Finding a developer relations job

Geertjan Wielenga: Once you have programming skills, how do you find these developer relations positions?

Ted Neward: In the same way that you find any other position. On the one hand, yes, there are the job sites that have keyword searches and so forth, but on the other hand, much of it is word of mouth still.

Finding a programming position is not that hard, but some of these companies don't know that they need a developer relations team. So, certainly, there's a challenge there from the standpoint that if you want to work for company Z and it doesn't have a developer relations team, you may have to go and convince people. The hard part is, obviously, that you have to convince people that they're wrong and that they do need this thing. But I think that that is going to become easier as more and more companies do this.

If you're Zeeks Pizza, which is a local pizza chain here in the Washington State area, and you have APIs, then when Domino's looks around and realizes that it is losing a whole bunch of business to this competitor that has APIs, it will say, "Well, we'll stand up APIs."

Then Domino's will realize that it's still losing business, so it will say, "What's the difference?

Somebody from Zeeks is going out and talking at all these places about how to use the Zeeks API here in the Washington State area. Who is that person? That person does developer relations. Well, we need one of those people!"

The more that companies start doing this, the more it's going to create competitive pressure on their peers and the more this industry will start to steamroll. Ford wants to put APIs on cars. As we start talking about autonomous drivers and all these other things, that's going to require APIs and that's going to require somebody to talk about that and build that ecosystem.

If you want to get a job as a programmer at a company that makes an open-source product, then contribute pull requests. If you want to get a job in developer relations, don't just contribute pull requests: go out and talk about the product. Remember, this is a three-headed horse: you have to have the coding skills, the writing skills, and the presentation skills.

If you're looking to define a developer relations story at a company, then I think, in some respects, the goal is to go in with that story. The notion of Smartsheet is that it's a tool that can serve at the center of a larger IT strategy. Somebody needs to talk about that story. Somebody needs to revisit that story and sell it to other people and other companies.

That is the story that my management chain carried to the rest of the company to say, "This is why we need to create this department."

What developer relations does is help to support the sales cycle by creating a narrative arc. So, if you want to convince a company that it needs a developer relations department, your first job is to create that narrative arc.

Geertjan Wielenga: Is there one specific thing that you like least about the developer relations role?