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Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

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Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

#1

Post by wpdn »

I mean this in the most non-inflammatory way possible. I want to understand what is the motivation of big companies behind having developer advocates on staff.

I don’t mean people who promote (in both tech and marketing sense of the word) the final product of the business, but rather people behind e.g. React, Andular etc.

Off the top of my head, I can only see this: you want to hire good people, so you push your internal projects to opensource, hoping to increase adoption, get bug fixes etc. So you need someone to promote the project and make sure there is a core group on the edge between possibly less sociable (?) developers and wider audience. Is that even close?

I can also come up with a bunch of counter-arguments to this but I’m not really good at high-level thinking that probably lies behind these decisions so would appreciate any reasonable explanation.

This is probably related to the “why open-source at all” one since if the product is internally successful and solid, the only reasoning to open-source it besides pragmatism (hiring) would be altruism and I find it hard to believe it can actually influence decisions in large enterprises.

Again, I’m asking this completely honestly and I don’t mean to diminish anyone’s role or motivations. Attribute any possibly offensive tone of my question to my ignorance please.

Re: Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

#2

Post by TACIXAT »

Developer advocates are sales people for an API. It does not necessarily need to be open source. For example, Twilio may have a developer advocate to help people get started with their product.

In other cases it is about an ecosystem. For Tensorflow, Google is seeking market dominance because they also offer the ecosystem around machine learning - the cloud. For that you higher people to promote your product, give people examples to get started, and sometimes interface and help users.

Re: Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

#3

Post by streetcat1 »

TACIXAT wrote: post #2

Developer advocates are sales people for an API. It does not necessarily need to be open source. For example, Twilio may have a developer advocate to help people get started with their product. In other cases it is about an ecosystem. For Tensorflow, Google is seeking market dominance because they also offer the ecosystem around machine learning - the cloud. For that you higher people to promote your product, give pe…

The end game for tensor flow is auto ml not cloud computing (which is a commodity by now).

At this point most of the model training is commodity. The game will shift to auto ml services.

Re: Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

#4

Post by wpdn »

TACIXAT wrote: post #2

Developer advocates are sales people for an API. It does not necessarily need to be open source. For example, Twilio may have a developer advocate to help people get started with their product. In other cases it is about an ecosystem. For Tensorflow, Google is seeking market dominance because they also offer the ecosystem around machine learning - the cloud. For that you higher people to promote your product, give pe…

Yes, that’s what I meant by “not directly related to the end product of the business”. Eg why does google have developer advocates for angular? Is it purely so that adoption is wide enough that the “talent pool” admits good engineers even purely statistically, ie it’s easier to hire a good coder out of 100k people that out of 1k? Not even mentioning that you don’t have to teach your internal frameworks.

Re: Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

#5

Post by iforgetmypwrd »

Imagine having a company, you have a sales pipeline.

For every 1000 people who know what your company/product is,

100 people will go to your website,

10 people will call/email your company to ask a question.

1 person will end up considering buying your product.

So build a dev advocate team, you will increase the amount of people who know what your product is/ask questions about your product. Furthermore people calling your company after interacting with a dev advocate isnt someone who just saw your logo, or heard what your company could do from another business person, but the people calling will actually know at least something about how your product works/interacts with the customers infrastructure. So the pipeline for interactions with people will likely convert to sales at a better rate than people from marketing/sales.

Dev advocates are able to talk about code (unlike most sales people), So if you able to convince a customer's dev team that your company provides value, you at least have some additional help convincing business people to buy your stuff if their dev team wants it.

Re: Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

#6

Post by RNeff »

A developer advocate is an extrovert that likes teaching, explaining, answering questions, writing intro docs and code examples; that wants the users to succeed. They also report back to the project managers and programmers about problems: confusion, missing functionality, bugs, possible enhancements, OS and compiler incompatibilities.

No one will use your software if they cannot figure out how to use it.

Re: Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

#8

Post by paulcole »

RNeff wrote: post #6

A developer advocate is an extrovert that likes teaching, explaining, answering questions, writing intro docs and code examples; that wants the users to succeed. They also report back to the project managers and programmers about problems: confusion, missing functionality, bugs, possible enhancements, OS and compiler incompatibilities. No one will use your software if they cannot figure out how to use it.

As an introvert who has worked successfully in roles like you describe, you’re conflating introversion with (at best) shyness. An introvert can excel in this kind of role.

Being introverted does not mean you dislike teaching, explaining, answering questions, writing docs, or wanting people to succeed.

Re: Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

#10

Post by wpdn »

iforgetmypwrd wrote: post #5

Imagine having a company, you have a sales pipeline. For every 1000 people who know what your company/product is, 100 people will go to your website, 10 people will call/email your company to ask a question. 1 person will end up considering buying your product. So build a dev advocate team, you will increase the amount of people who know what your product is/ask questions about your product. Furthermore people callin…

I'm specifically not asking about these people. Take facebook - they don't sell react. Why do they have developer advocates for that? In other words, if you sell cars, why have people who talk to other people about how ICEs are built?
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