To Be, or Not To Be: A Developer Advocate (Cont.)
In August of 2020, I wrote a Medium piece on the topic of developer advocacy — what I had learned about it, and how I was interested in pivoting into the role. With 2021, I want to provide so insights for those of us who may be interested in developer advocacy.
In 2020, I applied to twenty-three roles with the job title being “Developer Advocate” or “Developer Relations”. Of those roles, I interviewed for six of them. Two were small, but well established, start ups. The other four were enterprise level companies, and household names in the tech community. The kind that you mention to your cousin over Thanksgiving dinner and they raise their eyebrows at you, seemingly impressed. All of the interview experiences were similar, but also very different. Two of them were roles I was excited about but ended up finding out that actually, the company (or at least their hiring practices) are questionable. I will not be applying to those companies again.
One of the companies (a startup) I interviewed with demoed their product to me during the video interview and I was blown away by how wonderful and powerful their product was. I felt like their marketing website didn’t do the product justice. I remember getting off the video conference and calling a friend, telling them “I haven’t been this excited to work with a product in a long time”. I really wanted the company to make me an offer, but they let me know they needed someone who already had experience in developer advocacy.
Another company I interviewed with (enterprise) seemed to really understand why I was interested in developer advocacy, and how my educational background in teaching, writing, and tech could make me a great advocate. I got promises of moving forward into the interview process and the recruiter hyped up how great the interview process was, but then I was promptly rejected with out moving forward.
The second startup I interviewed with let me know they were still figuring out what the interview process would look like for them, and what they thought they needed. We had a couple of phone calls, and although the role was a bit less advocacy heavy and more working with third party vendors, the company itself and the people I interviewed with were pretty awesome. One of my favorite things about interviewing with the company was that they answered all of my questions honestly, even the hard ones. I was neither rejected, nor given an offer, and the job posting is still up, so they may be deliberating, or ghosting. Either way, it was a good experience.
Two of the companies I interviewed with were companies where I have used their product/services previously in my career, and so I was intimately aware of their product and company. I’ll start with the one that didn’t turn out to be shady.
The interview process was straight forward, and the hiring manager knew exactly what the role needed to look like. They had clear KPIs, role needs, and emphasized they wanted someone with a background in tech and development because their product was a technical product. Overall, I was very impressed. I was told I’d be hearing back after the video interview to start on a project, but I didn’t hear anything. A week later I was rejected for the role. About a month after that, I checked on LinkedIn, and they hired someone without a technical background, but with a background in content creation and developer advocacy.
The last two companies I interviewed with really surprised me with their questionable practices and antics. I will not be applying for roles at these companies again.
The first company was an enterprise level company who has a fantastic reputation for not ghosting, for diversity and inclusion, and for having a great workplace culture. I have used their product in the past, and have known a few people who work there. All of them say the company was pretty awesome and I was excited to start the interview process. I had a call with a technical recruiter who explained the process, what they were looking for, and noted that this role needed to be in Austin (the company has an office here) and it would be remote until it was safe to be back in the office (because of the pandemic). When I asked about the current team, the recruiter told me that the hiring manger was here in Austin, but the other developer advocate who had recently been hired was in Seattle. This was red flag. Why did this role require the location to be in Austin, but the other person they hired was remote? The recruiter explained the interview process and next steps, and let me know that I would have feedback on if I was moving forward by a specific day. That day came, and at the end of the day when I had no feedback, I emailed the recruiter. And I didn’t get a response.
Then, I did a little digging.
It turns out that this company has only one woman with the job title of “engineer” or “developer” based on LinkedIn, out of around thirty total devs. I was absolutely floored. This company has a large diversity and inclusion manifesto at the top of their careers page. I pushed this thought to the side because I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. I checked the job portal and realized that I had applied to this company, for various roles, seven times in the last six years. I had never been interviewed by them. It clicked in my mind that the only people I knew who worked there were men. Again, I pushed the thought aside.
The next week came and went with no word from the recruiter. I wanted to work for the company because I liked their product and was familiar with it. I could be a great developer advocate for a product I knew was good, and could passionately support. I really wanted this job. I emailed the recruiter again. No response. And then, in a moment of heated passion and a bit of anger for being treated the way that everyone I knew personally told me that this company in particular would not treat me, I did something quite uncharacteristic — I sent a Twitter DM to the CEO and asked to speak with them about a recent interview experience.
