Community Pulse

"Vibe coding" is gaining traction as a new way to approach software development—but what does it actually mean? In this episode, we unpack the term, explore how it's shaping the developer experience, and examine its potential to transform developer relations. We'll break down the pros and cons, from faster workflows to new challenges in communication and code quality, and discuss what this shift means for DevRel professionals today and in the future.

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There has been a lot of chat about the decline of the tech influencer. Where have they all gone? Is tech influence too heavy or too light? PJ, Mary, Wesley, and Jason share their opinions about “capital I” Influencers and where DevRel falls into all of this.

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Jason Hand

Mary Thengvall

Cover art photo by Diggity Marketing on Unsplash.

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Communicating the message is only part of the job of a DevRel practitioner - there’s also the method. Ensuring you share the same alignment and you are seen as a member of the community is even more important than being able to educate a community.

"Sit down. Be Humble” - Kendrick Lamar

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Wesley Faulkner

PJ Hagerty

Artwork photo by Merve Sehirli Nasir on Unsplash.

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Special Guest: Chris DeMars.

The team takes a look back at 2024 and ahead to 2025.

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Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash.

In this episode, Wesley, PJ, and Jason take the opportunity to talk about a new phenomenon - The DevRel Foundation from the Linux Foundation. Learn how folks have gotten involved, what the Foundation intends to do, and how you can share your voice.

Topics Discussed:

Foundational Goals:

Open Participation and Community Engagement:

Challenges of Defining DevRel:

The Role of the Linux Foundation:

Real-World Impact and Job Descriptions:

Future of the DevRel Foundation:

Key Takeaways:

Action Items:

Key Words and Themes:

[00:00:00] PJ Haggerty: Hey everybody. And welcome to another episode of Community Pulse. We're super excited to have you.

[00:00:04] PJ Haggerty: This week we decided we would take a look at a new phenomenon, the DevRel Foundation, the Developer Relations Foundation from our friends at the Linux Foundation.

[00:00:12] PJ Haggerty: Some of you are probably already aware of it. Some of you are probably in the discord chat. Some people might not know about it at all. So we want to take this opportunity to share some information about it and see what we could find out and how we felt about it. So with that, I am joined by, of course, Jason Hand and Wesley Faulkner. Wesley, you've been doing a lot of work with the DevRel foundation as far as like looking at, working models and how people can actually get things done within the foundation.

[00:00:37] PJ Haggerty: So do you want to kick us off and give us a description of what's going on?

[00:00:41] Wesley Faulkner: Yes. Let me lay a little bit of the groundwork to understand my involvement and how. So I'm part of the steering committee. There's five of us in total. And I am the newest member of that five person steering committee.

[00:00:55] Wesley Faulkner: I've been part of the DevRel foundation since June of this year. [00:01:00] And the foundations, the start of it had, I think, started way before that even before the beginning of the year. And the involvement with the Linux foundation happens like I think in around the February timeframe. And so the thought is that there are Certain types of challenges that are unique to people in dev rel defining what we do is one of them that I think is something that people are familiar with, but others that have been lingering around about how do you measure dev rel and like adequately, like, how do you plan for the future and how do you roll out a developer relations program?

[00:01:35] Wesley Faulkner: Those are like the broad strokes of it. So the thought of the Dev Rel foundation is to be a nonpartisan home for these types of discussions. And we are currently set up as the steering committee, as people who are trying to facilitate those conversations, give structure and processing of what timeline we should have these conversations and be helped, like [00:02:00] with the being a home to people to find this, Information once we have it all created and to be a repository for a lot of existing knowledge, but also allow the connection tissue to create new knowledge that is not there right now.

[00:02:16] Wesley Faulkner: So that's like the whole arc of it. Depending on when you're listening to this podcast, we are currently enrolling people to take on and champion these specific areas of topics. Here are the lists that we've aggregated from the community of the challenges.

[00:02:33] Wesley Faulkner: And we're looking for managers to say I want to champion that and run it to ground to make sure that we actually have things defined to help us all as dev or all practitioners.

[00:02:43] PJ Haggerty: And I want to zero in because I think that some people I was in the initial meeting kickoff thing that happened back in June and there was a concern and it was oh, this is a town hall, not really a feedback thing, but more of a town hall where we'll come and tell you what we think is [00:03:00] good and you can come and tell us if you don't think it's good.

[00:03:03] PJ Haggerty: But what it really is is a participative activity. Not everybody wants to, and that's okay. But the idea is really behind let's put together a compendium of knowledge about what we do and put that so that when people reference it, they can easily say, this is the way it works.

[00:03:22] PJ Haggerty: It's a constantly moving organic body. It's similar to software. There is nothing done on this. Would that, do you think that's accurate? Great.

[00:03:31] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah, I think that initially I was on that initial feedback preview call as well. And that session, I think, raised a lot of awareness about how developed the thought was of where things were going to go and how open to input.

[00:03:47] Wesley Faulkner: The foundation was to the community and letting the community shape the direction and the focus of the foundation. And I think to its credit, the foundation has taken a lot of that into heart. [00:04:00] And I think that's when I joined actually because of that call or after that call. A lot of the work that I've done, at least on the initial side, was finding a way to make sure that the community's voice is heard.

[00:04:12] Wesley Faulkner: And then once we get all of this feedback, how do we actually act on it? Because it feels like if you think about the possibilities, the developer relations, there's just so much out there. How do we choose which ones that we're going to help move forward? And I devised or helped with the rest of the people in the steering committee and other feedback.

[00:04:31] Wesley Faulkner: From people like you, PJ, about how we address the needs of the community in a way that doesn't feel exclusionary.

[00:04:39] PJ Haggerty: Think exclusionary is the word you're looking for. Yeah.

[00:04:40] Wesley Faulkner: And also how do we actually be productive to actually move forward instead of having constant discussions all the time and where do we actually make sure that it was the right time to do action?

[00:04:52] Jason Hand: Wesley, I got a question. I feel like a lot of our episodes, we generally take a stance on [00:05:00] when it comes to implementing certain things that it just depends on the situation of the organization, the team, the objectives of the org that they're in, there's always just like so many dependencies and variables that go into an implementation of things to take a stance on, how certain aspects or certain elements of developer relations Has found success.

[00:05:23] Jason Hand: I'm wondering if there's plans or if there's been any discussion on including lots of different implementation scenarios rather than trying to be one single source of truth, because I feel like that's probably going to be some pushback and going to be some feedback that maybe we hear from this type of organization or foundation, of what goals do we have about putting into concrete terms what.

[00:05:48] Jason Hand: developer relations is or isn't when we know that there's just so many ways to do it, Startups are going to do it one way enterprise is going to do it a different One part of the world's going to do it in one way [00:06:00] versus others so Anyway, just curious what your thoughts are on that

[00:06:04] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah, there's different verticals, like there's regulated industries like fintech, there are different areas like nonprofit work and open source software as opposed to closed source software.

[00:06:14] Wesley Faulkner: Then there is developer first, and then there's developer plus then you mentioned different languages, but there's also different geos and there's also different access to technologies, like parts of the developing world where steady connected electricity and internet is not something that's.

[00:06:31] Wesley Faulkner: So there's many different facets. So the answer is, we are trying to be as inclusive as possible by making sure that people have the opportunity to put forth their specific concern. At the same time, we are requiring that as groups are formed around these topics, that there are at least three managers.

[00:06:56] Wesley Faulkner: To each of these topics to make sure that there's not [00:07:00] one perspective that's running the show. And then each of these topics, the managers need to recruit at least eight participants. This is to increase the diversity and the different ways that people see things and to make sure that these edge cases or main cases are incorporated into the final result.

[00:07:20] Wesley Faulkner: And last, but not least, this is supposed to be an iterative process. So whatever the group Creates, it will be posted to GitHub and you can, and everyone and anyone can put in pull requests so that their voices are heard and their perspectives are also taken into account.

[00:07:39] PJ Haggerty: And you're saying all this and for those of you who are listening to the audio and saying, wow, Wesley really has this down.

[00:07:44] PJ Haggerty: Wesley has very much structured this and put it into a GitHub document for people to interact with and understand. And I think this that allayed a lot of my concerns when this first came up, because I was like, is this an exercise in student government where the most popular kids [00:08:00] will be voted into their positions of power.

[00:08:01] PJ Haggerty: And everyone else will just sit by the wayside with no voice. And Wesley was very careful to design a way in which that wasn't. I think one of the, one of the things that I liked the most about the structure of this, and we'll add the link to the GitHub and the show notes, but one of the things that I really enjoyed about the structure of this was that anyone who is a manager for only a certain period of time.

[00:08:24] PJ Haggerty: This isn't a situation where you are, to use the term, they often use an open source project. You're a benevolent dictator for life. Which is that, that's your Linus's and Your David Heinemeyer Handwritten. It's great that you create this thing.

[00:08:37] PJ Haggerty: Please let other people as it evolves, take it over. And that's baked into the design. And I feel like we're laying a lot on Wesley here. And I think that there's varying differences between what even the people on this podcast are doing as far as level of participation.

[00:08:51] PJ Haggerty: Like I'm a passive participant. I've been watching what's going on, participating in the discord. Talking to some people about some things, but I'm not a manager. [00:09:00] Wesley's a part of the steering committee. Mary had, is that some of those initial meetings are taking a step back due to some busy work related things.

[00:09:07] PJ Haggerty: And Jason, are you in the collective? Are you in the discussion or are you just an external passive observer at this point in time?.

[00:09:16] Jason Hand: Definitely a passive observer. I think, just through knowing Wesley and the conversations we have here and there I may be a little closer tHand others in terms of just, when I started hearing about it.

[00:09:27] Jason Hand: But yeah, at this point I'm not involved. Other than, like I said, just conversations I've had with Wesley. But definitely curious to learn more about what's going on with it. And I quite honestly, I don't have a lot of depth in knowledge around any of the Linux foundations or any just foundations in general.

[00:09:45] Jason Hand: And I don't know if Wesley, if that's something you can dig a little deeper into, like what would somebody who has no knowledge of what the Linux Foundation is and any of the offshoots of that, like what are the core benefits?

[00:09:57] Wesley Faulkner: I gotta say that there's something that I have to [00:10:00] say about the Linox Foundation in general is that the foundation is an umbrella of other open source projects. So Linux itself is a Linux Foundation project. Git. Is a Linux foundation project. And there's several other Valky is also big and new and it was just launched at the open source summit.

[00:10:21] Wesley Faulkner: In September.

[00:10:23] PJ Haggerty: Don't forget about that. Dang Kubernetes that people keep talking about. The kids are all under the coop. Yep. CNCF is

[00:10:28] Wesley Faulkner: underneath. Yep. The CNCF is under the Linux foundation. Those projects that you know, and love have come under that same umbrella.

[00:10:36] Wesley Faulkner: But I have to say the dev rel foundation is different tHand any of those are in all of the other projects because that this feels more of, A governance body or like a list of documents and not necessarily focused on code and making a product from that standpoint, which I think is a little bit different.

[00:10:58] Wesley Faulkner: And the question is [00:11:00] why the Linux foundation, and we have a lot of these addressed in our FAQ, if you go to the But for my take that we wanted a place in a home. That was nonpartisan, meaning like it's not owned by a company or someone with specific interests. One that has a history of supporting software and open source processes and making sure it's community like the way that we come to decisions is open to the community and the community can participate

[00:11:32] Wesley Faulkner: I can't think of any that checks all of the boxes. So it's part of the Linux Foundation because it is one that does already have a reputation. They are giving us resources and supporting us from a process standpoint. And it allows us to have access to other projects and maintainers and people who've been doing this way longer tHand we have.

[00:11:55] Wesley Faulkner: And so being under that umbrella also gives us that connection and [00:12:00] of the siblings who are also in the project. But also just to make sure that it is noted that we are unfunded product projects under the Linux foundation. So we were not trying to make money. No, one's giving us money.

[00:12:14] Wesley Faulkner: It's just right now it's all community and volunteer work. That's in the found formation of this foundation. So it's our passions that are driving it. So if there are better suggestions, we are open to hear it. But right now the Linux Foundation sounds like a really good choice and they've been an excellent partner for us.

[00:12:36] Wesley Faulkner: Without her support and her guidance and her doing the intros and her doing a lot of the heavy lifting I think we wouldn't have gotten as far as we have right now.

[00:12:47] PJ Haggerty: I think it's interesting you mention that because I know that organically around I had been talking for a couple years with people. Wesley, you and I had a conversation that I think is now two and a half years ago about putting together some sort [00:13:00] governance document, some sort of something to say, this is DevRel.

[00:13:05] PJ Haggerty: This is the way it worked. This is, giving some sort of guideline to what this all means. I think that some people might be like the Linux foundation eyebrows raised what's going on here at the same time, I think, without having that logistical support, if not the organizational support, this may never have come off because so many people were working in so many small working groups, but not really getting anywhere because they couldn't figure out that logistical component, like how do we do this and not exclude people?

[00:13:32] PJ Haggerty: How do we do this and ensure that we have the good mindshare and the diverse mindshare that we need to actually share this information. These are questions that luckily the Linux foundation has answered before, and therefore they can answer it for this.

[00:13:49] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah. I got to say that there's been a lot of reaction to the Linux foundation.

[00:13:52] Wesley Faulkner: And even just the DevRel foundation. Let's just talk it from there about one saying, why do we need this? That's one of the feedbacks that we've gotten. The [00:14:00] other is, this is amazing. I, this is, I'm so excited. And then I think what Jason also said is that. I'm going to wait and see, so will we, will this have legs?

[00:14:11] Wesley Faulkner: Will this keep going? Will this actually produce anything? Will this make a change? And when we were working on our little project back then, Jason PJ it was, some of the conversations were just like, why are we the two people? Or what, why are we the ones to be able to hold this torch and I think the Linux foundation kind of answers some of those questions in terms of it, are we a trusted organization or who legitimizes us for being a person that could have a voice?

[00:14:43] Jason Hand: So one more thing I wanted to touch on because I do see a lot of benefits that can come and clearly there's, great examples from the Linux Foundation of success and how this kind of community effort. Can come together and really help in a lot of ways, but a concrete way that I think really [00:15:00] stands out to me that could help for a lot of those folks who are either new to developer relations or in community in general, or maybe they're out on the market looking for new roles because we do hear so much of a variety in terms of what DevRel can look like.

[00:15:15] Jason Hand: And you see it like on new job postings where one company is looking for. With a title as a developer relations professional or some variation of that, but then looking through the description, it looks like it's going to include some roles and responsibilities that have traditionally not aligned with developer relations.

[00:15:32] Jason Hand: Oftentimes there's just so much variance in terms of what DevRel roles could look like, but this might actually help. Narrow that a little bit and make it easier for both those who are looking to fill roles and those who are looking to find new roles. We're all speaking the same language on what the expectations are here.

[00:15:51] PJ Haggerty: Yeah. There's that centralization concept of, maybe if we can define and say, this is what DevRel looks like, then [00:16:00] maybe the hiring managers and the people at LinkedIn and indeed, and what have you, is Monster.com still a thing? I don't think Monster.com is still a thing.

[00:16:07] PJ Haggerty: But maybe the people who are in charge of all of this hiring and doing all these things, maybe they can finally have a good definition to understand that maybe you're not looking for a developer advocate or a developer relations specialist, maybe you're actually looking for someone in marketing.

[00:16:24] PJ Haggerty: Maybe you're actually looking for a sales engineer. Who's technically minded, but they're to speak to onboard clients. Maybe you're even looking for customer success. Because like you said, Jason, I've looked at a lot of these job descriptions, especially over here that I was unemployed.

[00:16:39] PJ Haggerty: And a lot of these people do not understand that their questions that they're asking or that the positions they're describing are not developer relations positions, but. The buzzwords here. So let's go with what we got.

[00:16:52] Wesley Faulkner: And also to be frank, these questions have been answered and probably it's been answered multiple [00:17:00] times by different people and everyone who's been in DevRel for a very long time can see and read these and say, that's actually valid.

[00:17:09] Wesley Faulkner: Someone who's brand new may not have that ability to distinguish what is. Actually something that makes sense. I think the DevRel foundation will help those new people to be able to do some of that work for them.

[00:17:21] Wesley Faulkner: Not necessarily have to create all this new documentation and resources, but aggregating some of the things that are out there that is really good, high quality work that we can help with bringing them into the fold and allowing people to use us as a central point to jump off and find these other resources.

[00:17:38] PJ Haggerty: Yeah, that's awesome. And I think that I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. People should not have an expectation. Let's set some boundaries here. People should not have an expectation that like come January one, the dev rel foundation is about to drop the hottest mixtape you've ever heard about dev rel.

[00:17:54] PJ Haggerty: These things are going to take time. Yes, we have hope, but hope takes work.

[00:17:59] Wesley Faulkner: [00:18:00] And 1 of the things that we're asking or requiring for all these groups that form is that they give at least a monthly update on 1 of our open calls and open meetings that we do every week.

[00:18:10] Wesley Faulkner: If you want to stay abreast about the progress take a look in at. Our GitHub and look at what the process we're working and fostering. And also just, if you have input jump into one of these calls and just talk to the people who are championing these directly.

