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DevRel has its values in several contexts, and I think as a role it proved that it is important, and we have companies that without it would not be so successful. That said, the problem for me was when the centi-billion-dollar corporations started to use DevRel to do two things that I really distaste, that is, put marketing and its subdivisions as gatekeepers with engineers, and the sometimes very infantized way that they treat engineers of their clients. For the first point, back in time, if you're using, let's say, SQL Server 2012 and you're in a hairy scenario of spinlock in your instance, you could get a call with a senior PFE and in some scenarios, some of the core engineers of SQL Server could join in on it. Now with the DevRel, it started to be our entry point to communicate with those companies, and most of the time it adds one extra layer of context building for something that needs to have the most direct and urgent access to it. For the second point, the high number of beginner/pure feature showroom events it bad by itself. On top of that, seems that most of the DevRel of those big corps cannot modulate their communication style and look appealing to the common audience for DevRel. One example happened in some mandatory DevRel scheduled meeting about a CI tool. One of the mainframe Dev teams has the average age of 58, and out of 1h30m of feature pushing and a lot of Star Wars and pop culture references in the slides, everyone got almost nothing from it. |