A couple days later, I got a call from someone fairly high up in the company, but not the CEO (which is totally understandable). I was impressed that they were taking things seriously. However, the call did not go as I had thought it would. They explained that the hiring manger had not given prompt feedback, and the recruiter didn’t reply to my emails because they were hoping that feedback was coming soon. They apologized and acknowledged how it looked (ghosting). I replied that, from my point of view — from a point of view of a woman interviewing for a role where I’ve just recently realized that the tech team is comprised of almost entirely all men — I did not want their internal metrics on hiring to look like they interviewed a woman for this role when, in fact, they had not. I was not really being interviewed or moved through the process. They explained that they have internal interview tracking process that will reflect accurately who interviewed and who did not. They let me know that I would not be moving forward and they had other great candidates. The call ended and I had my answers, and I appreciated the apology, but everything still felt off.
About a month later, I checked on LinkedIn to see who they hired. But I found something more interesting. The person who had been hired before they started interviewing me — the developer advocate from Seattle — turned out to be a former cofounder of a company with the hiring manger. They worked together for a number of years previously, and much to my dismay, was also a white male. For a company who claims to value diversity and inclusion to allow a hiring manager to hire for a senior developer advocate role (according to their job title on LinkedIn) who has no experience in developer advocacy, conferences, writing blogs or content creation, or otherwise any professional experience that would justify their hire, I smell bullshit.
The last company I’ll write about that turned out to be questionable was a massive surprise. It could have been perfect — junior developer advocate job posting — and I thought, “Oh my God, I might actually have a chance at this one”. The interview process started and it was awesome. All the email correspondences, panel interview scheduling, was timely, straightforward, everything an applicant could want in an interview experience. The people I interviewed with were great, too. They let me know that they had the resources to hire someone with no developer advocacy experience. The hiring manager told me that even if this role doesn’t work out, that they wanted to connect on LinkedIn and help get me in touch with other people in developer relations. They said I’d be hearing something back soon about if we’d be moving forward. I half expected to get rejected at that point, so I went ahead and sent the hiring manger a LinkedIn connection request. When I got sent a panel interview availability email request, I was ecstatic. The panel was wonderful. One of them had an academic background in Liberal Arts like me. One of them was acquainted with the spouse of someone I used to work with at a previous company, and it was such a joy talking with them. I told myself that even if I didn’t get the role, I had done my best, and it had been great.
Famous last words.
The hiring manager had mentioned that they would be making an offer before the winter holidays started. The week I was supposed to hear an answer, I noticed a senior recruiter from the company had viewed my LinkedIn profile. I thought, “This is it, I did it. I’m going to be a junior developer advocate.” Then the day came that they had said was the final day for them to extend an offer for the role. After obsessively checking for a status update in the job applicant portal, I did notice a change, but not the one I was expecting.
They dropped “junior” from the job title.
I tried to rationalize it. I tried to explain away the sudden feeling of things being off — similar to how I felt when I started the interview process with the other company who turned out to probably be sexist. I could not rationalize why they would make me an offer but for the role without “junior” in the title. And so it occurred to me that I was not, in fact, being made an offer. The dread sunk in as I thought back to all the words of encouragement, of how they specifically said they wanted to hire someone who didn’t have years of experience, and I realized something had changed. Either the hiring manager was a liar, or someone up the chain of command over rode the decision, or they hired someone they knew, or any other number of antics and scenarios I could imagine. I emailed the recruiter for an update, and we chatted the week of Christmas. They made an offer to someone with “more experience”. It’s currently the first week of January, and the hiring manager has not accepted my LinkedIn connection request. I know that I’ll never know what happened, or what changed. As the old saying goes, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.”
Of the twenty-three developer advocate roles I applied for in 2020, I received no offers. It’s easy for me to sit here and consider getting a job as a dev and quit pursuing developer advocacy. It’s easy to be hurt and feel like a failure. What’s hard is to keep applying for developer advocate roles. It’s hard to keep following #devrel of Twitter. It’s hard to write Medium posts, even posts like this, and show the world what it looks like from an applicant’s point of view. It’s hard to call out sexism or bias in an interview process. I don’t know that I’ll ever get a role in developer relations. It feels incredibly hard to pivot into this community when every interview is a rejection because they hired someone with “more experience”, even with a junior role that was until it wasn’t.
I don’t know what 2021 will look like professionally. I don’t even know what it will look like personally. As I sit here typing, my cat is curled up asleep on a pile of clean laundry at the foot of my bed. I’m reminded of a pin that I bought a couple of years ago that says, “I work hard so my cat can have a better life”. I will have to make a decision to push forward trying to break into developer relations, or take developer job. I’m not making that decision today, but at some point in the future, I’ll have to choose, because at the end of the day, I have to put kibble on the table.