[00:18:26] PJ Haggerty: Or at the very least jump in the discord and see what the conversation is.

[00:18:29] PJ Haggerty: Yep. I think there's a lot of good conversation going on over there as well. And with that, thank you for giving us space to talk about this.

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Artwork photo by Ramin Khatibi on Unsplash.

It comes as no surprise that something in the hiring of Developer Relations practitioners has become a mystery box of confusion. No standard path to follow, interviews ranging all over the map, homework assignments that go nowhere, and most conversations leading to few actual opportunities.

Topics Discussed:

Key Problems with Hiring in DevRel:

Jason Hand adds that the mismatch between job descriptions and the actual needs of companies is another key issue, as job seekers often face unrealistic expectations (e.g., hiring for a "unicorn" candidate).

Challenges with Job Descriptions and Expectations:

The language around DevRel roles varies significantly across industries, and this results in job descriptions being vague or overly broad, making it difficult for potential candidates to identify if the job aligns with their skills.

Hiring Managers' Lack of DevRel Expertise: Even people within DevRel leadership positions (e.g., Directors or VPs of DevRel) often lack a broad perspective of how DevRel functions across different companies, leading to myopic decision-making during the interview process.

The Role of Recruiters and Automation in the Hiring Process:

Jason Hand discusses how recruiters who lack a deep understanding of DevRel can exacerbate the problem, often overlooking candidates who don't fit the narrow criteria set by automated systems, while also failing to match candidates with roles that align with their skills.

The Myth of the “DevRel Influencer” and Burnout:

Wesley Faulkner also discusses how burnout is common in DevRel roles due to unrealistic expectations and the volatile nature of the profession, where individuals often jump between short-term roles due to a lack of clear objectives or proper resourcing.

Job Hopping in DevRel:

Wesley Faulkner links job hopping to the failure of organizations to resource and value DevRel properly, causing professionals to leave quickly for better opportunities.

Solutions and Hope for the Future:

They also stress the importance of clarity in job descriptions and education for recruiters about the true nature of DevRel roles.

Key Takeaways:

Action Items:

Key Words and Themes:

[00:00:00] Wesley Faulkner: Welcome back to the Community Pulse. My name is Wesley Faulkner. And today we are bringing in a subject matter. That's near and dear to my heart. And this is hiring in DevRel as a person who's currently looking for a new role. I've seen things that I haven't seen before since the last time I was on the job hub.

[00:00:16] Wesley Faulkner: To start this topic, we have Jason Hand and PJ Haggerty here with me for us to have this kind of impromptu conversation to dive deep into the subject and I'll kick us off with the first question. What do you think is broken with DevRel hiring? And we'll start with you, PJ.

[00:00:33] PJ Haggerty: I almost want to answer, not flippantly, but seriously, what isn't broken with DevRel hiring?

[00:00:40] PJ Haggerty: I feel like that's a shorter list. I think that there's a few things that are wrong. One of the things that I think is a general tech issue is that the filtering and distilling of appropriate people and resumes is based on keyword searches and some SEO and maybe some AI magic in [00:01:00] the background.

[00:01:00] PJ Haggerty: That's causing people that are completely valid candidates to get booted out of situations. The evolution of DevRel and what that means is becoming a huge factor because I think a lot of people are thinking that it means I get an extra marketer or I get someone who does pre sales or, like we're still fighting this constant battle of defining DevRel.

[00:01:19] PJ Haggerty: And I know we talked a little bit in the last episode about DevRel maturity, but I still think that a vast majority of our jobs revolve around explaining what we do. And then you just add to that the glut of people who want to be in DevRel versus the hyper minority of people who are actually experienced in the job.

[00:01:39] PJ Haggerty: But because there's so many people there's a big signal to noise ratio issue. A lot of people want to do this. But the actual signal, the people who are qualified, the people who are experienced, the people who can do it is a very limited number of people. And I think all of those things contribute to the currently horrible, frankly, horrible situation in hiring [00:02:00] endeavor.

[00:02:00] PJ Haggerty: And I know that. Wesley, you're going through it right now. I think a lot of our listeners know I just finished going through it a few months ago, and it was like a 7 month slog of absolutely nightmarish hiring practice.

[00:02:11] PJ Haggerty: What do you got, Jay?

[00:02:15] Jason Hand: What I got was that, I agree with all of that. And as somebody who was laid off a little over a year ago, spent a good amount of time and energy into the whole process of submitting resumes and going through rounds and rounds of interviews and also doing that while injured, it was not a great experience.

[00:02:35] Jason Hand: So I empathize with everybody who's been through a layoff-like situation. Because it is, it's traumatic. And to find them for myself, a place that has been a good landing and a good, just opportunity for me has, I think I've helped, I've seen the full arc, basically. For being super in a low place and then suddenly feeling like, you've returned to what you did [00:03:00] previously and landed on your feet.

[00:03:01] Jason Hand: So it's a scary thing in general. And right now from a lot of the folks that I'm close to, Wesley being one, PJ being one there's several others in the industry and the community that I am real close friends with that have also recently been laid off. I feel like a broken record reaching out to everybody and like offering support and saying, I'm going to forward everything I get to you.

[00:03:26] Jason Hand: Because one of the things that I guess for me to point out as what's broken or things that I think are broken is I know a lot of people who are looking, but I also know of a lot of roles that are open. If you could just put a finger on what's broken, we can't fill the roles.

[00:03:42] Jason Hand: And some of them are there, some of them have changed some of them. Like I think PJ really pointed out a really big problem is there's a mismatch on expectations of what somebody who is a DevRel professional does. And some of that has to do with just language, across different languages.

[00:03:57] Jason Hand: Industries and what we refer to as DevRel and [00:04:00] DevExperience. DevExperience at Datadog is quite a bit different from DevExperience at a lot of other companies. And so I have to keep in mind that there's not often a one to one mapping on what people are talking about just within DevRel.

[00:04:12] Jason Hand: So that's a big problem right there. When you have a recruiter who only is going off of a script and going off of the details from resumes and job requests. Job descriptions, they don't know the nuance and know that there's this language thing. So that's problem number one. I also think that since COVID a lot of us are just rewired or wired to really have a strong allergic reaction to coming back into the office.

[00:04:38] Jason Hand: And that is a big problem. I think in general, for a lot of companies is the return to office situations and how that changes.

[00:04:47] PJ Haggerty: 100%.

[00:04:47] Jason Hand: It was just a lot of family situations. They can't just change it, and so that's a whole other episode to talk about, especially the folks and friends over at Amazon.

[00:04:56] Jason Hand: I also think in my experience that when I see [00:05:00] some of the job postings that are out there, they're really looking for a unicorn. They're looking for a superstar person. And it's usually like a startup, with the general, like standard, like startup rockstar language, things like that.

[00:05:13] Jason Hand: But so they want somebody who's done a lot of stuff and can wear a lot of hats and has a successful portfolio showing that they've done that. In their past but the compensation rarely is even close to matching what you're asking for. You're asking for somebody who's senior or above, but you're paying for some, something that's a little bit more entry level.

[00:05:35] Jason Hand: And so I see that a problem too, is like the, just a huge mismatch on expectations versus compensation. And then the last one I'll say is that I think that DevRel has evolved, has changed like everything, and some of the language has changed, and there's new people in the community, and all of that has just caused everything to just change over time,

[00:05:57] Jason Hand: push and pull on what I was talking about with language and what we [00:06:00] refer to as certain things within DevRel. And I also think just the evolution of technology in general, like DevOps, has like a similar problem where it was very clear what all that was. And now it's a little squishy and, but you can point to some companies that are super successful at it and then others where they're like laying off people.

[00:06:18] Jason Hand: I think it's, stuff like that is so hard to put a pin on, put your finger on because it's so complex, and it has everything to do with also just economies of the world and upcoming elections

[00:06:29] Jason Hand: and it's like hard to put a finger on how to fix it, so that's what, three or four things for me that don't feel like what's broken, but one of the things I told Wesley and PJ before we got on here is I don't really know. I have the same experience as a lot of people and how bad it is, also some success stories in there, but I don't know if I have any suggestions to help fix it.

[00:06:48] Jason Hand: Cause I feel like I'm in the mix trying to fix it. Being part of interviews and the process of hiring and now not just being somebody on the sideline, who's just complaining about it. Like I'm actually part of the system now. So it makes me part of the [00:07:00] problem, and I don't know if I have a real clear solution. So that was my one fear of, the subject today.

[00:07:09] Wesley Faulkner: We could, the first step is acknowledging that there's a problem.

[00:07:12] Jason Hand: There is a problem

[00:07:13] Wesley Faulkner: initially that if people don't understand the landscape, then that's step number one.

[00:07:17] PJ Haggerty: Yeah. I think there's an expansionist too. This is a tech in general problem. Cause Jason, you brought up a few things and I know Wesley, we haven't asked you what you think the factors are but just to dial in on something that Jason said, this is a tech wide problem, I think, where it's like, Hey, you know what we do when we interview people, we have an inexperienced HR person who is not technical go through a system of preexisting documentation that says, this is what we want.

[00:07:44] PJ Haggerty: And it's kicked out. Maybe they chat to you, PT it, put it up on LinkedIn and they said it's nice to have, but the HR person thinks that's a must haves. So you've already lost yourself with one level of filter. Then we have 17 interviews. And then one of them's a technical interview where we make you write code.

[00:07:58] PJ Haggerty: Yeah. This is still a [00:08:00] problem for tech in general, DevRel specifically, but tech in general has not figured out how to hire people. No one has disrupted the hiring space looking at your startups. None of you have done it. You tried with a glass door and greenhouse and all of those, all those are just apps to do the same thing that monster did in 1996.

[00:08:19] PJ Haggerty: Like you're not doing anything new. Nothing's been disrupted. You just change the name of your website. None of the three of us on this call, or probably anyone who's listening has the power to do this on a large scale, but I think it's worthwhile talking about it because the more people talk about it, more attention is brought to it.

[00:08:36] PJ Haggerty: Sorry, that was my little rant. Wesley, what do you think is contributing to this issue?

[00:08:42] Wesley Faulkner: One of the things that I think is part of it is I know you mentioned about the ATS the applicant tracking systems that don't have the right keywords or something going through that, but also as a person who's just trying to use whatever these employments are.

[00:08:57] Wesley Faulkner: Websites are, I'm not going to name any by specifics, [00:09:00] but DevRel is not really a drop down. You can do marketing, you can do sales, you can do all these different things. DevRel as a profession is not listed as even a way to be discovered or to label yourself. And so that means that you are more prone to being abused or skipped over by keywords because that is the primary way of how they find people rather than people who are doing the profession already.

[00:09:22] Wesley Faulkner: So I think that's one of the ways it's just not being able to identify yourself as a candidate for a specific industry or role. The other is.

[00:09:31] PJ Haggerty: No, I just agree with you.

[00:09:32] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah. The other is getting past these JDs looking at them because of this lack of understanding about DevRel, they really are looking for the unicorn candidate by putting a whole bunch of things there.

[00:09:44] Wesley Faulkner: But what is also missing is the thing that they're trying to fix or solve or why they need a person who is in that position. So they're really focused on getting the right person and so as a candidate, it's harder to self-identify your [00:10:00] alignment with the job and a role in a way that's actually more accurate than they say, we need someone with this many deals of experience or this doing this industry, and so on and so forth with her just characteristics of a person rather than someone who can tackle an issue. Because let's say I've done DevRel for a lot of database companies. Does that mean that I couldn't do DevRel for an analytics company? I think that they're exactly,

[00:10:26] Wesley Faulkner: So they're listing the things that they're needing rather than listing the problems, which means that, yeah, I guess I don't check all the boxes, but I don't understand why that it's a box that needs to be checked related to what you need after getting through the phone screen or interview process is just understanding, like it's, and that gets to my last point, which is a big majority of DevRel is being hired by people who don't know DevRel.

[00:10:50] Wesley Faulkner: And I know we've touched on this, but it's also a little bit more than that. So even when I've had interviews with directors of DevRel [00:11:00] or VPs of DevRel or heads of DevRel or people who have done DevRel or are currently doing DevRel. It can be one myopic in terms of they've only done DevRel at that company.

[00:11:11] Wesley Faulkner: And so that they're in that kind of comfort zone of how DevRel is done there, and they're looking to replicate that. Or number two, they may have more experience doing DevRel. The rounds and rounds of interview that you were mentioning, PJ. Sometimes it's like you talk to someone in marketing, you talk to customer service, you talk to all these other departments that need to get a buy in for this role, where if it was in the other role, you wouldn't have to run the gauntlet of all these other departments in some ways, good, but it amplifies the error or the problem where people are giving opinions based on their own experiences, being someone in sales or being someone in marketing or being in someone in product, not saying that they shouldn't have a hand.

[00:11:51] Wesley Faulkner: And the interview process, but they think what they know, being a practitioner is way different than banning an armchair [00:12:00] quarterback and saying I think you should have passed, not run on that play, or he should've gone for it on fourth down.

[00:12:05] Wesley Faulkner: It's easy to make that call when you don't have the skin in the game and you don't know all of the context. And I think that's the art part of the problem with the interview loops.

[00:12:13] PJ Haggerty: It's a funny cause. On both sides is as an interviewer and an interviewee. I've had situations where I've been interviewing someone, I'm like, I have no idea why I'm interviewing you.

[00:12:22] PJ Haggerty: It has nothing to do with what I do. You will not work with my department. I think they just randomly wanted to throw an extra person on for culture fit, which is such a bullshit term. And then on the other side, I've had people that I'm interviewing for the job and they've told me straight up, they're like, I don't know why I'm the person interviewing you.

[00:12:37] PJ Haggerty: I'm not sure why I'm here, except for there's some sort of org chart somewhere that draws a line between me and what you might be doing. And it's not unusual. But I think that also going back to one of your earlier points, when you mentioned that a lot of times these job descriptions are saying we want X, Y, and Z.

[00:12:55] PJ Haggerty: And we're going to build it this way, but they're not telling you the problem. The [00:13:00] one of the things that I found tripped me up a lot of interviews, I'd say, okay, so what problem are you trying to solve with DevRel? What's not being met right now with what you currently have? Why are you hiring for DevRel?

[00:13:11] PJ Haggerty: And people really don't like it when you ask them why they're doing the thing that would give you the job. I'm relatively sure I probably missed out on some opportunities, not just because of my smart mouth, but because I really need that question answered. What do you think? Dev rel is what do you think a dev advocate does?

[00:13:28] PJ Haggerty: What do you think I'm going to do in this role at this company? This isn't a, where do I see myself in a five year situation? What is my day to day? What do you think it's supposed to be? Don't ask me. I already know what the job is. I've been doing this for 15 years. You got to tell me if you actually are trying to hire the right person.

[00:13:47] Jason Hand: Yeah, I think it's a mixture. I don't know if it's an intentional bait and switch either.

[00:13:50] PJ Haggerty: people are just literally, they don't know what they're looking for.

[00:13:54] Jason Hand: Yeah, I think it's probably a majority of that. I do think that there may be some times out there where [00:14:00] people are just like, Yeah, I've seen some other companies have success in dev rel, and we want some of that

[00:14:04] PJ Haggerty: and I think with startups, sometimes it's a, the board or the investors come in and say, Hey, we've got things that you should do yet, things that you should do.

[00:14:12] PJ Haggerty: And one of the things is to hire a developer advocate. And I've seen that at companies that don't have a consumer and or developer facing product, and it's like, why?

[00:14:22] Jason Hand: Yeah. I remember I, maybe I was, I thought I was telling you about this PJ, but maybe it was somebody else. I'm on TikTok occasionally.

[00:14:29] Jason Hand: And I came across this one story that I was like, Oh, actually that's a very similar kind of metaphor for what's going on in DevRel and probably some other places too. But there was this story of this woman who found a job listing online, applied for it, and did an online interview. Everything was great.

[00:14:47] Jason Hand: It was like a sales role, I think. And then eventually you had to go to the site for training. And then it wasn't until, and that was probably like the fourth interview or something that happened. And it wasn't until [00:15:00] she got there that she learned that the first thing you do is you go and work like a kiosk at the mall.

[00:15:06] Jason Hand: And then from there, you graduate and go to another place. And then you finally would get to the actual job that she thought she was applying for in the first place. Hopefully doesn't apply to a lot of dev rel, but I know that, in general, people aren't always forthcoming in high turnover positions.

[00:15:25] Jason Hand: And I think maybe there's this conception that what I fear, the biggest thing for a lot of people in our community is that they don't realize that their own personality, like their own online presence, like they're themselves, what makes them unique is. Is the value. And so if you damage that by saying, in any way, really, then you've diminished your own value.

[00:15:49] Jason Hand: And a big part of that is being challenged, I think, with a lot of the just mismatched understandings of what DevRel does,

[00:15:59] PJ Haggerty: right. And [00:16:00] I think that we still have an issue with some people who really want to get into DevRel because they perceive it as this.

