Hiring a developer relations/advocate is difficult. It’s even harder to be the first DevRel in the company. My colleagues share their experience in detail
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. The DevRel collective is a community where people in the developer relations field can chat and help each other out. But this post isn’t about that group… We’ll get to that. This is an article about you: the startup founder or manager who’s trying to hire your first developer relations person. This article is here to help you by example. I’m not the first to write about this problem. Taylor Barnett wrote a great piece on this as well. Be sure to check it out! But first, let’s make sure we have the terminology right: Developer Relations is a field that encapsulates all the different roles that facilitate the communication between an organization and third-party developers. That can include a developer advocate (such as myself), a developer evangelist, community manager, and much more. But getting started is pretty hard. Wesley Faulkner started this by opening this thread on the DevRel collective community Slack: “Hey y’all I need a temperature check. I’m getting a lot of LinkedIn solicitations for ‘first developer advocate’ roles. Here’s just a snippet of the last one I got: With that, we are looking for our first Developer Advocate* to create our Developer Relations strategy from scratch. There’s no set playbook, but you’ll thrive in this role if you’re passionate about educating developers.” His response to this was: “Thank you for reaching out, but I’m not interested at this time. Hiring someone to execute and do strategy is really hard. Time and time again, I’ve seen this go south in a hurry, and no one wins in that situation. If you review the job description, it is heavily biased towards action. With a first role, there’s a lot to do, and without focus and direction, the results will not only seem scattered externally but internally as well. It’s as if you wake up in a field and want to get out, so you bolt off in a direction. Then it feels like you’re going nowhere, so you turn around and go in the opposite direction. All that work and time gets wasted.” My suggestion is to create a solid strategy and direction before getting someone to execute it. You could even hire a contractor or consultant to help with that. Better yet, make that the first role you hire. You wouldn’t open a restaurant with just servers on staff, would you? You would get a manager to make sure that all tasks are delegated responsibly. Why wouldn’t you take that same approach with DevRel?” I (Shai) am currently the first developer advocate at Lightrun, and I can very much empathize with those sentiments.
