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by mooreds 1821 days ago
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.

1 comments

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
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.)