Developer Relations Foundation Aims to Clarify Role
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Developer relations (DevRel) has a “My Gal Friday” problem: It’s not that they don’t have a role to play, it’s that they have too many roles.
Are they responsible for developer advocacy? Yes. Developer training? Also yes. Documentation? Probably. Developer marketing? Most likely. Coding? Sometimes, yes.
Increasingly, it can be any and all of those roles, which leads to scope creep and all its problems. That makes it very hard to determine metrics and thus establish business value of developer relations. To change that, developer relations professionals have asked the Linux Foundation to form the Developer Relations Foundation (DRF).
In September, the Linux Foundation agreed, announcing its intentions to do so as a new project under the nonprofit. The DRF already boasts 125 members, according to the count on its website.
DevRel Demographics
Who are developer relations professionals?
First, they’re well-paid compared to most developers. To compare apples to apples, the average full stack developer’s median 2024 salary was $63,000, but the median salary for “developer advocate” was $124,203, according to the Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey. However, that doesn’t tell the complete story, since only .2% — or less than 200 of respondents — identified as developer advocates.
The 2023 State of Development Relations, which was produced by DevRelAgency, queried 310 respondents in the DevRel field, of whom 242 completed the survey completely. It identifies $175,000 as the median base salary, with $167,088 as the average base salary. It’s worth noting, however, that the pay range is incredibly wide, with base salaries ranging from $10,000 to $400,000.
They are also largely older than many developers, who tend to be in their early 20s to early 30s. The largest cluster of age groups for developer relations professionals is is 35 to 44 (36.4%), with the average age trending up. That said, more than 65% reported being above 35 years of age, as compared with 50% in 2018.
Not surprisingly, given the demographics for programming in general, most are men. It’s worth noting, however, that DevRel has a much higher representation of female respondents at 32.1%, compared to the general developer population, where women account for just 5.1%, per the Stack Overflow 2022 Developer Survey.
A hefty percentage — 43.2 % — also belong to underrepresented communities, a broad category that includes people who are neurodivergent at 23%, the LGBTQ+ community at 9.5%, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) at 7.9%, and those with a physical disability at 2.6%. The 2023 State of DelRel noted that the percentage of neurodivergent individuals is similar to the figures reported in the general developer population, per Stack Overflow’s 2023 Developer Survey. It did not report a comparison among other communities.
While some DevRel professionals do freelance or work for consultancies, that number is small. The majority, at 93.5%, work for companies, with a hefty percentage — 15.1% — indicating in the 2023 study that they’d been laid off.
A Nebulous Role
The DevRel story began to coalesce during COVID-19.
”We were all looking for that connection, even outside of work, and I was participating in quite a few DevRel groups online and Discord and Slack communities,” said Stacey Kruczek, director of developer relations and community at Aerospike and a member of the DevRel Foundation steering committee. “Many of the conversations steered around the fact that people were still not understanding the relevance of DevRel in an organization.”
Kruczek herself has worn many hats. She’s managed marketing activities for developers, built demos, established and managed developer communities, and collaborated with product marketing, engineering, customers and executives.
“If you were going to look at the overarching umbrella of developer relations, there’s various components that fall under that,” she said. “Developer Relations can be advocating for those developers. It could be educating them — developer education. It could be developer marketing, which is very different from standard marketing. It’s authentic. It’s technical. It’s geared towards that audience.”
Often, developer relations work with engineers and sales prior to the sales cycle to help them understand the product and how to engage others with it. They build proofs of concepts and then help with the evaluation phase.
“We’re closing that gap and we’re helping them in their very first beginning state of their process and then helping them follow that path and making sure we’re giving them every single component down the way,” she said, adding that it can become quite cumbersome.
On top of that, they may serve as the voice of the company, writing blogs and speaking at events or to the press. They may even be called to code or handle technical documentation.
In well-functioning developer relations teams, there will be one person who focuses on each of those components. But organizations don’t always understand how to build out those teams.
DevRel Foundation, Supported by the Linux Foundation
Kruczek and her industry peers saw the need for an organization that could handle education and advocate for the importance of developer relations within the greater technical technology industry. They organized a steering committee, which decided that the Linux Foundation would be the best bet for creating such an organization.
“Developer Relations … could be educating them — developer education. It could be developer marketing, which is very different from standard marketing. It’s authentic. It’s technical. It’s geared towards that audience.”
— Stacey Kruczek, director of developer relations and community at Aerospace
The Linux Foundation will bring robust governance, legal protections and credibility to the DRF, Kruczek noted.
“We’re leveraging the Linux Foundation’s reputation for that long-term sustainability,” she said. “It ensures that there’s balanced contributions and it’s not being controlled by a single company. This is purely community-driven.”
The Linux Foundation also brings transparency, credibility and security to the foundation, noted Atsushi Nakatsugawaka, the CEO of MOONGIFT, in the press release.
In fact, Kruczek’s employer, Aerospike, is a long-time supporter of the Linux Foundation, she added. It has also endorsed the initiative, as have other Linux Foundation member organizations, including the Ant Group and SUSE.
The Developer Relations Foundation
The DRF already has a charter and a mission statement, which is ”to elevate the professional practice of developer relations and increase awareness of it as a driver of business value.” The foundation hopes to provide best practices and metrics, along with frameworks, methodologies and a common language to the practice of developer relations. They’re also working on a GitHub repository for all the information.
“We’ve created an initial phase proposal in terms of what the phases are going to be in order to establish this foundation and provide the context behind it,” Kruczek said. “We’re moving into a phase [where] we’re going to actually apply dates and some actual actionable points.”
Right now, they’re trying to pull together the community because there are many developer relations groups they need to spread the word to, she said. Many have contributed to or created their own standards, but there’s nothing right now in the way of standards across all the groups, she said.
The DRF is all volunteer-driven at this point, and anyone who’s part of the DevRel community is invited to participate and contribute, Kruczek said. There’s already an outline of tentative working groups, all of which will need leaders and participants who are experts on a best practice topics, such as standards and metrics.
The Take-Away for Developers
But what does this all mean for developers? Does it matter to working software engineers how DevRel professionals define their jobs?
Developers matter to developer relations because they are integrally connected, Kruczek said. Developers are DevRel’s bread and butter, of course, but the benefits flow both ways.
“There’s an old quote that goes around the DevRel industry that says developer relations is the face of the community to the company,” Kruczek said. “We are the face of the developer. That’s really what it is. I’m that go-between PR person. I’m very passionate about helping developers and I’m going to go to the company and say, ‘This is working, this isn’t working. Here’s the feedback that we received.’”
That’s why the DRF needs to hear from developers as well, she added.
“That’s where the everyday developer can come into play,” she said. “We need to hear their feedback.”