[00:16:06] PJ Haggerty: Lifestyle party. I'm going to travel the world. And it really, it wasn't that before COVID. And it really isn't like that now. I think the people that I saw that even a good bulk of their work was conferences and speaking and doing speaking engagements. A lot of those people are not doing that so much anymore, and they're doing other kinds of content.

[00:16:26] PJ Haggerty: They're doing videos, they're doing podcasts, they're doing, whatever, webinars. But like not the number of people that are still, hardcore road dogs, being being out and doing 25 and 30 conferences a year, that number has diminished to a near to zero number.

[00:16:43] PJ Haggerty: There's just not that many people doing it anymore. So if you're coming into DevRel and you're thinking, I'm going to have this great life where I travel all the time and it's going to be easy and you have very little experience and very little technical know-how. I'm going to ask you to do us all a favor for those [00:17:00] of us who are looking for jobs and don't apply.

[00:17:03] PJ Haggerty: Don't apply. This isn't a job for you. We're not influencers. We're not. Instagram, TikTok stars.

[00:17:09] Jason Hand: Only watermelon,

[00:17:10] PJ Haggerty: watermelon. Like three people get that and the rest of us will move on. But if you're looking for a job where you can travel and.

[00:17:17] PJ Haggerty: Don't worry about the technical repercussions of the things that you do. Join an airline or something. Don't get into DevRel. The flood of people that are not qualified to do this job, I think, are another major factor of why we're not able to get hired when we have lots of experience.

[00:17:32] PJ Haggerty: Because it costs a lot of money. And it's not like an exorbitant amount of money. I don't get paid as much as middle management execs that do basically nothing all day. But, it does cost a lot to hire me because I have years of experience. Those who are hiring should not cut corners and say I'll hire someone who has very little technical experience and very little DevRel experience just so that I can pay them less than 100, 000 a year.

[00:17:56] PJ Haggerty: This is, I think, another reason why we're not getting, we do [00:18:00] command a higher set salary and in the same way that I think with engineers that's going away. I think we have to start working on what it is. We're what value we're bringing to the situation that makes us earn that high level of pay.

[00:18:16] Jason Hand: No, I have something to come. I'd like to come back to that too, because I feel like we don't really focus on hiring junior people, junior level people as much, and we don't really have a method of bringing people up from let's say new recruits out of college internships, stuff like that, maybe you see it here and there, but generally speaking, it's not.

[00:18:34] Jason Hand: So I'd love to come back to that because I do think that there's space for people who are more junior, but like you pointed out, there's lots of us who have been doing this for a long time. And we take on a lot of the responsibilities and just, there's a lot more things that we can accomplish, than a junior person.

[00:18:50] Jason Hand: But I want to go back to, Wesley was talking about during your process of looking for new jobs and it's frustrating because a [00:19:00] lot of the systems that are out there using keywords and there's probably AI involved to do a lot of filtering and sorting and stuff like that. I'm just curious about your thoughts around if.

[00:19:10] Jason Hand: There is some automation being put in place, or if there's just something that's making it so that the keywords are so important, what prevents people from just putting in all the keywords to help them, basically game the system and try to increase their odds. Or you think that's what people are already doing and that still doesn't.

[00:19:29] Jason Hand: Still doesn't like help.

[00:19:32] Wesley Faulkner: I think because it's the eye of the beholder there, when you're talking about DevRel, it could be any tool based developer plus whatever company. And so that's what an infinite amount of keywords that it could be. For instance, social media needs to be a keyword there. For someone who's looking for someone to post on social media, but also let's say I wanted to work on technical documentation.

[00:19:55] Wesley Faulkner: Does that need to be there too? Since DevRel is also very [00:20:00] vast and very distributed in that way. You could overload it with keywords, but as a job seeker getting quality roles or getting filtered on the other end of what roles you're qualified for. It also poisons that as well.

[00:20:17] Wesley Faulkner: So when you put all the stuff into these systems, did you start getting it? Oh, DevRel like real estate.

[00:20:26] PJ Haggerty: Or like a social worker?

[00:20:27] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah. If you have social media Ooh, maybe you want to do social work. I've had that experience as well as where you put too much stuff in there and you, and it just makes it it's so much that it's, you have to do all the filtering on that, that in as well.

[00:20:39] Wesley Faulkner: It's a cat and mouse game in which. Either way, the candidate loses,

[00:20:47] Wesley Faulkner: I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah.

[00:20:48] Jason Hand: And there, yeah, no, it does. And there are a finite number of roles open at any given point too. I think it's, that's interesting the way you put it, because it [00:21:00] makes me feel like, we wear so many hats and have so many different skills that we even get pulled into other, Industries and just other areas of working opportunities that we probably wouldn't take in general, but there's some crossover there that, whether it's a good crossover or not I don't think any of us are looking to be property managers at the local community building, in our neighborhood or something.

[00:21:23] PJ Haggerty: if the payer,

[00:21:24] Jason Hand: my, in my experience, the recruiters, the ones who are looking are also running into that same thing. Like they're looking for Wesley. But for some reason they can't find Wesley, so that in order to find a Wesley there, they know all the things about Wesley, but all that does is bring them a list of not Wesley's and nobody's happy.

[00:21:44] Jason Hand: And

[00:21:44] PJ Haggerty: All that's because Wesley, I'm Wesley. I forgot that keyword. What's your name on it, man? Yeah. You should probably put your name, Wesley. I figured out the problem. You haven't been hired because you have to put your name and [00:22:00] email on the resume, or they can't contact you. I think that, that checklisty kind of AI thing is a part of it.

[00:22:06] PJ Haggerty: I discovered working with some insider folks that the reason why people don't get hired often has nothing to do because we should take it into consideration. Let me boil this down to what I'm actually trying to say. We should take into consideration the other side.

[00:22:20] PJ Haggerty: There is a burden as well. And that burden is that they are seeing thousands and thousands of resumes or submissions or LinkedIn applications or whatever. They are missing tons and tons of these things and they have to sift through them fairly quickly. So they have to build up a tool base. It says I can easily get through this.

[00:22:41] PJ Haggerty: I almost think there should be some sort of service that says, I specifically help you hire for DevRel and we answer those questions up front so we can get through all of the bullshit and get you to the point of meeting with the candidate faster.

[00:22:54] Jason Hand: And I think it has to be clear too, because there's two, one, there's two avenues here to help you with [00:23:00] connecting with the right people. That one problem is just finding Wesley.

[00:23:04] Jason Hand: But then

[00:23:04] Jason Hand: the second problem is once you've got him, don't fuck it up. Don't fumble here, and that's the part. I don't think that there's a lot of guidance on either, like because it's probably different in a lot of different places, but everybody has a different idea around what DevRel should be and things like that.

[00:23:19] PJ Haggerty: Yeah. And as you go along, there's people that are, if there's people confused about why they're part of the process, they don't know why they're meeting Wesley.

[00:23:26] PJ Haggerty: They're like, he seems like a nice guy. We had a great conversation. I don't know what the hell DevRel is. What are you asking me right now?

[00:23:33] Wesley Faulkner: Absolutely. I also just like to dovetail on this like fumbling the bag, as they say I was going to point out the three ways while I'm not a good candidate.

[00:23:41] Wesley Faulkner: And through this interview process, and probably a lot of people can identify with this going back to what is DevRel I think that there is a misconception of, or the poisoning of the well, using that term again, of the DevRel influencer and people wanting someone to go viral, to Make [00:24:00] tons of video content, have a huge social media following.

[00:24:02] Wesley Faulkner: I still see that listed on the job description is what they want as a person. And I think that the DevRel influencer is something that feels short lived, like it was a thing. And then those people are still like, not as prominent as they were.

[00:24:22] PJ Haggerty: Yeah, it lasted less time in the confederacy.

[00:24:24] Wesley Faulkner: And that's still what people are looking for and thinking what dev rel is. And so I've seen that and I'm not one of those people. So I think that's part of the issue where I wash out. The other thing is the questions on how would you fix X or how would you approach this? Or what is, how do you dev rel?

[00:24:42] Wesley Faulkner: Looking for definitive Answers for these very vague questions is something that I struggle with because you might be an early startup where you don't have a name for yourself. So awareness is something that's important. Or you're in an industry where it's brand new and people don't really [00:25:00] know that it exists and, or the terminology.

[00:25:02] Wesley Faulkner: And so you have to do a lot of education where you have to tell people that. This is even a problem and educating them on this and why a solution of this will make their lives easier. Or it could be like a brand that's been around for years and everyone knows about, but maybe they have 5, 000 products and there's a new one.

[00:25:20] Wesley Faulkner: And so you have to make sure that you can stand out between your 4, 099th product. And I have to say this 5, 000 products is actually something that's should, you should pay attention to, or it's iterative and it's a 2. 0 or a 3. 0 and why should you care if it's filled, is it incremental?

[00:25:39] Wesley Faulkner: Or is it, there, there's a lot of problems within dev rel and there's a lot of companies and company positioning where not one approach works for everyone. It's extremely bespoke to understand not only what the problem set is, the company set is, but what resources do you have? Are you, do you have an agency that you're working with?

[00:25:57] Wesley Faulkner: Is this internally? Do you have resources? Do you [00:26:00] have a budget? Do you have a travel budget? There are so many things that limit not only what you can do, but how you should do it and when you can do it. Do you have a big conference coming up? Do you have a big deployment coming up? Do you have a big announcement coming up?

[00:26:13] Wesley Faulkner: There are some things that you cannot move, but things need to be done before that or around that. All of that stuff comes into how you approach DevRel and how you solve some of these problems. That really is, are you putting in best practices so the low hanging fruit can just, you can see immediate results?

[00:26:29] Wesley Faulkner: Or are you reinventing how they've done things and cleaning up like the sloppy DevRel they did before you got hired? There are several different ways. And having to answer those questions can be a real struggle. And what you were saying, PJ, you're like, why are you hiring this? That can be something that kind of hurts.

[00:26:49] Wesley Faulkner: And the last one, I'm going to bring this up. And this could be more of a me thing than anything, but job hopping. My tenure for previous roles have been very short. And people don't, I [00:27:00] don't think people understand the volatility that's around DevRel. And that's something that I think I struggle with as well as other people.

[00:27:07] PJ Haggerty: Said that and I said, yes. Everybody who's been in DevRel for a while.

[00:27:11] Wesley Faulkner: Yes, absolutely. It's because of some of this hiring process. They don't know what they want. They don't know how to do it. They don't resource it appropriately.

[00:27:19] Wesley Faulkner: They are disinvesting. They don't even understand the value of DevRel, they don't see the value in DevRel. So a lot of those things are going into how people do DevRel and burnout is extremely prevalent with anyone who's doing developer relations.

[00:27:34] Wesley Faulkner: I think that understanding of the industry from that perspective is something that's also lost on people who are hiring.

[00:27:41] Jason Hand: I feel like the common theme that we I'm hearing here, and I think all of us agree is if you are looking for a place. Make sure it is crystal clear what it is that job is expecting you to do and that it aligns with who you are just as a person and somebody who has to own that [00:28:00] this is me, like I have to be Jason Hand for the future out there.

[00:28:03] Jason Hand: But yeah, I think just making sure everybody's on the same page before you go into a job, because. Job hopping, I think, makes it sound like you are leaving on your own every two years.

[00:28:14] Jason Hand: There's lots and lots of reasons why people leave their jobs frequently, and I think even for a long time, people were giving advice that if you're at a company longer than a couple of years, it's probably a good idea to start looking somewhere else. Cause you, you're not going to have an opportunity to level up or get a promotion or anything like that, unless you take another job somewhere.

[00:28:34] PJ Haggerty: Competing

[00:28:34] Jason Hand: incentives.

[00:28:36] PJ Haggerty: Even beyond that, it seems when I was going through the job search process recently, people always go through your resume, explain why, so you were at this place. Why'd you leave? I was laid off. You're at this place.

[00:28:45] PJ Haggerty: Why'd you leave? I was laid off. So how am I to blame for job hopping? If I get laid off every one or two years, that's a little ridiculous.

[00:28:55] Jason Hand: And I think that there's probably filters somewhere that look for people who have shown [00:29:00] a history of not being all in. They come in here and they do short term, they take their paycheck and they go somewhere else.

[00:29:05] Jason Hand: And I think that's what people are afraid of. But also there's lots of people who get filtered out because it looks like they did that. And that's not, that has nothing to do with why they've only kept jobs for a couple of years. So it comes down to, I think probably really informed, really skilled recruiters, maybe we need to try to educate recruiters a little bit more on what DevRel.

[00:29:34] Jason Hand: We all agree that recruiting, hiring, and DevRel is broken. I think we also just agree like in tech in general, it's broken. There's some unique things around DevRel that seemed to be heavily showing some connection to just mismatch and understanding what the role is.

[00:29:53] PJ Haggerty: I think it's cyclical. I think that is. Business either get a better understanding or maybe as more documentation comes up from this, [00:30:00] Linux Foundation group as people are more educated on what's going on in DevRel and who's qualified and things like that.

[00:30:07] PJ Haggerty: It should improve. I hope it improves. That's all I can do because otherwise things can't carry on the way they've been going.

[00:30:13] Jason Hand: Yeah,

[00:30:14] PJ Haggerty: so I'm glad Wesley. I'm glad you brought this topic up. I think it's on, it's at the front of a lot of people's minds. Those who are looking, those who aren't looking, but maybe soon it seems like the level of certainty in this job area is definitely gone south.

[00:30:28] PJ Haggerty: If it ever was there. So I'm glad we had a chance to talk about it and get to, and I always love when we get a chance to hang out and chat about these things. They become great episodes. I feel like this is a great episode. And I'd like to. Thank everybody for listening.

[00:30:42] PJ Haggerty: Please share with us your research on what you're finding in your hiring situation. So this email has a bunch of areas about blue sky email if you want to info community policy dot. I. O. we're happy to hear from you and we'd be happy to read your messages to other folks. Thank you very much for the privilege of [00:31:00] your time.

[00:31:00] PJ Haggerty: And we'll see you next time on the Community Pulse.

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Artwork by Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash.

Recently, the topic of DevRel maturity sparked a conversation: What qualities define a mature community and a seasoned team? Join PJ, Jason, Mary, and Wesley as they share their insights on past experiences, current trends shaping the field, and key indicators to monitor as you strive to build a thriving, successful community.

Topics Discussed:

Mary Thengvall introduces the topic of maturity in community programs, DevRel teams, and broader community growth, asking the co-hosts for their views on what it means for a program or team to be “mature.”

The Definition of Maturity:

Wesley Faulkner offers multiple angles for assessing maturity:

Maturity in the Context of Company History:

Challenges in Community Maturity:

Evaluating and Using Data:

The Evolution of Community Programs:

Impact of External Growth and Organizational Expectations:

Key Takeaways:

Action Items:

Key Words and Themes:

[00:00:13] Mary Thengvall: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Community Pulse. I'm Mary Thengvall, and I brought up this topic to the team recently as something that I've been curious about and thinking a little bit more about.

[00:00:26] Mary Thengvall: And I'd love to get everybody's opinion on it. So the idea of the maturity of community programs or the maturity of. A community or the maturity of a team and trying to figure out what actually is that definition of mature in those different examples? What makes a program mature? What makes a team mature?

[00:00:50] Mary Thengvall: What can be done as a result of having a more mature program or DevRel team? And I'd love to get everybody's opinions on it. [00:01:00]

[00:01:00] PJ Haggerty: I think if I could weigh in for a second, I think that one of the interesting things here is the word you mentioned, the word mature. Like 17 times which is good, but I also feel like maturity is in some ways similar to when we, when tech companies use the word enterprise, what does that mean?

[00:01:15] PJ Haggerty: It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And a lot of, in a lot of cases, I think that maturity, when we look at like a DevRel team is. skewed.

[00:01:27] PJ Haggerty: I don't think that's the same metric as. I've never seen a DevRel team that says, okay, so we have junior DevRel and mid level DevRel, senior DevRel, product managers, and communication is managed by this other part of the team. I think most people are basically saying a DevRel program is mature, if There's more than one person.

[00:01:49] Mary Thengvall: Really?

[00:01:49] PJ Haggerty: I think external people who view DevRel say there's more than one person. Clearly we have a mature DevRel program. I disagree with that, but I think it's a thing. [00:02:00]

[00:02:00] Wesley Faulkner: In terms of community and a mature community, I think of it in multiple facets and you can pick which one.

[00:02:06] Wesley Faulkner: Resonates with your initial thought, Mary, is that there's a maturity in terms of when you're creating a community, there's a lot of, let's figure this out, like how we're going to run this, let's build up the playbooks. Let's build in the process, let's build in the connections internally.

[00:02:21] Wesley Faulkner: Oh, a base of maturity. Another way of looking at it is from the people who are involved internally in community. Do you have a seasoned community manager? Do you have strong enough goals? And clear expectations. Do you have a good relationship with the other departments to make sure that the collaboration there, that everyone sees the investment in community and the value of community where basically you have an internal synergy where people understand community is part of the process

[00:02:54] Wesley Faulkner: so where the community in a company grows to the point where it's the whole [00:03:00] company understands. That we are a community. And this is important to us.

