Genuinely curious: what’s the point in developer advocacy or developer relations work if the parent company requires radio silence during periods of extreme criticism, facing backlash for the company’s direction and decisions?
Shouldn’t this be the moment in which your team are *most* useful?
Zach Leatherman 3535 replies 4242 likes44 reposts Original on Mastodon35 replies
@zachleat@zachleat.co This is quite the subtoot, Zach!
@cferdinandi 🤷♂️ seems like a fair question!
@zachleat Oh for sure! 100% valid. I also believe with all of my heart it's *very specific* about one person/company.
@zachleat that, unfortunately, requires the devrel team to have some agency, so they're listened to both internally and externally and it's seen that that's the case.
@sil well said!
@zachleat
I assume the job is a two-way street but not a public one: publicly putting out what the company wants developers to know, privately taking in and passing on what developers want the company to know.On the outside, if they do the latter part well, you might see results from it. Often even when done well, you won't see results because decision-makers won't listen or stick to other, competing interests. They don't have the power to do more.
@cwilcox808 seems accurate to me—the silence is a symptom of a lack of agency/power
@zachleat
I'm not saying silence from devrels means those individuals in those roles are doing a bad job or that it's a sign of a bad culture a specific company, I'm saying it's inherent to the role anywhere.A devrel is not doing their job well if they're publicly taking a group of developer's side against the company or even publicly reflecting the bad feedback they're hearing (beyond acknowledging to an individual that they're not the only one saying something).
@zachleat
Companies should generally be solicitous about feedback, hopefully in a way that it doesn't feel like shouting into a void.I don't know how much devrels should be personifying feedback channels, especially on social media; that doesn't seem healthy for them as people when companies are big and/or passions run high.
@cwilcox808 @zachleat I hear what you're saying, but I also vividly remember Chrome Devrel folks ripping into Google for some of their shitty decisions (and now I'm mad at you for making me speaking kindly of Google devrels 😂) .
@cferdinandi
😀 I can imagine some relatively safe thoughts to share like "nobody like ads, right?" or even "AMP is not for me," but "ripping into" sounds like a "dev" forgetting the "rel."I suppose there are topics, about a company but so inconsequential to the business that sharing one's feelings would clearly be just being a person, not a devrel.
@cwilcox808 @cferdinandi @zachleat I don't necessarily think that being vocal or not is bad or good - it depends. My goal for our teams first and formost is to focus on listening and understanding what's going on and direct that internally. Being public with criticism might win points publicly but rarely enables you to secure change internally.
@cwilcox808 @cferdinandi @zachleat that's not saying that we get it right either ..
@zachleat
On this point:
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apple-backs-off-killing-web-apps/Apple execs: How much negative feedback about removing PWA support could there possibly be?
Apple devrels:
@zachleat From what I've gathered talking with a lot of people in dev rel, many companies don't seem to really know why they have a dev rel team 😅
@kevinpowell 😅😅😅😅 oh no!
@zachleat Speaking from recent experience, sometimes folks internally need to clarify the criticism and understand the correct path to fix the issue.
I’m unsure if it’s the case in your current example, but having devrel folks go out without being well-informed and understanding the situation can worsen things.
Also, developers have gotten a lot more frothy at the mouth these days, and trying to talk with folks who are beet-red in the face is also non-constructive. 😅
@khalidabuhakmeh I think that’s a good reminder—but the bar is pretty low there!
Is it not part of the job to be well-informed about the company you represent? The example I’m thinking of has been going on for *awhile* so it isn’t breaking news.
@zachleat I’m not sure what company you’re sub-tooting, so I can’t comment on the specific example you have in mind. Perhaps you are right.😅
We have many products for JetBrains, so while Devrel may be aware of some surface-level stuff, it's not easy to know every implementation detail that may prevent a quick resolution.
@zachleat sparkling influencer sponcon counts as devrel as long as it comes from the developer region of the budget
@Wilto I… need this on a t-shirt
@zachleat Legal reasons. Everything wrong DevRel utter through whatever channel can get in the way and cost the company a sh1tload of money.
@tomayac yeah, I guess. For super large companies, wouldn’t it be best case for devrel to get legal training to avoid such a case? It all seems like part of the job (imo)
@zachleat @tomayac God no. Please don’t make use do that. As well as being incredibly boring, it would likely result in us being afraid to ever tweet/toot/blog/speak or even help ever again!
IMHO our role is to help developers as much as we can (within certain constraints), and also feed back developer’s sentiment internally—not to cover our employers legally.
But yeah that sometimes means we don’t talk about some things—but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still listening and feeding back!
@tomayac @zachleat Besides the only thing that legal training is going to tell you is “say nothing over anything legally contentious until we have something official to announce”. Which is what you say is happening for whichever drama you are sub-tooting here. So more legal training won’t help anyway. 🤷♂️
@tunetheweb @zachleat What Barry said. IANAL for a reason. Interestingly, even internal written evidence can get you in trouble, which is why many companies on purpose delete stuff like chat protocols or even emails the first moment it's legally allowed. This blog post seems to cover the motivations well enough, but again, IANAL: https://harmon.ie/blog/five-reasons-legal-wants-you-to-delete-your-emails.
@tomayac @tunetheweb hmm. Folks are operating under legal constraints already! Surely a good legal department can be a help and not a hindrance (ideally). IANAL either—but I would welcome guidance if it helped me do my job more effectively.
@zachleat well fruitco has always had this rather opaque relationship with developers in the wild (see also the old radar bugtracker stuff)...
@patrick_h_lauke @zachleat I was a Mac developer before I was a web developer (before there WAS a web). Then a Mac developer of web tools, and for 20 years+ no longer a Mac developer.
more than 30 years ago someone I knew who'd been around the block already by then observed he felt with Apple as a developer you were "fuel for their rocket not a passenger on it" It stuck with me.
And the way Apple treated the devs who stick with them in the dark days of MacOS 8/9 when X came along…
@patrick_h_lauke @zachleat so time to wheel out the Maya Angelou quote. It's part of my great love of the Web as a platform.
@zachleat I would guess, beyond the usual corporate secrecy, *lawsuits* make it dangerous to comment.
@mia oh yeah, I’m guessing this is the primary reason why Apple (apropos of nothing) had little to no devrel presence for many years.
