Rabea's view of developer advocates

Geertjan Wielenga: As you don't have "developer advocate" on your business card, when you go to conferences, how do you view the developer advocates? Do you see a difference between the way that official developer advocates present their content versus people who are not official?

Rabea Gransberger: I'm not sure that I would actually notice the difference if I didn't know that they were official developer advocates. It's pretty much the same.

It might only be different for people who go into new roles. I never feel that the developer advocates are presenting their material like some of the speakers of sponsored talks. They always try to sell their product, but developer advocates don't do that too much.

Geertjan Wielenga: Could you explain a little bit about sponsored talks at conferences to draw out that distinction?

Rabea Gransberger: I usually never go to sponsored talks because I think much of it is just marketing. Many of the speakers are not honestly presenting the product: they have a lot of marketing stuff in their slides.

The speakers present things that probably do not even work today, but they might work in the future. I think people get disappointed if they go to the sponsored talks and then go and try out the materials, and find that they don't work as expected. The speakers don't honestly answer any questions from the audience either. I don't like that.

Geertjan Wielenga: Let's go back to you saying that developer advocates working for companies are hard to distinguish from speakers who are not working as official developer advocates. What's the reason for that?

Rabea Gransberger: No, that's not what I'm saying; I'm saying that I don't see a difference in the way that they present the talks. I'm sure that there's a difference in what they do for daily work, but I don't see a difference in how they present talks in comparison to other speakers who are not in the developer advocate role.

I think that they are very passionate in delivering what their job allows them to deliver. One of the differences between sponsored talks and developer advocate talks is that many sponsored speakers don't seem to be people who are very passionate about the topic.

Geertjan Wielenga: Since you're not a developer advocate, how do you see your career developing from here?

Rabea Gransberger: I'm not sure what my career will look like in the future because when I was still in university, I would always have some goals to work toward and achieve.

My goals for the future are not particularly related to work or my career anymore. I'm pretty happy with my role now. I don't want to go down the management career path, like other people have. I'm already partly in management, but I don't want to go into full-time management. I want to do some more open source to actually be able to learn from others through the code reviews.

Geertjan Wielenga: Are there people in your team who you talk to about going to conferences? Do you mention that this is something that they could add to their working life?