[00:03:04] Mary Thengvall: And then

[00:03:04] Wesley Faulkner: The third option for the community when I think about it is the external view of the community. Do you have members who keep coming back? Do you have people who are participatory in either surveys or type of feedback sessions in which they are contributing not only back to the company, but they have a That are horizontal to other members of the community where they feel like that relationship has been built up.

[00:03:32] Wesley Faulkner: Another way that this can show on the external side is that it is large enough that you're able to do an ambassador program? You're able to have people be moderators. You're tearing the community itself where there's different types of facets or different types of verticals where the community can have different shapes and sizes depending on the size of it.

[00:03:51] Wesley Faulkner: So those are the three different ways that when you say maturity that popped in my head.

[00:03:56] Mary Thengvall: Part of the interesting thing [00:04:00] from my perspective with the company that I'm at, which is Kamunda is. From a just pure length of time perspective, right? Like we have data about our community back to 2013, which is a lot.

[00:04:19] Mary Thengvall: And so that's part of it is, as we're starting to look at this data and try and evaluate, what do we do next and how do we make decisions based on that? If we're asking other companies about the type of data that they have and the type of information that they have, the fact that we have 11 years of data, most other companies are going you have way more data than we do.

[00:04:39] Mary Thengvall: You have way more information than we do. Like you're so far ahead of the game, but part of that is simply when we started. Mature community.

[00:04:50] Jason Hand: Are you doing anything with that data?

[00:04:53] Mary Thengvall: Trying to

[00:04:54] Jason Hand: That's an excellent question, Jason.

[00:04:55] Jason Hand: To me that's what makes them a team mature is if you're not doing anything that's [00:05:00] actionable and you don't have a plan to take the things that you learned or the things that you've collected or whatever,

[00:05:06] Mary Thengvall: and

[00:05:07] Jason Hand: Build some process around that and do something positive with it.

[00:05:11] Jason Hand: Then you're wasting that. And you're also not really a leader in the space of what, I hate using the term best practices, but if you're not I feel this all the time are, am I following my advice all the time? No, but I'm doing my best and it's not always up to one person either on how things come together.

[00:05:28] Jason Hand: To me, the first thing to jump out is in terms of a mature team, like communities, probably something different, mature, like other words out there. But I'm starting to realize like a data dog, like building some process around stuff, having some good goals, making sure we have a clear vision and mission statement, like all these things help to me create this this maturity thing,

[00:05:53] Wesley Faulkner: I think that was option one, right?

[00:05:55] PJ Haggerty: Yeah. I think it's interesting that Mary brings up 13 years of data. [00:06:00] Or I shouldn't say weak. I don't work at Komuna. I work at IBM, where we literally have 100 years of data and we do nothing with it. And I think that it'd be more accurate to say you have a 100 or you have 13 years of actionable information based on the data you've collected.

[00:06:16] PJ Haggerty: There's always been my argument and anyone who's seen me speak at DevOpsDays. There's a big difference between data and information. You can have a lot of data and no information. And that's, because, at international business machines, we concern ourselves with the enterprise and the client, but the client isn't always the community.

[00:06:35] PJ Haggerty: And the mature community model would. But even given the amount of time that we've had to collect data and look at it and evaluate it, there are still because and maybe this is part of the just large nature of a huge international conglomerate.

[00:06:51] PJ Haggerty: Community interaction that the company is very good at. And there are other parts of the company that have no idea who the community is or how to talk to them. And [00:07:00] because it's so large, those two places just don't talk to each other. That's option two. Yes. But it's like the bad version of option two.

[00:07:08] Jason Hand: Not everything also, as far as data goes, is going to be actionable. Like you can't assume that all that data going back to 2013 is it is really even valuable because time is, this there's pre COVID and post COVID there obviously, but also I just read about the dead internet theory the other day or watched a video on it and the internet in 2016, which I don't disagree with there's a time where things were different in terms of what we were collecting and what we thought was valuable.

[00:07:37] Mary Thengvall: Yeah.

[00:07:37] Jason Hand: Today, most of us would say, page views and clicks and all that stuff. The best we had at the time. And that's what we looked at the most, but that having that data from some, from several years back might not be that value.

[00:07:47] PJ Haggerty: This goes back to a lot of the metrics conversations we have as well, though.

[00:07:50] PJ Haggerty: Like I think that 10, 15 years ago at any tech company, I would think that net promoter score was a totally valid way to look at your end users and figure out whether you were doing well. [00:08:00] Nowadays, it's a huge waste. It's a huge waste. That is not a way to get a grip on your community or your end users or people that are using the, that promoter score is just, in the same way that, if this was 1998, I would say, yes, if you were in the upper right magic quadrant of a Gardner square, way to go, you're the best.

[00:08:17] PJ Haggerty: It's not 1998, it's 2024. And with 2025 rapidly approaching, you need to like everyone who complains about the metrics of determining whether a DevRel program is good or a community is mature. And meanwhile, these other people are using you know 40 year outdated metrics to say. But we're doing good in the industry.

[00:08:36] Wesley Faulkner: Used to believe in the net performance score too, in terms of community. But I think that someone told me this and coined it the uberfication of metrics for star rating. I like that. Like everyone gets five stars, no matter how bad your driver is. And this or they get one star, there's nothing in between.

[00:08:54] PJ Haggerty: If they have a personal interaction with the company it's the same as like I give every uber driver five stars [00:09:00] because I interact with that person. If you're an end user and you have a personal relationship with a salesperson or a developer advocate or a market, someone, you have said, you're going to be like I thought I'd give them the best net promoter score I possibly can.

[00:09:12] Mary Thengvall: Yeah.

[00:09:12] PJ Haggerty: Because I don't want to hurt so much, but that's exactly what invalidates the metric. It's just not valuable anymore.

[00:09:18] Mary Thengvall: I think it goes back to, and this is it's metrics related, but I think it's directly related to maturity as well. The idea of. Are you collecting metrics for metrics sake?

[00:09:30] Mary Thengvall: Are you actually collecting metrics to, Jason, your point? Are you doing anything with them? What are we doing with that data? Why are we collecting this in the first place? How are we using it to advance the programs or things like that? And part of it from my standpoint too, we have a new version of the product.

[00:09:49] Mary Thengvall: That's very specifically called a new version because it does the same things, but it's a different product. And so as we're looking [00:10:00] at. Are people sticking around or people churning because they want to be on the old version of the product, but we're at the end of life in that, like, how does that work?

[00:10:06] Mary Thengvall: What does that look like? Can we still call our community mature? If most of those people who have been around for that long are potentially no longer involved in the community, right? Does that change the level of maturity of the community,

[00:10:21] Mary Thengvall: maturity of the community programs. And that's where I think those two things might be separate. Because the level of maturity of the team could be 10 years on the team. I'm lucky enough to have a number of people who have been with the company and on my team for three years or longer at this point, that's practically unheard of in DevRel, let alone tech, but that's a very different thing than how mature is our community, which is a very different thing than how mature is the data that we're working with and what are we doing with that data and how does it impact our [00:11:00] programs and everything else?

[00:11:02] Wesley Faulkner: Option three.

[00:11:06] PJ Haggerty: Wesley is just going to underscore that he was right. And Wesley, I admit 100%. All right. Yes. And one question, one more question they have about what it takes to make a mature community program is what about the external community. So in here, I'll use the example of, back in the day when I was working at Engine Yard, the Ruby and Rails community was still In comparison to other source and language, other open source and language communities.

[00:11:33] PJ Haggerty: It was still immature. People were not building massive products in that language just yet when I first joined that team. So the external community was actually fairly immature. Which meant that we could only mature as a community team so far. And back then there were no metrics, there were no guardrails, there was no rules.

[00:11:55] PJ Haggerty: We were just making it up as we went along. But because of that, like we [00:12:00] felt like at the end of that experiment, like around 2014, 2015, we had matured quite a bit. We had built something that was rerun, but we had. a playbook that you could follow. This was something that made the parts interchangeable, which unfortunately led to them changing our parts.

[00:12:16] PJ Haggerty: Nonetheless, it was something that you could do, there was a pattern. And I think that's something that only came because of the maturity of the external community growing along with our internal community. And I think that's an important factor when we talk about, is a community program mature?

[00:12:33] PJ Haggerty: Is the external community of users or developers or whatever, are they also mature? Is it a matter where the only people who are really making up the community right now are those like, super cutting bleeding edge technologists who are going to adopt it, or is it a matter of.

[00:12:50] PJ Haggerty: Jason, you asked, why is it good to be mature? That's not a question I've ever had to answer.

[00:13:48] Wesley Faulkner: This is very timely. So yesterday I spoke at CMX Global. And my topic was about the governance of a community. So making sure that you involve the community [00:14:00] and your decisions and your planning, and also giving out some of responsibilities like moderation or something like that.

[00:14:09] Wesley Faulkner: So I was thinking about this and how you couldn't do that without a mature community and what it does give you is scale gives you options. It gives you more that you can work with in several different dimensions.

[00:14:25] Wesley Faulkner: So whether you use it for product feedback, whether you use it for marketing outreach, whether you use it for like user groups, where you're going to meet in different cities, physically, without maturity, you don't get scale. You don't enable some of these things that larger companies, larger.

[00:14:47] Wesley Faulkner: Organizations or even more established organizations are able to do. So it does unlock like a new layer and new skillset. If you are able to get to the [00:15:00] place where you can build that maturity on all those different dimensions.

[00:15:03] Jason Hand: Yeah, I love that. And the reason why I even thought that is because going back to when Mary was opening things up this has been something that's been spinning on your mind for a little bit.

[00:15:16] Jason Hand: And I'm just curious, like what's. Motivating that what's driving that, is there another part of the business that has expectations for something you're involved in to be quite mature. And then just to see the other side of that coin. Sometimes I feel like being new to a situation and maybe not being all that mature means I'm not stuck in some old patterns and I'm open to new ways of doing things.

[00:15:42] Jason Hand: So I'm just curious, what's driving this and is there actually something uniquely about that team program, whatever that the business is after you know what I mean?

[00:15:54] Mary Thengvall: No, that's a great question.

[00:15:55] Jason Hand: Not exploitation of customers.

[00:15:57] Mary Thengvall: No. And it's, I think part of it is [00:16:00] just. I've been thinking, is there a point at which we can go, this program is mature and like that phased iteration of, okay, we're just launching it and let's see how it goes for the next six months and get the baselines. And then great, let's iterate on it.

[00:16:14] Mary Thengvall: Is there a point that you get to where? Some of those programs can just run easily without a lot of overhead, without a lot of work, without a lot of manual intervention, right? Is there a point where you might need a senior community manager to get the program off the ground, but then you could have An intern who does the, manual follow ups and manual approvals and things like that.

[00:16:43] Mary Thengvall: Is that a sign of maturity? But to your point, I think there's some of the benefit of being quote unquote, immature is that ability to iterate quickly. Whereas once you have a fully mature [00:17:00] program that's running really well, if we're going to make any significant changes, that's, it's a lot more difficult, right?

[00:17:08] Mary Thengvall: Because it's not just, Oh, Hey, iterate on this one little thing. Try this out, tell people we're trying this out and then move forward with it. It's, Oh, okay. If we're going to change this, then that process that it feeds into and these things that it feeds into, and this vendor that we use to handle this side of things for the program needs to change and all of these other things, right?

[00:17:26] Mary Thengvall: There's a lot more built into it. There's a lot more at stake. But yeah it's interesting. I think on a personal level. Part of the reason I'm interested in this topic is because this is the first time that I have ever been at a single company and in a single role for this amount of time.

[00:17:47] Mary Thengvall: Like I'll be there five years in December and I've been at other companies for a long time, but always switching roles within the company. But like I started as [00:18:00] director of developer relations, I'm still director of developer relations and I'm okay with that.

[00:18:04] Mary Thengvall: And so some of it is also like my considering my own career trajectory and what's changed and what's different. And the team is very different than it was when I started. The program is different than it was when I started. Where does that leave? Me, what are my day to day responsibilities if we're not changing and iterating on things?

[00:18:26] Mary Thengvall: And I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's just, it's a very different perspective for me to have from always running, always working long days, always launching big programs, always launching new things. That's a personal adjustment.

[00:18:43] PJ Haggerty: But I'm curious, because when we talk about cause I feel like in some ways, like Jason, what you're talking about is like, what should our goal be?

[00:18:48] PJ Haggerty: Maturity share metrics are focused on maturity. And I think that a lot of places never get out of that. Iterative part. And the reason why they don't [00:19:00] is partially because they go through these iterations of the team. So you have, you have, okay. So I bring in PJ and he works, he contracts with us through DevRelate for a year.

[00:19:11] PJ Haggerty: Great. Then, somewhere towards the end of the year, he brings in a permanent, developer advocate. Great. Cool. And then they actually start to reform things and reshift them. Oh, and then our understanding of how DevRel works. Oh, and then there's just a pandemic in the middle of that.

[00:19:23] Mary Thengvall: Company

[00:19:24] PJ Haggerty: and it almost makes it impossible for any company to have a community program. I feel like one of the benefits that you have at Kamunda, Mary, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is their dedication to building a community program from the top down.

[00:19:39] Mary Thengvall: And

[00:19:39] PJ Haggerty: I don't think every company has that. I think a lot of departments have that, or a lot of groups have that, but a lot of companies do not have that.

[00:19:47] Mary Thengvall: Yeah.

[00:19:48] PJ Haggerty: And I think that's why it's difficult to find a similar situation to yours.

[00:19:52] Wesley Faulkner: Another,

[00:19:54] Jason Hand: So I've been, on a few different teams now and Devereux related teams of various maturity, I think really it's [00:20:00] more that it's a moving target of course it's a spectrum in terms of how you measure How mature a team is.

[00:20:07] Jason Hand: But I feel like. Teams change in terms of the people that make up those teams and the priorities of the org that you're in. Some companies might have a whole quarter where they're just, okay. Ours are really focused on one very specific thing that really don't reflect the team as a whole, but this is what the company needed to focus on right now.

[00:20:30] Jason Hand: And we're all coming together to make that work. Everything's just a freaking moving target and to come up with that

[00:20:36] PJ Haggerty: should be the standard DevRel tattoo.

[00:20:37] Jason Hand: I don't want maturity.

[00:20:38] Wesley Faulkner: I will need the pins.

[00:20:39] Jason Hand: Hey, Oh. I don't think maturity is a target and you get there and then you're done. And like magically doors open up and all these things that Wesley's talking about are totally true, but I feel like what may have seemed mature.

[00:20:53] Jason Hand: A couple of years ago, quote, best practices just aren't, they aren't anymore and that's, things are [00:21:00] just different. So we're starting off with a new, Blank slate pretty frequently. And that's where, I don't know, that's where we get, I think, mixed up on what's important.

[00:21:11] Jason Hand: To measure and what's important to take action on with the measurement.

[00:21:16] Mary Thengvall: Thanks for sharing with everybody.

Enjoy the podcast?

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash.

In this episode of After Pulse, Jason Hand and Wesley Faulkner reflect on the challenges and evolution of community conferences, especially in the aftermath of COVID-19. The conversation revolves around the changing landscape of these events, including financial, logistical, and cultural shifts.

Jason opens the discussion by expressing how the podcast’s previous episode, where they talked to guests Matty Stratton and Mo McElaney about community events, raised more questions than answers. He notes that while conferences were once easier to organize with ample sponsorship funds, the landscape has shifted significantly, especially with the impact of COVID. He recalls the immense effort that went into organizing DevOpsDays Rockies, including the burnout he and other organizers faced, and reflects on the need for a change in how such events are structured.

Wesley acknowledges the high cost of attending conferences, noting that ticket prices have increased significantly over the years, along with attendees' higher expectations. He highlights how, in the past, attendees were satisfied with simpler events, but today, conferences are expected to provide extras like swag, high-quality food, and receptions. These heightened expectations, combined with the rising costs, make it harder for community-run events to maintain their appeal. Wesley suggests that perhaps a "refactor" of the conference model is needed—one that focuses more on community involvement and less on corporate sponsorship, emphasizing the need for more volunteer-driven, scrappy events.

Jason points out that the growth of events like DevOpsDays Rockies in the past decade led to increasingly large venues and more extravagant setups to meet the growing demand. However, after COVID, things have shifted towards smaller, more intimate gatherings, with some events being canceled or rescheduled due to various reasons. He expresses hope that these smaller gatherings, like the Wild Spaces initiative in Denver, will serve as a creative alternative to the traditional conference model, focusing on connecting people in less formal settings. Jason imagines a future where people gather in parks with simple tools like whiteboards, without the need for elaborate setups, to foster a more organic exchange of ideas.

Wesley also discusses the maturation of the DevOps space, suggesting that many of the core problems have already been solved, leaving less room for groundbreaking discussions. This has led to a sense of stagnation, with community members having "graduated" beyond the need for typical conference content. He believes there is a need for events that focus on high-quality content and true knowledge sharing, rather than just drawing large crowds with celebrity speakers.

