Are you qualified for developer relations?

You are reading a course written by a developer relations professional. If you follow 75% of the advice here, you will be well qualified to be a developer relations professional. It just so happens that much of the same advice helps coders in the non-coding aspects of their careers (which is the only reason this course made sense to write).

So, if you’ve read the course and practiced these principles, strategies, and tactics, we can assume you’re qualified and should easily get the job. Our task now is to figure out whether you want the job.

Titles for this job

There are many names for this job:

Developer Evangelist
Developer Relations
Developer
Developer Advocate
Developer Experience Engineer

For convenience, we’ll just say “DevRel,” which is slightly better but not as fun as “Developer Avocado.”

As you might expect, titles aren’t standardized. In theory, they are different roles, but the reality is everyone performs some ill-defined mix of all these roles. The best you might observe in titling trends is that “Evangelist” is on its way out (too much “I’m telling you to use my product”), and “Advocate” and “Developer Experience” are on the way up (more focus on being the user’s champion internally, or making the conversation a “two-way street”). However, the shift in titles may not track closely with the actual behaviors and incentives set up by the company.

It’s not a common job

It’s not a common job by any means; it only makes sense for developer-focused companies to hire DevRels. Even in a “dev tools” company, there might be a hundred developers to 1 DevRel, but it is a very visible job (this is a very good thing for mid-career developers). This means that even as a developer, you’ll see ...