My DevRel Limit: I might be cooked.

I'm wondering if I'm reaching my DevRel limit.

We recently moved the DevRel team back into marketing and now we're reconciling what our focus is again.

I spent the last week identifying why being the developer in the room to make informed decisions and enabling technical content on product releases, rollouts, etc. I believed the most valuable move would be making things that help us talk to HUMANS about their robots (while still helping them with their robots).

Today, we had an AI-enthusiast show that our "making things" could be greatly reduced with the advantages in AI, which left me with less building, and a lot more yapping.

I have also learned that we are doing our best to make more things for the robots. A pivotal moment hit me in the face. The attention of the people feels less important than the attention of the LLM to get folks in the door. More people will prompt their way into a sales conversation or a $5 Database.

The human out of the loop

I see it more and more around me. Honestly, we're at the point in this blog post where most of the human readers are reaching for the summarize button. The videos on YouTube could be a 30-second short following the flow of "state the problem --> show the solution --> AI prompt to build it."

It feels more and more that the people I talk to at the booth and in the calls undervalue the opinions of their engineers, and overvalue their LLM which changes its opinion based on the nudging of a few weights. This put me in the realm of cooked because I feel DevRel is at its best when you're doing something that resonates with the human on the other end of the conversation.

Some thoughts from other amazing folks

I talked to two of my DevRel friends and they gave me two pieces of insight. One, a Staff-Level advocate, mentioned sharing that cooked feeling but also just letting it ride because the "good jobs" are still coming from above and a "good job with a paycheck and existential dread" is better than looking for that next opportunity that would require a literal 25% pay decrease.

The other one, a DevRel leader, suggests that DevRel must reduce the value it puts in the ability to make and invests more in the ability to consult. Take the knowledge and experience we have and use that to empower the prompters to prompt for the right things.

That second conversation evolved more into the "what about the people" direction. They pointed out that there is still an amazing opportunity to maybe make the move to solution architecture. Another option would be to be the change that I want to see in the world and maybe try my hand at software engineering.

That said, I'm not going anywhere for now, just a little worried that I'm going to turn around one day and be the only one here still "doing everything I can to ensure that people trust me when I suggest something for them".