Further into the conversation, Wesley addresses the difficulty in finding the right community events to sponsor or participate in. He notes that, unlike large corporate conferences, community events tend to be fragmented, and it's hard for potential sponsors to find events that fit their needs. He highlights the lack of a central entity that could streamline the process of finding and funding these events, making it difficult for smaller events to compete with the larger, corporate-driven ones.

Keywords:

Themes:

Post-COVID Adjustments:

Burnout and Sustainability:

The Rise of Volunteer-Driven, Scrappy Events:

Evolving Expectations and the Need for Quality Content:

Challenges in Finding and Funding Smaller Events:

Reimagining the Future of Conferences:

[00:00:00] Jason Hand: That was a really great episode.

[00:00:02] Wesley Faulkner: Yes. Actually, it was more filled with questions. Content that I didn't expect because I thought I knew the subject so well, but hearing those perspectives actually really put it in focus for me.

[00:00:15] Jason Hand: And we also completely went off script. We had a, what, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight questions pre selected that we were going to get through.

[00:00:24] Jason Hand: We didn't even get through half of them. And we also pivoted and changed the course a little bit based on how the conversation went along.

[00:00:31] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah, it was really great.

[00:00:33] Jason Hand: Yeah for anyone who may have stumbled across the after polls before listening to the community polls, we just got done talking with two of our guests Matty, a Stratton and Mo MacElaney. I'm pronouncing her last name wrong.

[00:00:45] Jason Hand: But it goes back. And we basically wanted to talk about community events and where we are with it and how things have changed. We talked a lot. Where things are, how things have changed through COVID and did bucket things into a pre COVID post COVID a lot of different [00:01:00] subjects.

[00:01:00] Jason Hand: That we got into there. And I thought it was really interesting. I think nobody's surprised that budgets have tightened up and that it's just harder to do things the way we used to do it. And I don't know if that's because money was just easier to come by, sponsorship money.

[00:01:15] Jason Hand: It was, so therefore it was easier to like, put these things together. But times have changed and COVID did that did play a big role in that. But I think we also identify that it's not just that. I think that some of us that have been involved with these things, we're all changing too, and most of us are still involved with these types of roles professionally, but at least for me personally, I pointed out that I Tend to shy away from spending a lot of my free time, and when I think about DevOps days Rockies, which is like the core main community event that I was involved with for years, I felt like I was working round the clock for the months and months leading up to that. And me, not just me other organizers as well. And that, I think I knew it was never really [00:02:00] sustainable, but it took a couple burnout sessions, burnout, periods for me too.

[00:02:05] Jason Hand: Finally, I just don't think I want to keep doing this. I don't think it's worth the burnout. I don't think it's worth the effort. And then also I think it's always good to get out of the way and let other people step in and take charge a little bit and just see what they can do with stuff.

[00:02:22] Jason Hand: So it was nice to hear a little bit of confirmation, that it's not just me that feels that way. What's your take on that?

[00:02:29] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah, it does take a lot of time to go to these events, but I also wanted to say it does take a lot of money and we were talking about sponsorships and getting enough sponsors, but I'm talking from the attendee perspective, I think.

[00:02:41] Wesley Faulkner: Ticket costs, entry fees have also steadily moved up as I think the expectations have also moved up of what to expect from a conference. I do remember like a decade, two decades ago when going to conferences, the expectations We're way [00:03:00] smaller. You just expected to run into people, have a microphone, maybe, sometimes not, a cafeteria, auditorium.

[00:03:09] Wesley Faulkner: But now there's swag that's expected. There's branded t-shirts and lanyards and receptions, food and drink. It's less scrappy. And so the expectations have made it so that it's less achievable. I think for me going to conferences I don't know how many I would go to if my employer wasn't helping to pay the bill for me to get there, both from a transportation cost, but also just the ticket costs are high.

[00:03:36] Wesley Faulkner: And so I do think maybe a refactoring is needed where it pushes aside the corporate sponsorship to be more scrappy and more community involved to make sure things happen. A lot more volunteers, a lot more donated spaces or even like an outdoor park, or there are ways to have some of this communion without some of the fanfare that I think [00:04:00] I at least have gotten to the point where I'm expecting when I go to a conference.

[00:04:04] Jason Hand: And I think of some of them. Disappointment. I feel in my nostalgia about how things used to be in the good old days is just a victim of success for a lot of these events, they started off small or smaller than they were, pre COVID and then. With popularity of the events, mostly speaking again of DevOps, these Rockies, it started off, maybe a hundred people, a couple hundred people, and then it just kept growing and growing.

[00:04:29] Jason Hand: People get, the word got out that this is a valuable event. And not just for the participants, folks that are showing up as attendees to sit in the audience, but also those who were speaking and the sponsors. And it just, there was a lot of value being like plugged into that community.

[00:04:45] Jason Hand: And so it kept growing and growing. And in order to make sure that we are being inclusive of all the people that want to come, we kept having to get a larger and larger venue and we'd have to get larger food, more coffee and more swag.

[00:04:58] Jason Hand: And it just kept [00:05:00] getting larger and larger just to meet, I guess what you'd say is the demand of that event. And then COVID came around and reset things a little bit. But I think it didn't completely reset for everybody. It hasn't been really until after COVID that I've seen things start to trend a little bit in the smaller direction where Matty pointed out, a lot of DevOps days, events have.

[00:05:21] Jason Hand: Had to either change dates or just completely cancel for a variety of reasons, many contributing factors. And I know in Denver, it's the same, but I think it's neat to see this re-imagining of what these events can be, at the point is to just get members of the community together and share ideas.

[00:05:41] Jason Hand: Let's not lose sight of that. There's a lot of ways that can be done. You don't need a quarter of a million dollar budget like Chicago had for their DevOps days. I pointed out, there's some folks from the local people here in Denver, who are now doing this wild spaces thing, which I think sounds really cool, really creative, maybe for those who like to be outdoors and enjoy camping and things like that.[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Jason Hand: But to me, that's, it's thinking outside of how things used to be done. And I hope that there's more of that. I actually had this vision recently of just getting people together. I don't know, at a park. I think you mentioned bringing, bringing people together at a park and having just a whiteboard or you remember those old projectors that's just like a lamp and the, like the clear.

[00:06:22] Wesley Faulkner: The overheads.

[00:06:23] Jason Hand: We don't have to have these big blown out produced events to get people together to share ideas and to learn.

[00:06:30] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah.

[00:06:31] Jason Hand: And I think I've come to that. Realization or, I've at least accepted that recently.

[00:06:37] Jason Hand: And it hasn't quite pushed me to the point where I'm ready to start something. But I would maybe think about attending something like that more than I would an event that looks more like a community event. And some of that's also just like I pointed out, at least for the community events that I go to, so many of our challenges have been solved and outside of [00:07:00] AI, I don't know what else there is to talk about. We have come up with good solutions. I hate the term best practices. It really does depend on the situation, the company, the community. But I think we've shared a lot of ideas that have really helped others grow. And so what's left to really talk about, I think, is another vibe that I'm having.

[00:07:21] Wesley Faulkner: So the space is matured enough that we're not solving new problems. We're just rehashing old things. And then that causes the people who've been a part of the space to almost graduate out, like they've matured past having to have these discussions and look for these answers. And it's just a really good point in terms of innovation.

[00:07:38] Wesley Faulkner: I think there's also a stagnation there. I have had people, even colleagues, say that they want to get in front of developers and they think community events are a good way of doing it, but they can't find them. They don't know attendance numbers. They don't know locations. They don't know how, if there's a way to easily even give them [00:08:00] funds.

[00:08:00] Wesley Faulkner: Do they have an entity to give them funds? Does a PO need to be created? It's not been like an Uber. Events created where there's a one stop shop to actually find these. If I wanted to get in front of a. net developers, then I have to do the research. I have to do the work to find out which conferences cater to this group, what are the sponsorship packages like, and there's not really been an innovation or a focus on.

[00:08:24] Wesley Faulkner: On doing that, because these groups are all diffuse. They're not one conglomerate that's able to lobby this to get together and to solve this problem. And there's no way that someone else could be the authority of this, where they would be able to have that power to be able to do that. Everyone is doing these events because they are getting to their own specific audience.

[00:08:43] Wesley Faulkner: They want to do it their own specific way. And it's something where, unless something. Can make it easier for people to give them money. The money will continue to probably be an issue going forward, but it also, hopefully it'll move into more intimate spaces, more conversations that happen [00:09:00] around things like for me, I am still extremely interested into work culture and environments.

[00:09:06] Wesley Faulkner: How do we make sure that, yes, I know I need to, what I need to do, how can I make sure I create an environment where I can do my best work? How do I create an environment where. When there is a forecast that there could be a catastrophic failure, meaning a la like CrowdStrike either from the CrowdStrike side saying, like, how do we make sure that we do better testing or from the customer standpoint of saying, how do we be more redundant and how do we make sure that this is not an exposure we have?

[00:09:35] Wesley Faulkner: Those conversations, I think probably did happen, but no one was able to really get those points across. So I think creating a culture around getting work done is something I would still like to get a fix and work out. But how do we make space for these conversations that still need to be had, even though that like a bulk of the, yes, we know how to solve it, but the question of how do we implement those solutions are still something that [00:10:00] I still need to be hashed out.

[00:10:02] Jason Hand: Yeah, you made me think of something too. Obviously there's places online there's community groups or slack groups and discord and whatever, where there are people getting together and talking about stuff, but I still stand on that. I'm not going to go to a lot of after hours things.

[00:10:16] Jason Hand: And I know at least my company data dog and others, like we have policies on how many. Conferences, community events, whatever it is that you can actually go to, especially if travel is involved. Many of them have limitations on how much they can get involved and how many of those events that they can go to.

[00:10:35] Jason Hand: And if they've only got a couple that they can actually set aside time or budget or whatever to attend. They're probably going to pick the ones that have the biggest return on investment. And I'm not just talking about money. Like actual energy that's invested to go to these things. And it might not be the community events, they're just not providing the same value that they used to.

[00:10:56] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah. What came first? The value the [00:11:00] focus or is it the money and the expectations that maybe it's COVID maybe it's business needs. I think generally speaking, time has been inconsistent and less predictable and that's making it more complicated.

[00:11:15] Wesley Faulkner: Hopefully, I hope these. Community events still continue. I would like to still see them exist. I think it would be a sad thing if they all went away. So I hope that things get figured out either on the company side, the attendee side, or the organizational side to make it sustainable and if it needs to change, if it needs to have a different structure, or if it Needs to have a re-imagining of some sort.

[00:11:38] Wesley Faulkner: I just want to see them still go because I still have a fondness for them. I don't know if it's more of a retro thing of thinking about how I got my start, how I got to meet some of the people I've met, and or maybe that just makes me old .

[00:11:50] Jason Hand: We are getting up there. Yeah. I think there is, I don't think things are just gonna go away.

[00:11:54] Jason Hand: I don't think we're gonna wake up one day and there's no more community events. I think that they're just evolving. [00:12:00] And maybe they're getting smaller. We did have a bunch of questions that we didn't get to, like, how do you ensure that you can scale some of these community events? And I don't know, I think what I'm concluding is that we all agree that maybe that's not necessary.

[00:12:13] Jason Hand: Maybe that's part of the problem is that we expected these things to just continue to grow. They don't need to or they need to shift in some way. And also the question of like, how do you continue putting on high quality events? Quality is, it's quite subjective and what makes a high quality event?

[00:12:31] Jason Hand: Do you have to have a large screen that slides are being put onto with a really great PA system and like food is really good. And the coffee's great. And yeah, these, the, after so afterwards, social hours, like a cannot miss type of thing. We could have gone into that and that would have probably been much more interesting pre COVID because I felt like you did see that a lot across community events as you were.

[00:12:57] Jason Hand: I think maybe we have to reassess what [00:13:00] better means. I'm just here to learn. I'm here to make connections and I want a better experience around that.

[00:13:05] Jason Hand: I don't necessarily need this, high product high highly produced. Things. And I think that's totally fine too.

[00:13:15] Wesley Faulkner: I think it would also be nice if we had more conferences too. Yeah, which is more of a focus on people sharing knowledge, which I think some of this has been highlighted that it's a popularity contest when you talk about speakers, getting the big names.

[00:13:27] Wesley Faulkner: And the bigger names drawing bigger crowds to keep that up. But if we go back to the content and have high quality content, hopefully maybe we'll see more of those. Yeah.

[00:13:39] Jason Hand: Yeah, I totally agree. I think we are just about out of time here for our after polls. But Wesley, this was fun getting together with you and chatting with Mo and Matty.

[00:13:50] Jason Hand: It is always fun to have them around and learn. And I don't know, it's definitely been a nice conversation just to revisit some things around the community. I know, like I've [00:14:00] mentioned, I haven't been as involved. I miss it, but also I don't miss, like some aspects of it, but I also definitely miss it.

[00:14:07] Jason Hand: Other aspects too. So I'm hoping that there's like a shift towards something new that draws me in. I'm sure there will be, there's ways that you can get people off the couch or, change their plans from doing something boring to going and meeting with some people.

[00:14:25] Jason Hand: But I think we're going to have to get creative about it. And I'm looking forward to seeing what comes from some of the community events that are out there,

[00:14:33] Wesley Faulkner: wise words, good thoughts, good hopes. And I think that concludes our after post after pulse, and hopefully we'll have PJ and Mary on our next show.

[00:14:44] Wesley Faulkner: Thank you for listening and we will see you all next time.

Enjoy the podcast?

Over the past few years, we’ve seen conferences ebb and flow. Some community-run conferences have evolved into new things, new ones have sprouted up while other annual favorites have sadly gone extinct. What goes into a community-led conference? How does someone get involved? Let’s take a look!

1. The Role of Community Conferences in DevRel:

2. Guests’ Journeys into Organizing Community Events:

3. Why Organizers Keep Coming Back:

4. Impact of COVID-19 on Community Conferences:

5. Challenges in Organizing Community Conferences:

6. Refactoring the Community Conference Model:

Key Takeaways:

Community Conferences Have Evolved:

Innovative Models Are Needed:

Sustainability and Support Are Crucial:

Advice for Aspiring Conference Organizers:

Closing Thoughts:

Final Quote:

Keywords:

[00:00:00] Jason Hand: Over the past few years, we've seen conferences ebb and flow. Some community run conferences have evolved into new things. New ones have sprouted up, while other annual favorites have sadly gone extinct. What goes into community led conferences, and how does someone get involved? Let's take a look.

[00:00:20] Weslefy Faulkner: Conferences are such a big part of many DevRel programs. But where do they come from? Who puts them together and what really happens behind the scenes? We've gathered some of DevRel's event organizers who can help us out. Mo and Maddy, could you introduce yourself, starting with Mo?

[00:00:38] Mo McElaney: Hello! Thank you for having me.

[00:00:40] Mo McElaney: My name is Mo McElhaney. I work for IBM, leading the strategy of our open source AI developer programs in IBM Research. I ran a nonprofit teaching women to code from 2012 to 2018. I've spoken at conferences around the world.

[00:00:59] Mo McElaney: And I've [00:01:00] organized a bunch of different conferences over the years. Burlington Ruby, UX Burlington, Vermont Code Camp, Offline Camp, Abstractions Conf in Pittsburgh. And currently I'm on the contact committee for PyCon US and Ray Summit. And I'm on the board of the Vermont Technology Alliance.

[00:01:20] Matty Stratton: Great.

[00:01:20] Matty Stratton: I'm Matty. I currently run developer relations and growth for a company called Aiven. And I also have my own DevOps podcast, Arrested DevOps, on the topic of community conferences. I've spent my time as a conference speaker at all sorts of community events all over the world.

[00:01:36] Matty Stratton: I was the founder of DevOps Day Chicago, when that started. I've been a co-chair of the global team for DevOps days worldwide, and currently in an advisory role with that. I also help out with the content track for all day DevOps, and there's probably a bunch of other community related conferences that I'm forgetting about that I've helped out at some point over the years.

[00:01:58] Matty Stratton: And so if I didn't name your [00:02:00] event and I helped you I apologize, hit me on Twitter and yell at me. Excited to be back on Community Pulse.

[00:02:08] Weslefy Faulkner: You really have someone who loves the community when they can't remember all the things that they've done to help run conferences and help the community get together and.

[00:02:18] Weslefy Faulkner: Speaking to passion and thinking about why you're doing this. What is your specific answer? Why, what led you to organize conferences to start with you, Maddie?

[00:02:27] Matty Stratton: It's funny. And if I want to be a little introspective and honest, it's the same thing that I think brings me to organize. Anything is one of the ways that you can make sure you're involved in something is to run it.

[00:02:41] Matty Stratton: And I look back over the time and I spent years running a community around swing dancing here in Chicago. This is not a good life lesson or a good way to live your life. So I don't recommend it.

[00:02:52] Matty Stratton: But really the first community event that I. Got involved in organizing was DevOps days, Chicago, and it came from [00:03:00] being interested in DevOps days, having wanted to go to one and not having had the chance and saying, Hey, maybe we should have one in Chicago reached out to the global team, and they said, Oh last year, some people were interested.

