:
       | 
       | 1) it's a tough job because developers communities are hard to
       | build and more difficult to keep engaged. 2) people in management
       | at their company don't understand the real role of a dev rel 3)
       | companies are doing devRel just to say they do devRel and check a
       | box
       | 
       | These 3 points are in every single devRel blogpost you read since
       | 2012: it's crazy how it's never been improved since the days of
       | Twilio/Sendgrid doing devRel at scale?!?!
       | 
       | IMHO if devRel aren't respected or seen like divas/influencers
       | these days it's because that's the meme of devRel itself...and
       | there's always a little bit of truth in memes, isn't it?
       | 
       | It is similar to how some people think that jQuery/PHP is for
       | meme programmers or that Node.js is the only real dev language[1]
       | meme.
       | 
       | So will DevRel be able to rise from the meme world and sit at the
       | table with engineers or marketer leaders or VPs of whatever?
       | Well, this blogpost shows that still hasn't happened.
       | 
       | [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nodejs-is-the-
       | only...
        
       | janita wrote:
       | [dead]
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-28 23:01 UTC)