from Hacker News

What developer advocates do

by lynnetye on 1/23/19, 6:40 PM with 28 comments

  • by swyx on 1/23/19, 7:01 PM

    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.

  • by wink on 1/24/19, 10:55 AM

    > 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).

  • by matchbok on 1/24/19, 2:05 AM

    Answer: Convince companies that they need to have one.

  • by romanovcode on 1/24/19, 10:27 AM

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

  • by simonebrunozzi on 1/23/19, 11:06 PM

  • by jklepatch on 1/24/19, 6:02 AM

    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

  • by kingosticks on 1/24/19, 10:05 AM

    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.

  • by keyle on 1/24/19, 3:44 AM

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

  • by stakhanov on 1/24/19, 9:52 AM

    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?