[00:03:12] Matty Stratton: I can put you in touch with them. Maybe y'all can figure it out where we are now. 10 plus years later after that, a fateful little meeting that we had in the second floor walkup consulting company thing. So it's interesting, and hear what most is what leads you to originally organize a conference and what keeps you doing it, or maybe two different questions and maybe we come back to that second one in a minute.

[00:03:31] Matty Stratton: 'cause the answers are

[00:03:32] Weslefy Faulkner: Yes. I would love that answer. And I think it also has. You don't have to be an expert in something before you start trying to organize around it, which is great. So Mo, what is your story? What got you involved?

[00:03:44] Mo McElaney: That is a very good segue into my answer to that question because I'm a mid career switch into tech.

[00:03:51] Mo McElaney: I coded before I had a full time job in tech, but I got laid off in 2009 when the recession in the United States happened. [00:04:00] And I saw all my friends who worked in software, whether they got laid off or not, they still were making money. So I was like, Oh, I need to really get into tech.

[00:04:09] Mo McElaney: And so I started going to meetups. I was teaching myself to code for real. And then I started a nonprofit teaching women to code. And in doing that work, as anyone who's listening or anyone on the show knows, once you start organizing something, everyone wants you to help them with the thing that they're organizing.

[00:04:30] Mo McElaney: And so because of running that tech community, Meetup. I got invited to organize our local Ruby conference because we were teaching a Ruby class and it just was a perfect synchrony. And then, in doing that work, I got invited to organize another conference and it was a way for me to learn from the best.

[00:04:49] Mo McElaney: In the industry, because when you get involved with a conference, you're inviting people to come and speak who are really experienced or really interesting and have an interesting way of teaching a [00:05:00] concept. And my inexperience is what led me to organizing conferences.

[00:05:06] Jason Hand: I feel like that's definitely similar to my experience and Wesley, I think, maybe you're also the same, but.

[00:05:12] Jason Hand: To Matty's story, like mine's almost identical with DevOps days. I saw, I think, I don't know which DevOps days it might've been. Chicago was one of my, it was either Minneapolis or Chicago was one of the first ones I went to. And I was like, Oh, this is pretty rad. We need something like this in Denver.

[00:05:26] Jason Hand: And it just is like filling a gap, filling a need of what was already a meetup going on in the area. And I was, just Oh we deserve something like this. Like the Denver area, the front range actually was what it was, when I was really focused on, because one of the tenants of DevOps days is to be very, ultra inclusive.

[00:05:47] Jason Hand: And I felt if we called it DevOps days, Denver, some of the folks in Boulder. 30 minutes away, they may not come. It's not going to feel like it's one of their things. So we decided to call it DevOps stays Rockies, which meant to like [00:06:00] really, including the whole front range of, from Colorado Springs, all the way up to Fort Collins.

[00:06:05] Jason Hand: I got yelled at for calling it Rockies, which is true because like we wanted it to be Denver, but. I felt like I got a pass on it because it was inclusive, in the Rockies, at least to the culture out here. Denver and Boulder are two different people or two different things.

[00:06:18] Jason Hand: And you're just not going to get a lot of cross collaboration. So anyway, let's pivot a little bit on what Maddie was talking about. There's one thing about starting the conferences. It's something else to keep you coming back and doing it year after year or whatever the frequency is.

[00:06:33] Jason Hand: I'm wondering if we can start with maybe Mo on you with this one. Is there anything that sort of keeps you returning back to these? Or is there something that inspires you to either grow it or maintain it? What are your thoughts around that?

[00:06:48] Mo McElaney: Community conferences are the best.

[00:06:51] Mo McElaney: I've made the best of friends at community conferences that I've attended. The organizers are always just really passionate about the community and it's [00:07:00] just always a wonderful experience. Sometimes it's really stressful because at a community conference, we're going to talk about the hardest thing about running community conferences, I think, but funding is always an issue.

[00:07:09] Mo McElaney: So it's really stressful trying to figure out how you're going to. Have the money that you need to do the things you want to do and all that. And the other cool thing, as a developer advocate, it's a really easy way to see trends in the industry. If you're involved with the content for conferences, you're seeing what developers are interested in because you're seeing what they're submitting to the conference.

[00:07:29] Mo McElaney: And so you get the inside. Track on what people want to see and what they want to be learning and what they want to brag about.

[00:07:37] Jason Hand:Very true. And Matty, you're still on, are you still involved with DevOps Days Chicago or?

[00:07:41] Matty Stratton: And that's a story about that. It has to do with actually connecting pretty well to what keeps you coming back. And one of the other parts is what makes it hard to not come back. What makes it hard to stop because sometimes you need to stop. But to answer your question shortly.

[00:07:55] Matty Stratton: So this year is 25. We're not doing one for 2024. So the next DevOps day, Chicago [00:08:00] will be in March of 2025, a single day event, a new thing. I am an advisor. But they have asked me to be the emcee. So that part keeps happening, but it's about the people, but in two different ways.

[00:08:13] Matty Stratton: So it's the, first of all, about sort of the participants and one of the reasons I use the word participant really intentionally there. So one of the things for the community event that is DevOps day Chicago, that we believe really strongly in Is that everybody there, nobody's badge says speaker or sponsor, whatever they all say, participant, because everybody is there to participate together and I feel really strongly that community events tend to be very participatory, you don't go there to be spoken at, maybe some people do, you do you man, that's not the intent.

[00:08:44] Matty Stratton: But even as an organizer, it's like you're participating in it, you're part of it, and you see what everybody gets out of it, right? It's the thing of like, how many times over the years I will encounter folks at other events, [00:09:00] on LinkedIn, on socials, on whatever, someone comes on and they talk about how They came to DevOps Day Chicago, and that's what got them into the job that they have.

[00:09:09] Matty Stratton: Things happen at these events that change people's lives. We think about things like TalkPay, which is a very popular thing at a lot of community events where people are very transparent about their compensation. And it literally gets people, when they know about people that have found better jobs, that have gotten paid better, that have done those things, you're like, how can you not have this keep going?

[00:09:29] Matty Stratton: And from the personal. I hesitate to say selfish, part of that is, that's a little selfish too, cause I'm like, I feel awesome. And I'm like, cool. I was helpful and helped your life. My co organizers it's there. And, I know we're going to talk about how COVID changed everything, but I remember our first in person DevOps stage, Chicago being up on stage.

[00:09:47] Matty Stratton: And I was just like in tears because I missed these people, even though we had done an event together, but even that event that was in person, Didn't get together the way that we used to, [00:10:00] and it was, I was like, these were folks that throughout the year, cause it takes a year to run this event, event would come off and we'd be like, all right, we're going to give ourselves like six weeks.

[00:10:06] Matty Stratton: Everybody go back and get away from this for a minute. And we got to start again. And, you get together and we all go and order pizza to Margaret's house to review the talks. And this is the place we would go. And, you think about stories about drinking a bunch of beer at an elephant in castle and saying, Hey, Jerry, can I have money to buy a yak costume and.

[00:10:24] Matty Stratton: Now we have one, it's like those types of things. And you have new people come in and out every year, but you have this set of folks and they're some of your greatest friends and you like to make things with them, but it's also a hell of a lot of work.

[00:10:39] Weslefy Faulkner: Yeah. Conferences are a lot of work and I think everything that you mentioned is a form of pay or. Recompense for putting in that effort. And I know we, you mentioned the COVID during COVID. I remember us as a group and just the Royal us, talking about okay, so what are we [00:11:00] doing now?

[00:11:00] Weslefy Faulkner: And then let's do some efficiencies of a virtual conference. Let's do more webinars. Let's write more blog posts, do more content. These things were in place of some of the ways that. We did some of that stuff at conferences. And then we're then after that, or during that period, we're also saying when will conferences come back?

[00:11:19] Weslefy Faulkner: And then people will start meeting up again. And then the conversation shifted to, are they the same and what are we going to keep doing that we did during the lockdowns conferences do have. Some meaning, and there's only things you can do at conferences.

[00:11:33] Weslefy Faulkner: So they're not good at everything, but they're good at some really great things that can't be replaced. My question is in this period of time where it seems like things have equalized. When you look now, do you look before COVID, would you say that conferences are at the same level? Have they increased?

[00:11:52] Weslefy Faulkner: Have they decreased? Where are we now in terms of conferences as in before COVID after COVID Are things better and in terms [00:12:00] of the amount of events, are we seeing more people having more conferences, or are we seeing just less overall conferences, but better quality? What would you say?

[00:12:08] Weslefy Faulkner: Let's start with you, Matty.

[00:12:09] Matty Stratton: It's, haha y'all know how much I hate root cause and there's a lot of contributing factors to the landscape of community conferences today. But there is some definite causation because one of the things that was clear from the year or two of massive slowdown is for a lot of it and not necessarily what people want, but what organizations are willing to fund.

[00:12:38] Matty Stratton: So it's a lot of, if what you get out of it is just, how much more can you learn in different ways? I think that, in my opinion, the bigger impact to what I would say is a decline in community led conferences. And it's a shame because this is not what I would have predicted and what I was hoping was going to come out of [00:13:00] COVID.

[00:13:00] Matty Stratton: I thought it was going to be the flip. Yeah. Because of the costs and but I think it's less about maybe we could say that a contributing factor to the current economy is related to COVID so therefore it's COVID but in today's economy, the dollars and the ducats are harder to get and We also find a lot of folks in their community events are still wanting to run events in the playbook that they ran pre COVID when money was cheap and you could get lots of sponsor dollars and we're used to doing things in a certain way.

[00:13:35] Matty Stratton: Anyway, I want to bring it back to the change that has happened, but I made a comment where I said this is not what I was hoping and If you look, we talked about this topic slightly on arrested DevOps in the retrospective of Chicago 2020. And I'll give you a link for the show notes.

[00:13:49] Matty Stratton: And at the time, one of the ways I was thinking when I was looking at what was happening was with conferences starting to decline through COVID. My prediction. And maybe it was what I wanted to [00:14:00] happen was that we would see a rise in community events because community events are cheaper to do and to attend and thinking about, these big shows that cost bajillions of dollars remember at this time, too, we were seeing O'Reilly shutting down their way of funding that velocity going away all these big events and I was like, here we go community events.

[00:14:22] Matty Stratton: And, maybe we missed it as community events to be able to refactor how to be able to optimize for the fact that they were, that community events tend to be local. They tend to be regional. Instead of having to try to do this scenario, because I think when the other thing in the decline besides the cost is that also people are trying to think about sustainability, right?

[00:14:44] Matty Stratton: And they're like, Hey, maybe I don't want to be, maybe we shouldn't all. Be flying from the whole world to San Diego or whatever for this one big event. Whereas if we could have smaller bits and pieces that exist, so all these things have multiple contributing factors. [00:15:00] Anyway, do I see the thing that there's been a decline in community led conferences since covid?

[00:15:05] Matty Stratton: I think yes, because of COVID, I don't know, but if that's the point in time, we are saying there absolutely has been, and I will, I can speak specifically from DevOps days. And I would love to hear what Mo and the rest of you do for the other events that you do. We have seen the number. It's very interesting because we look at how many DevOps days happen every year.

[00:15:25] Matty Stratton: And that number like Was this massive spike in 2019? It was huge. And then you're like, Oh, and then they were like, none. But then you look at it and you're like, cool. Look at devopsdates. org and you see all these cities are having it. And as a core member, I can tell you, and you know how many of them end up getting canceled and don't actually happen.

[00:15:43] Matty Stratton: How many? A lot. That's the scientific rational number of it is a lot or continually get postponed because, Oh, we weren't able to make our funding. We weren't able to do that. We have to cancel it. And so we're not back. And I don't know that we will be without [00:16:00] changing.

[00:16:00] Matty Stratton: How we reason about these in kind of the new world. It sounds like the community run conferences need a collective PR department

[00:16:07] Weslefy Faulkner: to help with getting the word out.

[00:16:08] Matty Stratton: Don't think it's we need to realize that you don't, the money is not there.

[00:16:14] Matty Stratton: So you don't, Maybe you have to run the event in a different way. You're used to being able to, and again, I'll tell you that like Chicago we always make a lot of money on our, I don't say we make a lot of money. We don't profit, but we get tons of sponsors. Our event is very expensive. DevUpstate Chicago costs over a quarter million dollars to run, do you need to spend that much money to run a DevOps space? You absolutely do not, but a lot of events are used to doing that and you're just like, yo we have to have 600 people cause we've always had 600 people and we have to have all of this cause we've always had it. And you're like, do you?

[00:16:47] Matty Stratton: And that's the thing we miss. In Covid time was the chance to refactor and so why also most virtual events failed. ~~Sorry, I swear to God I'm gonna stop talking. ~~

[00:16:54] Weslefy Faulkner: ~~So Mo, ~~are you seeing what Maddie's seeing? And also are you in favor of a refactor?

[00:16:58] Weslefy Faulkner: What do you think? [00:17:00]

[00:17:00] Mo McElaney: I definitely am seeing exactly what Maddie's seeing. And I think it's also connected to meetups. I haven't seen meetups return to what they were. Anecdotally for me, a lot of the main organizers of my favorite communities either left DevRel or have been laid off and have been having job insecurity.

[00:17:24] Mo McElaney: I think that's a widespread industry thing. It's been tough out there. And so it, my impression is that there isn't the same bandwidth for people to do the organizing. And maybe we didn't do a good enough job of raising up the next generation of organizers. I think that's another issue that is just a chronic thing in communities is having that mentorship where you're raising up the next people to come up behind you when you inevitably, either burnout.

[00:17:55] Mo McElaney: Hopefully you don't burn out, but if you burn out, a lot of community organizers burn out [00:18:00] eventually. Or you just, your life changes and you can't do as much as you were doing before. And who are these people that are going to come up behind us to organize these things? And how do we make it a good experience for them so that they get what they need to take it over?

[00:18:15] Mo McElaney: I also think that, yeah, I agree funding hasn't come back. It's tough to get funding. I agree with Maddie. I thought community conferences were going to come back strong after COVID, but it seems like the corporate ones are the ones that suck up all the funding and then there's nothing left.

[00:18:30] Mo McElaney: And I feel like from my perspective, coming from a tech giant people want to fund the things that are going to have a big art, like ROI and they're, they want big numbers. And they're not looking at like the quality, but community events are just like such a different experience.

[00:18:50] Mo McElaney: And you can have such a wider impact if you are investing in a whole bunch of communities like dev ops days or pi data, or all the [00:19:00] pi ladies, all these communities that have chapters all around the world. If you could invest in those, you're having smaller events, but the overall numbers are high, but I feel like, from what I've seen in the corporate trending around this, people want to see thousands of heads that are viewing your content and not necessarily just like a hundred in one event.

[00:19:25] Mo McElaney: Even though the sponsorship level would be way cheaper than. Arguably the impact would be higher because you're actually getting a more authentic interaction with a smaller group of people and actually getting them playing with things.

[00:19:40] Mo McElaney: Maybe people see your logo, but they're not actually doing anything because they're running around to the next session.

[00:19:46] Weslefy Faulkner: Yeah. Those are really good points. I also think that, during the pandemic COVID period, productivity went to all time highs. And then after the rates [00:20:00] got increased, layoffs also happened that mass.

[00:20:03] Weslefy Faulkner: And so now someone who's already working at their peak, and then on top of that, now they are taking on the work of their coworkers who are no longer at the company. Maybe they don't have the time to go to conferences as much. Maybe their routine has changed so that it feels like it's a little extra.

[00:20:18] Weslefy Faulkner: But Jason, you have the next question.

[00:20:20] Matty Stratton: Oh I just had one, there was one thing, a point Mo made about why places don't sponsor the community events and they want to get the thousand and one other thing that I've observed and I could be wrong. Community events tend to be not about.

[00:20:34] Matty Stratton: Products and specific technologies. They tend to be things like PyCon or DevOps days or whatever, which means as a marketer, I don't understand the persona as clearly because we've had this conversation about why, it seems like nothing, no shade against KubeCon, but people want to spend way much more money sponsoring KubeCon than DevOps days.

[00:20:53] Matty Stratton: And I've had organizers say to me like, Oh, it's because there's so many more people. And I said, no, because they know what they're there to buy. [00:21:00] But someone who comes to an event about DevOps. I don't understand who that is. I don't know if it's my target market or whatever.

[00:21:07] Matty Stratton: And it's about an awareness thing. So one was we would have it at DevOps days where you would get to a fun thing where. There were events. I remember chef did this in one year where they were like, we're going to sponsor every single DevOps day. So it's really clear that we care about the community.

[00:21:20] Matty Stratton: And I believe that they did and whatnot. But one of my favorite things that was interesting was for a time at monitor Rama. You didn't have, if you were in a certain part of the industry, you had no choice, but to sponsor monitor Rama, because if you didn't people wondered what was wrong, so if you were like in the monitoring space and suddenly you weren't sponsoring, basically what that said was we are struggling.

[00:21:45] Matty Stratton: And this, but now it's, there's much more needing to connect like most to that ROI and to be able to say this is going to actually convert and that the long tail is because everybody when the. Beans start getting [00:22:00] counted and the economy shrinks down it, which it shouldn't because everybody is making lots of money, but whatever.

