Being headhunted

Geertjan Wielenga: How did that connection start if they weren't aware that they needed such a function? Why did you pick that particular organization to do this at?

Ted Neward: Well, actually, it came about rather accidentally. I met the principal technical recruiter for Smartsheet at a HackerX hiring mixer about two and a half years ago. I also met with the VP of engineering and we just had a nice chat. It was purely random.

Then, about five months later, one of my students from my university classes was interning at Smartsheet.

He emailed me to say, "By the way, thanks for the class. It really helped me to get ready for this internship."

I said, "Oh, Smartsheet, I know those guys. Tell them I said hi." That brought me back to the top of the cache, so to speak. They said that they wanted to talk to me.

Brian, the VP of engineering, said, "Well, we don't really have any place in engineering for somebody who talks as much as you do, but we don't have anybody who talks as much as you do! Would you be interested in doing that for us?"

I said, "I won't be a developer advocate, but I will build the department for you."

I think the larger message is that Domino's doesn't know that it needs a developer advocate. There are so many companies that you can start rattling off; that's the realization. If every organization is an IT organization and if we are telling these IT organizations that they need to build APIs in order to enable public integration with all these other companies, then they need somebody who can go around and talk about why you would want to integrate with them as opposed to somebody else.

In some respects, my boss, Andy, who is the senior VP of technology, admitted right out of the gate that a third of what Smartsheet wants developer relations for is to use it as a recruiting function, which, again, is brand recognition.

We're saying, "This is where the cool kids are and we're working on some interesting ideas."

For those companies that think that they have all the developers they could possibly need (which you and I both know isn't true), developer relations is not just a recruiting function: it's also that sense of creating those technical partnerships. So, for example, if Smartsheet decides to do some sort of partnership with Meetup, who's going to have some of those initial discussions? If we want to start doing some cross-branding on the blog or if we want to do some partnerships at hackathons, then there's this ecosystem of developer relations. You're literally acting as an advocate not to consumers but to potential partners.

Developers spend all of their time writing code, except maybe for a small sliver of time doing meetings, but with developer advocates, it's much more of a split. You're coding, but you're typically coding samples. You're not actually writing production code; instead, you're writing prose and so forth. You're writing articles for the blog, if not articles for some publication. You're presenting at conferences or doing customer visits. You're helping the sales team to sell.

Geertjan Wielenga: Let's move on to talking about what makes this so interesting for you. What are the key points that make this position so valuable and relevant for you?

Ted Neward: I think part of what makes it interesting on a personal level is that just from one day to the next, I'm never doing the exact same thing.

One day I'm working on a blog post; the next day I'm working on the sample code for that blog post; the day after that I'm working on some slides for a presentation; and the day after that, I'm flying to Amsterdam to go and deliver a talk on this topic. So, in many respects, if you're one of those individuals who loves the idea of walking into your space and putting on your headphones and just writing code all day, this is not the job for you. This is not a job for people who want to hide.

As much as we like to say that developers are just code monkeys, most people actually have a desire to change it up every so often. So, the idea is that you can actually make use of some of your other soft skills in terms of communicating with other people. I do think that developers, as a whole, are required to communicate more with their peers than 10 or 15 years ago. I think that that's going to make the developer relations position more attractive to a larger number of people.

One of the things that I'm finding is that developer relations is very attractive to people who come from non-traditional CS backgrounds. As a matter of fact, in my developer relations team one guy is a former sports writer for soccer. He then got into tech and was working on code. He's thriving. The other guy on my team spent a fair amount of time working in event management for wealth management seminars. He writes the best talk abstracts. So, we've got two people who many other companies would just completely give a pass on.

Geertjan Wielenga: But what's your story? How did you end up being a developer advocate in the first place?

Ted Neward: I didn't ever hold the title of "developer advocate" until I became the director of developer relations at Smartsheet.

I spoke on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour and I've written a number of books. I've done that consulting style of developer relations because I had to go to places and convince people that they had a problem that I could help them to solve, which, again, was some of that sales and marketing stuff.

If you're an independent developer or if you want to build your own consulting company, you have to do those sorts of things. Whether you see that as developer relations or sales and marketing, there's a fair amount of overlap. Quite frankly, there's so much overlap between being an independent speaker and being a developer advocate that they're almost synonymous in many ways.

Geertjan Wielenga: How did you get to where you are now? It's obviously been a long journey with many twists and turns.