The downside to developer relations

Ted Neward: Probably the fact that, as we said earlier, it's not well known yet, so I spend as much time talking about what it is as I do about strategies within it. But that will correct itself over time.

That's not something that I can educate my boss about and suddenly everything will correct itself. My boss actually has a fairly good idea about what developer relations is and for the most part, he leaves it to me to define the rest.

Technically, I'm not even a developer advocate: I'm in management. So, it's about making my team successful and not about what I do. My job is basically meetings and emails. Scott, the former sports writer, told me that the thing that he really likes about the job is that on any given day he walks in and says, "Do I feel like writing code today? Then I'll work on a sample. Do I feel like writing an article today? Then I'll work on a blog post."

Geertjan Wielenga: With the diversity of the role and how interesting it is, why on earth would someone not want to be involved in developer relations?

Ted Neward: Some people don't like it. Let's recognize that our personalities are similar, but let's also not make the mistake of assuming that everybody's personality is similar.

My wife, for example, prefers to know what the boundaries are. If she's supposed to do a job, she likes to have boundaries in which she operates. If you were to present her with a very open-ended task to make people aware of a company, she could do that, but that's not what she likes to do. What she likes is to know exactly what her responsibilities are so she can carry those out and go home at the end of the day.

In the CS world, they teach developers that there's one right answer. Every time somebody up on stage says the words "best practices," we reinforce that notion that there's one right answer. There just isn't. You and I have been trained from our university education to see things not as black or white but as this long shade of gray. But there are people who don't want to deal with that.

We could also ask, "Why isn't everybody a start-up founder? Well, because a lot of people don't like taking those risks. They don't like being in a position where they're responsible for other people's livelihoods.