There’s no easy way to put this: one year on from my ZIRP DevRel article, it appears that reports of DevRel’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Philip van der Merwe got in touch to give me an update on my own DevRel Death chart and… oh my…
Searches for “developer relations” are at all time highs!
Let’s be real, there’s no way it is 5x’ed in 2 months, but anecdotally, the pings I get from founders trying to hire good devrel has appreciably gone up in recent months so it directionally checks out. Anthropic, arguably the hottest AI lab with the best Developer models and tools and reputation, has had a Head of Developer Relations role open for at least the last 4 months, despite offering a $385,000 - $460,000 USD salary.
Linkedin is filled with posts asking for new devrel folks:
and of course in the last few months in short order Cursor hired LeeRob, Factory hired Ben Tossell, and Cognition hired me.
Some further data points:
- The Linux Foundation launched their “DevRel Foundation” last month:
the first post I referenced above, from Philip van der Merwe, notes that DevRel is going up again
when I saw Pedram Navid’s “Reflections on 2 Years Running Developer Relations” show up on the front page of Hacker News today, it was time to write this post and notify all of you who probably signed up a year ago on the DevRel Death post.
Bottoms up is So Back
Something’s in the water. Anonymizing and generalizing from all my industry conversations, I think there’s one overall driving trend - DevRel is synonymous with Bottom-Up Developer Adoption, and I think the desire for Bottom-Up Developer Adoption is stronger than I’ve seen in my career (and my career has included that one weird time in 2017 when Microsoft hired like 100 Cloud Developer Advocates and then let them ~all go 2 years later, oh, we could write a BOOK on that one once statute of limitations expire). For the first time in 5? years I’m even hearing the strong belief that Enterprise sales is helped by having great Bottoms Up Adoption (it’s true, but for a long while people stopped saying it, and it’s noteworthy that people are saying it again).
And if we’re cutting it right to the bone, there’s two main areas of real Bottoms Up Adoption - IRL events (e.g. in San Francisco where people are hiring DevRel the most) and on Twitter. This refreshingly honest take on how OpenAI operates is absolutely how a lot of the top devtools companies you know operate today:
Aka you can get a devrel job just being reliably Good At Twitter (whether Personal or Company Twitter accounts) for a company you work for/believe in. There, of course, the question of DevRel-Company fit comes into play - Will Brown has the best recent take on this:
I’m being pushed by it, not pushing it
Heck, I’m even organizing my Dev Writer’s Retreat again (sign up here!) after a 3 year hiatus. It’s weird stepping out of my own body and recognizing that my own actions (of course done with the illusion of free will) fit a trend and I don’t even really know what is causing it.
