[softwaredoug]

You'll grow more as a producer[1] of know-how, rather than just a consumer of other's knowledge. People who _really_ know something can teach others through blogging, speaking. Or they can synthesize their knowledge into working projects that capture an aspect of the problem. The act of synthesizing and adding to a body of knowledge reinforces your own understanding, and forces you to stay up to date.

Instead of asking "where do I go to grow", think "what can I contribute?" "what can I teach?"... If money is also a priority, then find the intersection of that and what pays well (which luckily isn't that hard as a dev).

1 - By "producer" I mean an evangelizer, synthesizer, teacher, not just an "inventor" of brand new ideas

[stonecharioteer]

Not OP but you bring up something interesting. I'm nearing 10 years of exp and I am faced with a rather unique role. I can join Twilio as a Developer Evangelist.

I'm a good developer, I enjoy coding but I also love teaching, blogging, and mentoring. This would be a dream role, but does it close off other opportunities to me? I am slightly disillusioned with enterprise software because of how chock-full of politics these places are. I'm too old for the early stage startup scene, so I'm wondering whether this would be a good opportunity.

What do you see as the roadmap for someone who specializes in teaching software development, and being an advocate?

[cweill]

If you could take that job and leverage it to build your personal brand (blog, YouTube channel) I'd agree it's a dream job! The next best thing would be working in a research lab where you get to publish or speak under your own name.

[stonecharioteer]

I'm mainly concerned about bouncing back as a developer should this not pan out.

[luigibosco]

I am mainly concerned your letting past achievements limit future growth. One thing about technology, you leave and come back often times things get better. Besides you already got there once...

[haswell]

I started my career as a dev, and when given the opportunity I spent a few years in a Dev Evangelist/Advocate role. I loved it, and still remember it fondly - probably the most fun I've ever had at work.

As for opportunities, for me, this became a direct stepping stone to a Product Management role. I also strongly believe I could have shifted back to a dev role if I wanted to. YMMV, and maybe the PM track isn't for you, but I think Evangelist/Advocate roles can be great "generalist" positions that set you up nicely for the next thing, whatever that is.

[ditonal]

I worked as a SWE for 6 years, then DevRel for 2, and it became a huge hassle to get back to plain SWE. This was true even though in DevRel I spent almost all my time coding on demo apps and client libraries. Recruiters just see something other than SWE and assume you forgot how to do real engineering in 6 months and push you towards roles like partner engineering. Ridiculous but true. I eventually got back to SWE but I just wanted to offer a counterpoint that it’s easy to go back because that can vary.

[haswell]

Yeah, this is good to know. I’m a sample size of one.

One other angle is that you might have an easier job shifting back to dev if you’re at a larger company that has decent internal mobility. I feel confident I could shift back here, but it’s fair to expect that at least someone will reject you for that reason.

[mraza007]

Nice !!!! I wonder what its like being a developer advocate for a company and what are some skill this requires

I would love to hear your experience

[mooreds]

I'm currently in developer relations. I haven't bounced back to being a developer, but I'm sure that developer jobs of the same type as I had before would be open to me. Sure, I'd need to do some off-hours studying to be up to speed on the latest tech, because it'd have been a few years since I was deep into it, but I'd have to do that anyway.

I don't know how much coding Twilio developer evangelists do, but at my current position (admittedly a much smaller company) I can do a fair amount of coding if I choose to.

The next step I might take after being an advocate (if you don't want to stay in that space and take on larger and larger projects, going from dev advocate -> senior dev advocate -> lead dev advocate -> staff dev advocate), would depend if you wanted to keep training.

There's a large need for professional software trainers out there. I was involved in AWS training for a while and was able to get $1300/day. I know some folks getting $1500+/day.

Another option would to be consult, either in devrel or in whatever Twilio is training you up on. Or write some books and see if you can make a living that way. Consulting + books + training is a great way to make a living being a teacher.

And finally, I think if you are a developer, you can always fall back to that. It may be a salary or autonomy decrease, but the market for experienced devs is pretty tight right now and I don't see that changing for a few years. There's just so much appetite for software and the complements of software devs (CPU, memory, disk, network access) keep getting cheaper.

[eb0la]

The only job tech job I knew that paid $1300-$1500/day was Murex analyst / developer. I should be polishing my cloud certificates and fishing for customers there :-D

[mooreds]

Just to be clear, some of the folks getting $1500/day were experts with a ton of domain knowledge and experience in related fields (I think of one person who knew networking at a level I never will).

I think the going rate has gone down for what AWS training will pay, but I guarantee you there is a new hotness that will pay well. (I know one training firm desperate for kubernetes and terraform trainers, for example.)

[tstrimple]

Being able to mentor and communicate effectively is a force multiplier for someone in software development. A senior dev who's capable of elevating those around them is tremendously valuable to most organizations. It absolutely should not close off any doors, and should open quite a few more.

I took a similar path as a Microsoft Technical Evangelist and then Cloud Solution Architect. I moved from building products to helping other companies build on Azure effectively. This took many paths. Sometimes all the companies needed was some high level guidance. Sometimes this required rolling up my sleeves and diving into 3rd party code base to figure out where things are going wrong. Occasionally it involves surfacing bugs to the product team and working with them on the use case to get them resolved.

Broadly I'd consider my role to be more aligned with architecture than software developer now, but that term can have a bad connotation especially in the enterprise space with many "astronaut" or "ivory tower" architects. I work with developers, product teams and engineering managers to help improve the overall software development processes. A lot of times this means being a developer advocate and helping push communication and ideas from the bottom up. Other times it means making sure some of the foundational software development practices are in place. Other times it means helping identify and close skill gaps on development teams. And then there are the times I've got to become an internal evangelist to sell the technology vision to leadership. The work is extremely diverse which is a huge plus for me. I still get to roll up my sleeves and work on interesting problems, but I'm never on the critical path for building yet another CRUD form.

[noir_lord]

Twilio is fucking awesome (apologies for the language).

Like genuinely a pleasure to work with compared to almost anything else I can think.

Been a developer evangelist for them would be a cool role, delivering a good product to appreciative devs.