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Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

16 comments

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

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

streetcat1
The end game for tensor flow is auto ml not cloud computing (which is a commodity by now).

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

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

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

100 people will go to your website,

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

1 person will end up considering buying your product.

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

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

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

I would assume Facebook having one successful dev advocate has many benefits:

-if FB is going to build products with React, it is in FB's best interest that there is a healthy React community constantly building new things FO FREE, so now Facebook can easily integrate good ideas/tools built for React into internal systems. I would assume this is huge.

-basically recruit smart/productive devs to FB by interacting with React community on a regular basis

-buys goodwill with dev community

-An additional line of communication into potential customers, when you have a potential sale going on with a customer, if your dev advocate knows important technical leadership people at customer that can help

But really i have no idea :)

nwAcctFrgtPswrd
Important to remember that things like React or Java, they aren't ever finished, they are constantly being worked on and improved on, so while there is a central brain trust (React has the React team at FB, Java has the Java Executive Committee comprised of devs from Oracle and other big companies like IBM, Twitter, others. these devs are eventually going to retire and will need to be replaced by community experts) these open source communities are still very much dependent on dev community assistance/feedback for the successes of these languages/frameworks to keep the gears churning.
wpdn
Yep, this is close to what I was thinking too. I was wondering if this doesn't have the drawback of core team having to constantly deal with people from outside coming with their use-cases that have nothing to do with what the team's vision is. You know, "i was thinking it would be nice to have bells and whistles when you click this button" type of people. I would really love to get some insight into the efficiency of this (developer-advocacy-in-general) - seems like it's really worth it for companies.
wpdn
I just thought of another possible explanation - apps and integrations are probably a big part of the revenue ecosystem so e.g. in case of react, if your product is built on it and your integrations/apps/whatever engine is also react-centered, it's kind of cheap to introduce new people to these concepts. I guess.
RNeff
A developer advocate is an extrovert that likes teaching, explaining, answering questions, writing intro docs and code examples; that wants the users to succeed. They also report back to the project managers and programmers about problems: confusion, missing functionality, bugs, possible enhancements, OS and compiler incompatibilities.

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

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

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

wpdn
This is a valid argument but it does not answer my question which was about why do companies have developer advocates for products other that what they directly sell.
kazinator
Because those products form an ecosystem on which the product is built which they do sell. If the users are familiar with the platform and have adopted it, it's easier to sell to them stuff based on the platform.
wpdn
i am pretty certain that promoting react has little impact on people who do bring the most revenue to facebook (end users who simply eat up clickbait).
maps7
In my experience, for React, developer advocates have been really good for getting the project out to the community
wpdn
Yes, what I'm asking is what is the motivation to have them?