[00:22:07] Matty Stratton: It's, it, it's you, I've said this about Deverell about when the economy gets tough, we have to do things that require less imagination to show value. And the same thing, your sponsorship has to require less imagination. It has to be a shorter line between sponsor dollars. And money, right?

[00:22:25] Matty Stratton: That's just, that's where the economy is right now. But you can do those things. Anyway, you had a question.

[00:22:31] Jason Hand: Yeah. You bring up a good point there, Maddie, because I feel like it wasn't just Monitorama. That's an excellent example. I think DevOpsDays was a good example of that too. Like a lot of companies, their marketing teams set aside a budget.

[00:22:42] Jason Hand: The company needed to be seen as a good steward of the community as just a player in the DevOps space.

[00:22:49] Jason Hand: Sometimes I think that maybe DevOps in general as a term or as a movement or whatever, like we, a lot of folks just have this feeling of what we solved for a lot of those problems. And so now [00:23:00] there's, we just don't have the need to like be there and be involved in those conversations because CICD has already been solved and the incident management has been solved.

[00:23:08] Jason Hand: And like just a lot of the things that we were talking about we still talk about them, but in different ways. And so it's definitely that the budgeting has tightened up a lot. And I know for myself, like I'm much less willing to spend personal time outside of my like nine to five work to like work on or attend things, in the evening or on the weekends or stuff.

[00:23:30] Jason Hand: I'm just not as interested. And some of that's just maybe age, I'm just grown older and I just rather use my personal time on other things. Some of it, I feel like I'm old and in the way sometimes. And maybe there's like a new crop of people who have a lot more creativity and ideas and I should just step out.

[00:23:43] Jason Hand: I get aggravated when people older than me don't do that and I don't want to be that way. Also, a lot of the events have turned sadly into DevRel talking to DevRel. And that bothers me a little bit too. And I don't know what the solution is because, if you look at the [00:24:00] CFPs, that's just what we're getting submissions from.

[00:24:02] Jason Hand: That is, that's what a bulk of the submissions are to DevRel. That's their job. It's my job to go and be in communities and talk and stuff, but I don't want to be talking to only other, I don't want it to be a room full of just You know, us, like I want to be talking to engineers and other folks too and learning from them.

[00:24:19] Jason Hand: I think the refactoring stuff or the re-imagining of a lot of these events is underway in a lot of places. I can tell you about the DevOps days, Rocky's folks, a lot of them I haven't really been directly involved with this, but I'm going to start participating is they've taken what used to be like meetups and things like that.

[00:24:35] Jason Hand: And now they go off into the woods, into the mountains and get together and connect their star links and spend a few days. Working, away from offices, but together with a smaller group of people. I like that idea. I haven't yet gone. I'm going to hopefully go to the next one.

[00:24:50] Jason Hand: I think that's later this month. I'll be sharing a link to that in my checkouts later, but it's I think a really creative way. Instead of trying to find, a conference room [00:25:00] or some office that you can borrow or rent or something.

[00:25:04] Jason Hand: And trying to get, people still had to pay for a meetup. com, which isn't cheap. So you had to get sponsorship money. And a lot of that is just people don't want to do that anymore. And so I think there is this way there's like new, I, a new movement. I don't know if movement's quite the word, but I like that I'm seeing some creative ways of getting folks together and at least, filling that void of I still miss you all.

[00:25:26] Jason Hand: I still want to talk, but I don't really want to do it the way we used to do it. So anyway, those are just my thoughts around that, but let's pivot a little bit.

[00:25:32] Mo McElaney: Just want to mention too, that like for me, my experience in organizing events. Most of it was unpaid labor. The large majority of it was unpaid labor.

[00:25:44] Mo McElaney: And I was able to do that before I had kids. And because I was career switching and I felt like I had to to get where I wanted to go. And I just think that people should get paid to do this work. [00:26:00] Either, if maybe you're in DevRel and it's part of your job, but, you That wasn't a common thing that I've seen in community conferences.

[00:26:08] Mo McElaney: And maybe people are less willing to do community conferences if they're not going to get paid for the labor.

[00:26:14] Matty Stratton: That is really interesting because first of all, I'm actually a big believer in paying speakers. Not that Oh my God, look at my ice cold take that speakers should be paid.

[00:26:23] Matty Stratton: But it's interesting because it's actually a very important rule. So theoretically DevOps days and organizers are not paid. Which again, goes back to that. Maybe we need to rethink some things because this happens often in DevOps and because DevOps has been around since 2009.

[00:26:39] Matty Stratton: So a lot of the quote unquote rules and guidelines of this global event. They're not, they shouldn't be sacred with things like that. Cause the world changes in certain ways. And I understand like the reason the intent for a lot of times is you don't want these to be for profit things, but also people who work for a non for profit get paid, so it's a way to think about it, but you're right, because you have this [00:27:00] unpaid labor and it gets into the people who have the ability to do that. Money is not the thing that's annoying about all of this is the conferences that have the money to pay the people and do the things don't do it, or they do because people work there.

[00:27:13] Matty Stratton: And unfortunately, community events, we try to be cheap and try inexpensive and accessible and all these things. If you could find some way to reward this, maybe you do that instead of having a big fancy party or. Heaven forbid a yak costume. No, you always have to have money for the costume and actually most importantly to have money for the cleaning of the yak costume.

[00:27:32] Matty Stratton: Do not forget that when you pick your mascots. You got to set aside a budget for that.

[00:27:39] Jason Hand: So it feels like we're talking a lot. We're covering several of the difficult areas of running these conferences. I'm wondering, and it also feels like we can bucket it into like pre COVID and post COVID too, but I'm wondering what other things are there that are difficult?

[00:27:56] Jason Hand: Those are things to consider when putting on a conference or trying to maintain a [00:28:00] conference over 10 years like some of the ones out there are longer I don't know, Maddie, start with you, maybe on this one. And what are your thoughts?

[00:28:06] Matty Stratton: One of the big challenges with an event like this and doing a thing. And I, it's going to sound maybe a little crass if you can't fire someone who's volunteering for performance. And this is often with many things people want to do. So again, give the, if you go back to the example of when we wanted to kick off the first DevOps day, Chicago, 15 people came to that meeting of the 15 people, three of us are still now, first of all, we're the three people that's crazy that we're still doing it, but how many fall in, how many people at anything like this, you'd see an open source, everything.

[00:28:36] Matty Stratton: Oh yeah. I want to help with this. I'm like, I need someone to help. And I'll get this big influx of a dozen people like, we'll help work on the website. And then it doesn't happen. So one of the challenges though, is because especially you're trying to create, like organizing a conference is hard.

[00:28:50] Matty Stratton: It has a lot of moving parts. People have different responsibilities. And if someone doesn't do what they're supposed to do or what they agreed to do, you really don't [00:29:00] have a lot of recourse. Because they're volunteering and you can't really, you could yell at them, but you feel like a jerk because someone's volunteering, they're doing their time, and everything like that.

[00:29:10] Matty Stratton: And some of it you can't really even, and then sometimes you're like I can't even get rid of you because who else is going to do it, even though you're not. So that's one challenge of organizing. And the other part is just everybody has different ability to do what they want to do.

[00:29:23] Matty Stratton: Like in terms of how much they commit, and it is probably not uncommon. I bet you, if you look at almost any community conference event, there are probably a handful of people that you feel like, if you ask everybody organizing team, they're like, yep, you know what? Jason and Wesley, they don't do crap and Mo does everything.

[00:29:42] Matty Stratton: And, it's again, that I think is one of the big challenges of that is how do you balance that?

[00:29:48] Mo McElaney: I think that managing the volunteers is the hardest. Aside from money obviously is always a stressor and, making sure you have enough to do what you want to do, but [00:30:00] managing the volunteers and also, mentoring people to take over and handing things off and being okay with them not being done the way you would want them done necessarily.

[00:30:11] Mo McElaney: I think that's the hardest part. And that is crucial to making sure your community lives on past you. And yeah, it's a difficult part. I've done it well in the past. I've done it poorly in the past with events that I've done. And so I don't have a great answer, but that's what I think is the hardest.

[00:30:33] Weslefy Faulkner: All right. We're good. We're coming up on the end of this, but I want to try to bring it on as actual advice for people who are listening to this that are just considering getting into this field of volunteering.

[00:30:48] Weslefy Faulkner: What advice would you give them to help them make the determination if they should or should not?

[00:30:53] Mo McElaney: I think that you should go in

[00:30:54] Weslefy Faulkner: this?

[00:30:55] Mo McElaney: Sorry. I think that you should go into it being really clear about [00:31:00] your capacity and what you have time for and the best way to communicate with you.

[00:31:06] Mo McElaney: Because that will really help the organizer with leveraging you in the best way and. And then it also sets both of you up for success, because if the organizer knows what you're there to do and why you're there and, what you're not able to do, then they're not wasting your time, assigning you things and then you don't get them done and then everyone is frustrated and, so

[00:31:34] Matty Stratton: I just want to double down on that. I want to agree. And I think you need to, when you're getting involved, be not only very clear about what you can do, but ask those questions if you're going to join an organizing event or something like that and say, realistically, what is the commitment you expect out of me?

[00:31:51] Matty Stratton: What is, what, how, what do you need and what does that mean? And then sit down. And assume that it's twice that and say, does that fit [00:32:00] within your bandwidth to be able to do that because things are going to happen. Sit down and take a long, hard look at yourself and say, why do I want to do this?

[00:32:08] Matty Stratton: Because there's going to be times that it's going to be super duper hard and you need to know that the reason that you're doing it is enough to pull you through the days that suck, so just know that.

[00:32:18] Jason Hand: Awesome. As Wesley pointed out, we're getting towards the end of our time here.

[00:32:21] Jason Hand: So I want to thank both of you for joining us. I think that community events are still out there. I wouldn't, I don't know if I feel to have the confidence to say they're thriving, but I feel like they're evolving. I know that DevOpsDays Rockies is much, much smaller this year. I'm a little bit excited about that for some reason.

[00:32:38] Jason Hand: I think it's going to be, I don't know, maybe I just like change as long as it's a good change. I think it's healthy. They're holding it at a brewery this year. I'm just, I'm optimistic, to see how things are going to change a little bit here.

[00:33:43] Jason Hand: Let's pivot away into our checkouts. As most of those of you've been listening to the show forever, we spend the last 10 minutes or so just going around the room and letting our guests and whoever's hosting share some of the different things that they are thinking about, reading about, watching, talking about just [00:34:00] anything that's on top of your mind.

[00:34:00] Jason Hand: Moe, I guess if you are Ready? Let's maybe start with you and then go to Maddie from there and then Wesley, and then I can wrap things up. So what do you got for checkouts?

[00:34:08] Mo McElaney: Okay. So I am a contributor to the contributor covenant and we are working on version three of that code of conduct.

[00:34:18] Mo McElaney: So if you want to get involved in version three of this, a big part of it is we want it to be more transferable to in person events. not just open source projects. Relevant to this conversation. I also just this past Monday presented at PI data Vermont on cognitive bias and machine learning.

[00:34:40] Mo McElaney: So if you are interested in that, you can check out the video it's coming out soon. I'm also giving that talk at AI for the rest of us in London this fall. If you're around there or thinking about going to that, stop by and say hello. And yeah, just non tech related. I'm also a Master [00:35:00] Gardener intern out of the University of Vermont.

[00:35:04] Mo McElaney: So if you have garden questions, you can go to the Ask a Master Gardener hotline. You probably have an extension locally to you if you're in the U S. But yeah, so I hope if you are in a part of the world where gardening is possible, that your garden is lovely.

[00:35:22] Matty Stratton: You're a master gardener.

[00:35:23] Matty Stratton: That is amazing.

[00:35:24] Mo McElaney: Haven't finished my certification yet, ~~but ~~

[00:35:26] Matty Stratton: you are you are, you're closer to it than the rest of us. I assume I know I shouldn't speak for Wesley and Jason, but I'm going to guess.

[00:35:36] Jason Hand: All right, Matty. Let's hear your checkouts.

[00:35:38] Matty Stratton: Yeah, a couple. So one thing there's a little bit of a theme here. So I've been getting a lot into weightlifting and working out over the last bit of time. And I can go on and on about that. And we'll talk about that another time, but there's a couple of things to check out.

[00:35:52] Matty Stratton: One is there's this app that I like to do for keeping track of my lifting and it's called heavy H E V Y. There's a billion of them. And of course, [00:36:00] you'll see all the ads for all the AI generated and stuff, but literally you just want to keep track of stuff. Along those lines, there's this great trainer.

[00:36:07] Matty Stratton: And her website is, she's a beast. co and she has this awesome program. If you're just getting started with lifting called couch to barbell, it's the liftoff program, but what's the greatest thing about it is there's a discord. For members of her newsletter. So basically for seven bucks a month, which is well worth it.

[00:36:23] Matty Stratton: I spent so much time trying to find a community of people to live because of accountability and to learn from and everything. And everyone was like, here's an influencer. A lot of them can follow on Instagram. I'm like, that's not a community. And my friend Dave Shackelford that I used to work with at Patriot duty, clued me into the lift cord from this, and it has been the most amazing way.

[00:36:42] Matty Stratton: I've got everybody gassing each other up. You have folks in there who have just started doing anything to people who are massively competitive Olympic lifters and all of this, and everyone. It is amazing together. So check it out. And then finally, the other thing I've been into lately, and I know I'm like a decade behind is fallout.

[00:36:59] Matty Stratton: So the fallout [00:37:00] TV show, if you haven't seen it, check it out. It's amazing. It got me hooked on the game. Because the lore is great. It's quirky and funny. So anyway, check out

[00:37:11] Matty Stratton: and everyone's dude, we've been playing Fallout. Like we started playing fallout like 20 years ago. Where are you? I'm like, cool. Soon I will learn about Mario. Just kidding.

[00:37:17] Weslefy Faulkner: I

[00:37:17] Matty Stratton: I already know about Mario.

[00:37:21] Weslefy Faulkner: Yes. Also the fallout TV show is really good. And as an intro in terms of getting the, knowing what the scenario is for me, I only have one checkout and it's a book that I finished it's called, you're not listening.

[00:37:35] Weslefy Faulkner: And the book is that I wanted to get it just to make sure that. I had all the techniques to stay engaged as a person with ADHD. There's often a conversation where I check out in the middle. And this gives some really good techniques about how to stay engaged, what to listen for, what are the reasons for not being engaged how to re engage how to understand if someone is not being engaged and making sure.[00:38:00]

[00:38:01] Weslefy Faulkner: There are techniques in which you can phrase a question and pose an idea where you can get the maximum amount of engagement, which I think is also very important. Once again, the book's called you're not listening by Kate Murphy.

[00:38:12] Jason Hand: Awesome. Yeah, I definitely need to add that to my list.

[00:38:14] Jason Hand: I've got a few things here. I've got a couple of books. And then also I had mentioned that sort of new community type of event that's happening locally. If you're in the, what's called the Colorado region. Cause I feel like it's going to happen all over the place. You should check out wild spaces.

[00:38:29] Jason Hand: That work. And or if you live in an area where you can get away from things maybe consider starting something similar. I think it's a pretty neat idea, very creative. And the books that I have are from a friend. SRE advocate former colleague at Microsoft David Blank Edelman.

[00:38:46] Jason Hand: He's been a guest on our show a few times, but he just recently put out becoming an SRE and I'm I'd say about a third of the way through that. And it is really good. He's very funny. He's very smart. And all of that comes through in the book.

[00:38:58] Jason Hand: He's got a lot of [00:39:00] smart people that he's talked to. So anyway, if you're in the DevOps SRE space, I highly recommend it. The other book I have actually David recommended this to me. So thank you, David. If you're listening. It's called, you have not heard your favorite song. And this is from somebody written by somebody who formerly was at Spotify and really just talking about sort of the transition into the digital music world.

[00:39:19] Jason Hand: I think a lot of us have feelings around that. And I know for myself I'm big into music, both listening and playing. And I haven't gotten very far in this book, but I'm very curious to see what it does expose to me in terms of what it is you're missing out there. I think that there's, we all, I'm always coming across new music that I didn't know about.

[00:39:36] Jason Hand: So I don't have a lot of feedback on what the book's going to tell me, but David says it's great. So I'm going to trust him and I'm looking forward to reading it. And I think that's it for me on checkouts.

[00:39:45] Jason Hand: So anyway, thank you all for being here. Mo Maddy and Wesley, of course it's been great. Usually PJ, when he's on the show he's out today both him and Mary, but usually at the end, PJ likes to take us out with a little [00:40:00] quote from a musician that is somewhat relevant or just feels like the right vibe for today Wesley tossed a few into chat for me here because we didn't quite think about it ahead of time.

[00:40:09] Jason Hand: I'm going to choose this one from John Lennon here that I like. For those of you who want to go out there and come up with something new to keep these community events, either floating as they are, or refactor them, like we said, or start something new.

[00:40:24] Jason Hand: I encourage you to find some creativity, whatever that takes to do that. And the quote from John Lennon is there's nothing you can do that can't be done. And with that, I am going to say goodbye. Thank you so much to everyone joinning us today and we'll see you on the next episode of the community pulse.

