[gordonhart]

Tons of traditional companies have x-relations employees, they're just not titled as such. Attending trade shows, developing distributor relationships, constructing and distributing demo materials, building local/state/federal government support networks, driving the branded truck around town — all of these are very common in non-tech industries and are basically analogous to DevRel engineer responsibilities.

[tptacek]

It's also an enormous and heavily specialized market, so where an aerospace company might need only a small staff of people who speak aeroese to vendors and clients, if you're selling developer tools you probably need a bunch just for coverage of all the different venues you operate in.

[hammock]

Boeing and other aerospace companies have teams of several hundreds that do this work.

[tptacek]

I'm sure. Boeing is also a world-historically huge company. This person worked at Nordcraft.