[00:40:44] Jason Hand: Bye.

Checkouts

Matty Stratton

Wesley Faulkner

Jason Hand

Enjoy the podcast?

Artwork Photo by Tyler Callahan on Unsplash

Special Guests: Matty Stratton and Mo McElaney.

In this episode of After Pulse 89, the co-hosts—PJ Haggerty, Jason Hand, Mary Thengvall, and Wesley Faulkner—continue the conversation from the previous episode of Community Pulse, discussing the transition of DevRel professionals who move on to different roles. The focus of this episode is on the evolving landscape of DevRel, the shifting career trajectories of people in the field, and the complexities that come with leaving DevRel roles to pursue new challenges. The hosts reflect on the shared experiences and skills DevRel professionals carry with them into their new roles, including the ability to learn and adapt.

Co-Hosts’ Reflections:

Jason Hand adds that many people in DevRel often find themselves wondering what comes next when the "light burns out." He shares his own perspective as someone who enjoys learning and feels that the skills developed in DevRel, like the ability to learn new things quickly, are incredibly valuable in any role, including product management. Jason emphasizes the importance of focusing not just on job titles but on skills and experiences—what a person brings to the table rather than the specific job title they’ve held.

Mary Thengvall talks about how, even when someone leaves DevRel, they often continue to apply the same skills they used in DevRel, especially when transitioning into product management or other fields. She emphasizes the idea that people in DevRel excel at things like product management tasks and skills, which can be leveraged in other roles. Mary encourages the audience to focus less on titles and more on the specific skills they bring to new roles, and she also mentions how this approach helps when looking for new opportunities.

Transitioning Out of DevRel:

Mary continues the discussion by highlighting how DevRel professionals are often misjudged in interviews due to the broad and sometimes vague nature of their roles. She discusses how one of her friends with experience in customer support, product management, and customer success had to downplay her job titles and focus more on her skills to find a new role. This idea of emphasizing "skills over titles" becomes a recurring theme throughout the conversation.

Reflections on the State of DevRel Today:

Jason Hand chimes in with his own experiences working with developers at Datadog. He mentions how, in his current role, he’s helping engineering teams improve their communication skills, making them better presenters at conferences and user events. Jason expresses pride when a developer he worked with successfully presents a talk, even though the impact of his coaching is often invisible to the larger audience. This lack of visibility for the contributions of DevRel professionals is a recurring theme—many of their efforts are behind the scenes, making them hard to measure but still incredibly important.

Skills Beyond Titles:

Mary Thengvall echoes this sentiment, stressing that many DevRel professionals come to the role from "sideways" paths, bringing with them varied life experiences that make them uniquely equipped to handle the demands of DevRel. She highlights how people entering DevRel without this broader experience often lack the passion and historical context that more experienced DevRel professionals bring to the table. Without the context of the role’s evolution, it can be challenging for newer professionals to fully grasp the complexities of DevRel and to advocate for its continued importance.

The Importance of Leadership in DevRel:

Mary agrees with Wesley, emphasizing the importance of continuing to mentor and support those in DevRel roles, even when they transition out of DevRel into other areas. She points out that people like Matt, who have transitioned from DevRel into product management, still stay connected with the DevRel community and support those who continue to work in the field.

Final Thoughts on Career Shifts and the Future of DevRel:

Key Words:

Themes:

Skills Over Titles:

Burnout and Career Shifts:

Leadership and Mentorship:

Historical Context and Passion for DevRel:

Value of Being a "Jack of All Trades":

[00:00:00] PJ Haggerty: That was a great episode. Really fantastic. Not just for the content, but I will say it's great because we hadn't seen Taylor and Matt on the podcast in a while. So it was really good to have them back. Especially because I think the last podcast we did with Matt was like, I'm leaving DevRel and this is what's happening.

[00:00:16] PJ Haggerty: And then we got to see a couple of years later here, he's doing really well. So that's really good. DevRel then and now. Then and now.

[00:00:23] Jason Hand: And I think we've all had, where

[00:00:25] PJ Haggerty: Are they now?

[00:00:26] Jason Hand: We've all had the thoughts, like what comes after, my, The light has burnt out for me in dev rel.

[00:00:32] Jason Hand: What am I, what do I do next? So it was really easy to hear from them.

[00:00:36] PJ Haggerty: And I think the most interesting point he made was, no, he's not really interested in coming back. He is completely happy and satisfied with the work that he's doing, which is fantastic.

[00:00:46] Mary Thengvall: Absolutely. And I think it's always fascinating to see and to talk to people who are either thinking about leaving DevRel or have left DevRel to go, okay you've left the official DevRel [00:01:00] titles, but a lot of what you're doing is still the same work, right? It's the stuff that I, when you were in DevRel, I looked at you and went, Oh, you really excel at, And so it's cool to me

[00:01:14] Mary Thengvall: but I think it's a cool thing to remember, because we do so many different things. In this space, if you have one piece that you're really good at, really passionate about, it is possible to take that and make that the core of a new position, right?

[00:01:34] Mary Thengvall: Not only is it possible, but people thrive doing it.

[00:01:37] Jason Hand: One of the things about most people who are in developer relations is that we are skilled at learning new things. And I think that's our greatest asset is that we are interested, just Matt was saying he's just like this hobbyist, like he'll just learn and dive in headfirst.

[00:01:53] Jason Hand: I'm the same way. I've got way too many hobbies. Because I just, I'm a constant learner and I enjoy the process of learning. If there's a challenge, [00:02:00] I know I can get through it by just learning something, spending the time and investing in myself. And I'm trying to come to grips with something that I think a therapist or somebody told me along the way is like, when you get to a place where you're interviewing and you're trying to put yourself out there.

[00:02:14] Jason Hand: You're not just a dev rel, you're not a thing. You are Jason, and they're hiring Jason and he's going to come with a lot of experience and he's got skills that he used to rely on. He's got skills that he has now, but the best thing that we might see on a piece of paper on my resume is that he is a constant learner.

[00:02:32] Jason Hand: And so maybe one day I do want to be in product, even though I have zero real background in it, I think that hopefully they see through all that and be like, Oh, but that's Jason.

[00:02:41] Jason Hand: And he, we know that he can, pull through.

[00:02:43] Mary Thengvall: And the counter that I would make to that is you have zero, Official title of product manager experience. You have a ton of experience in product management, like tasks and skills and [00:03:00] those types of things. And there's a good friend of mine who's been looking for a new job for probably close to a year now and is struggling because she has customer support experience and product manager experience and customer success.

[00:03:16] Mary Thengvall: Customer renewal type of experience. So if you look at her resume, she's bounced around between a lot of these different roles. And one of the things that she's found she has to do is put far less emphasis on these were my titles and far more emphasis on here are my skills.

[00:03:33] Mary Thengvall: Past job experience from her resume entirely and leading with, look, here are my skills. And then you get to the bottom of that single page resume. And if you're interested in my specific job experience and titles, it links back to her LinkedIn. And so it's almost that kind of idea of okay, how do we emphasize here are the skills that I have here, the things that I thrive at doing [00:04:00] the environments that I thrive at.

[00:04:02] Mary Thengvall: Most at and encouraged most by right and looking at it from that perspective, I think is a very different approach than many of us take, but can be so helpful in not just this economy, but when we're considering moving to a different type of position.

[00:04:19] Wesley Faulkner: And it makes it hard for describing yourself, describing what you do, but also for others to do the intro, to find things that are good fit for you as well.

[00:04:28] Wesley Faulkner: The saying, this person would be a great fit for this role. So I'm going to recommend them because I think we've talked about this before, they could say this person's a good person and they're good at what they do. And they do a little bit of everything, which does not fit with. Companies, the way that they advertise for jobs, they have these titles, they have these duties, and they're looking for the people who fit those, that specific set of requirements underneath each one of those titles.

[00:04:53] Wesley Faulkner: And when, one of the things that we're good learners because we're. In that continuous cycle of learning [00:05:00] one, do one, teach one, right? That's the job. And so you're not only learning the thing, doing the thing, but you have to be skilled at explaining it.

[00:05:09] Wesley Faulkner: If you are doing that constantly, there's almost nothing that you can't retain. And so you do that for years and then you have the pub quiz trivia and knowledge about technology, about development, about sales marketing and all the things around it, because that's what the job is.

[00:05:26] Wesley Faulkner: And so it does make it difficult to just say I'm the square peg. And I will fit in this square hole.

[00:05:34] PJ Haggerty: A good one. A good problem to have.

[00:05:35] PJ Haggerty: Yeah. I think that kind of concept of the jack of all trades master of none. Like it's. It's true and not true. I think that when it goes back to, both what all three of you have just said, we're educators, but educators are educated. At least they should be, in the ideal situation.

[00:05:51] PJ Haggerty: Educators are educated and that's why they're good at the things that they do. If I'm able to explain a process to someone, I'm able to explain that process. I can repeat the [00:06:00] process of explanation all that I want.

[00:06:02] PJ Haggerty: And I was going to ask Taylor, but I decided to back off about layoffs and DevRel and hiring and interviewing right now. A lot of the places that are doing this are going in and saying Oh, you need to know, you need to have 80 years of experience doing Python and Ruby and AI and all of that.

[00:06:18] PJ Haggerty: I don't need to actually be able to have any competency in any of those languages just because your product is written in it. What I need to do is have the ability to. Piece it all together and explain how to participate in it, how to use it, how to take advantage of your product, tool, API, whatever.

[00:06:32] PJ Haggerty: And this is the big disconnect that's currently happening, I think. And why I think a lot of people are like, I'm going to leave DevRel because they're like, I don't have tons of places to be hired in the AI field. Very few of us who have been doing DevRel for a long time have had deep experience in AI.

[00:06:49] PJ Haggerty: Where do these AI companies think they're going to hire people? They have to have a better understanding of how the job itself actually works. When you hire a marketer, you say you're good at marketing.

[00:06:58] PJ Haggerty: When you hire a salesperson, you say you're good [00:07:00] at sales. When you hire someone in developer advocacy, you say you're good at engineering that you've never done before. That doesn't make sense. But if I say, I can educate them on how to use that should be what they're looking for.

[00:07:10] PJ Haggerty: And that's the breakthrough I think we need to have. And we will stop hemorrhaging great DevRel folks. If we start hiring appropriately.

[00:07:19] Jason Hand: There's always so much just debate. It feels like what developer relations is. And one thing that it definitely is, cause this is where I'm spending a good chunk of my energy, a data dog is working internally is working with our engineering team to help them prepare, all hands decks and make them better communicators.

[00:07:38] Jason Hand: I mentioned dash the user conference that's coming up. I'm assigned to a couple of different. Presenters that are going to be speaking there and I'm their coach. I'm going to help them all along the way. They're already decent speakers, but I'm going to work with them, from the beginning to end.

[00:07:54] Jason Hand: And it's going to be an amazing talk. And that's the relationship, that's developer relations. I'm working with developers [00:08:00] from, I can't mention the names just yet, but like some big name companies. And I'm, Lifting them up, and then where does that map, Matt kept saying things have to map to something with the business.

[00:08:12] Jason Hand: It's a little harder to map that, but I do see, I do feel some pride when somebody that I worked with is now on screen or on stage and they freaking crush it, and not a lot of people know I influenced that. And that's hard because you can't put a metric to that.

[00:08:27] Mary Thengvall: Also, it's something you don't want to brag about too loudly publicly. Because you don't wanna make that other person look bad and go

[00:08:36] PJ Haggerty: you also don't wanna seem like it, you don't, you don't wanna seem like an asshole. Exactly. So I totally, yeah, I totally created the situation where so and so became a wonderful speaker. You're welcome. World ,

[00:08:45] Mary Thengvall: like exactly. Exactly. And so because of that, I think there's a lot of other things that we do really well that just aren't ever seen and are difficult to point to if we want to [00:09:00] maintain those relationships,

[00:09:00] Wesley Faulkner: yeah, exactly. And most of us are career switchers who find themselves in. DevRel. And so not only are they learning new skills and doing this kind of integration with different departments, but they're bringing in a whole host of previous life experience that does help them.

[00:09:16] Wesley Faulkner: That does enhance where they have their perspective on things, but then also doesn't necessarily come into context of what we talk about. For instance, I was a product development engineer for AMD for five and a half years, where I helped bring products to market. For OEM systems. And before that I did onsite deployments and emergency break fix for Dell.

[00:09:37] Wesley Faulkner: And I worked there for six years. And so I was in front of the C level suite. Executives explaining the products and what went wrong and how we solved it. And coming up with a mitigation plan, that stuff doesn't come up in interviews.

[00:09:50] Wesley Faulkner: It feels like it complicates the thing. I ran for city council of Austin, ran a whole campaign, created the whole and met with constituents and did all of the [00:10:00] stuff and the debates, all that stuff doesn't ever come up really. But. When I'm in those situations, when I'm trying to defuse a customer or a client that's having an issue when I'm taking Q and a after a talk and someone is wanting to complain about the company stance on a certain issue or how a feature is not created or that addresses their problem, those All come into play.

[00:10:27] Wesley Faulkner: And, but it's hard to say and to say how valuable it is. And it's almost like when I did it, people notice things when something goes wrong and they get corrected, but they don't really notice the things that never become a problem. Absolutely.

[00:10:42] Mary Thengvall: And this is something that we chatted with Matt and Taylor a little bit after the recording was done, but.

[00:10:47] Mary Thengvall: Don't tell people about

[00:10:47] PJ Haggerty: the secret

[00:10:48] Mary Thengvall: tell them about the secret after posting. But Wesley, this goes back to your point that a lot of us who have been in the DevRel space for a while now got [00:11:00] here through a sideways path, right? We stumbled into this because of our other areas of experience.

[00:11:07] Mary Thengvall: And I think that's one of the biggest issues that I'm starting to see right now. Like I have nothing against people cobbling together their own type of college resume and their own learning path to figure out, Hey I know people who do Debrel. I want to do Debrel. Can I do that straight out of college?

[00:11:27] Mary Thengvall: That's fine. But the problem that I'm seeing is. Those of us who are more experienced who are getting tired of having to fight for What I do is important and here's explaining what I what my job is and doing it, you know in hard mode like taylor mentioned if all were Left with at this point is people who haven't had other roles don't have other job experience or coming into this as 22, 23 year old going, cool.

[00:11:57] Mary Thengvall: I have my college degree and I now [00:12:00] know how community management works and how developer relations works and everything else. They're then trying to basically redefine DevRel without any of that. experience.

[00:12:11] PJ Haggerty: Historical context.

[00:12:12] Mary Thengvall: Well,

[00:12:14] PJ Haggerty: and this goes to what Matt was talking about.

[00:12:16] PJ Haggerty: Tired of fighting that fight and explaining what we do. If you come along and you don't have the history of what we've done, you have no desire to fight for what it is that we do or what this job is, you don't care about the definition. You don't, and I don't mean to dismiss people like that. I'm not trying to gatekeep, but honestly, you don't feel the passion.

[00:12:34] PJ Haggerty: If you just came into the job, I was like, Define DevRel, and you're like, it's the job that I'm doing right now. If you don't like that, I'll go find a DevRel job somewhere else. Part of the want to keep doing this job is to keep redefining it, keep it evolving, and keep proving that there's a reason why we're about.

[00:12:50] PJ Haggerty: But if you don't have the historical context, you don't know how to fight that fight.

[00:12:54] Mary Thengvall: Yeah,

[00:12:54] Wesley Faulkner: right. And the one way of preserving that historical context is promoting [00:13:00] leaders in dev rel to higher positions. Absolutely. To be able to not only make those calls, but have that influence to make those judgments about what direction the company should go in and also who.

[00:13:09] Wesley Faulkner: Yeah. Who should be rewarded and what skills should also be reinforced so that it makes sense for you to keep developing those skills so that you can progress so that you can move up. And that's one of the things currently in this DevRel environment is that the senior leadership so few of them are from a traditional DevRel background.

[00:13:29] Mary Thengvall: Mhm. Agreed. And I think that's such an important point, right? That if you are moving out of DevRel into other leadership positions, keeping an eye out for people who are in DevRel, right? Keeping an eye out for people who are in those roles. And I know Matt and I have talked about this before.

[00:13:45] Mary Thengvall: This is something that he does, right? He is no longer in DevRel, but definitely continues to have those conversations, and continues to support people who are doing it because just because he doesn't want to have to fight for [00:14:00] that conversation anymore.

[00:14:02] Mary Thengvall: It doesn't mean he doesn't have that context and experience to be able to help other people do it as well.

[00:14:07] PJ Haggerty: I

[00:14:08] Mary Thengvall: know. I do want to wrap it up in PJs. I know you normally wrap up with a quote, but you mentioned the after pulse, none.

[00:14:16] Mary Thengvall: However, that's only half of the saying. And I think this is a really applicable time to bring up that other half. Because the full quote is actually a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one. Know more, have more context, learn more quickly than a lot of people who have only that single deep knowledge of that one topic so something to keep in mind for all of us and we'll see you next time on the next community pulse Thanks for joining.

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