Get hired in DevRel roundtable

Tamao Nakahara: I wanted to start, because I'm sure there'll be some overlap. I wanted to, like, maybe kinda throw out some of the obvious things, so you don't have to all say, yeah. Me too. And then maybe we'll look for some outliers. So, and then correct me too if I've maybe missed any critical phases.

So I was thinking, we'll imagine you guys have, job posts. Maybe in some cases, we'll assume, there aren't job posts yet, but you know that you're starting to look. In some cases, there are companies where you might not necessarily have a job post listed, but you know that you have some leeway that if a rock star showed up, you would maybe start a conversation. So we'll put that on the table. Let's say some of those rock stars have a pretty good time at getting through the passes.

So we we won't go through those details, but just kinda lay the grounds. So for other people who are looking to break in, okay. We're gonna assume there's job posts, there's application process, there are recruiters, maybe you get referred through, coworkers or friends. Are there any other maybe ways that people might not have thought of that capture your interest that you might think that they would be a candidate? Maybe I'll start with you, Grace.

Or we could do a raise hand thing too because that might be easier if you Yep.

Grace Francisco: How we do MongoDB is hiring across the board in many different areas and particularly as well in DevRel and education, which is the function that I made up. So we're hiring traditional developer advocates, those folks that go out to speak, write a lot of articles, particularly in the mobile space because we have Realm and Realm synced to Atlas. So we definitely want some folks who have that mobile expertise. So that is one area we're looking for right now.

The other is you said rock star, and immediately what came to mind is, wait a minute. We've got quite heroes and heroines who are writers. We've got a lot of hiring going on in our technical writing group too. And they may not think of themselves as rock stars, but, certainly, they are the quite heroes that keep pushing along the documentation we all depend on. Right?

So that's really important. And then we also have what's called curriculum engineering. So we have this university platform, which does a deep dive in learning on MongoDB and Atlas, and we need more engineers who are interested in teaching and doing videos around that on our university platform. So let us know. We've got all those open up on our MongoDB career site.

You can ping me on grace dot bar on Twitter, or you can send me email. I'm just grace@mongodb.com.

Tamao Nakahara: Alright. I love

Grace Francisco: how you're easy.

Tamao Nakahara: Jeff, I saw you nodding. Any

Uttam Tripathi: Yeah. I mean, I'd say, first of all, what I always ask people, I I tend to hire quite a bit. And I will just say in ballpark, I probably have roughly, I work at Microsoft leading a pretty good sized team in DevRel, but I probably have about 80 positions across my team, give or take over, that we're hiring for. And there's lots of opportunity for folks. I would just say broadly, you know, for people when I have this conversation for hiring, I ask people what their dream job is, and I actually start with that.

And I'll usually just start with folks. I'll say, hey. Take a moment and think about when you're at the pinnacle of your career. Learned this from Jana Mezerschmidt at Twitter. She was a great leader that I worked under.

And she said, if you think about that moment at the pinnacle of your career. Right? And that's that moment, like, if you when you wanna retire and you look back, you wow. It never got better than that. And I'll often ask people, like, you know, tell me what that job might look at Microsoft.

Tell me that what it might look like at another company, and actually tell me a third one that's just for fun. And I actually usually will say, hey. And let's go do that in a day or so. Let me tell you about some of the things that are going on here and come back to me. Because what I want you wanna do in some of these things in your career is you know, careers are either like ladders or jungle gyms.

And what I'm trying to do is find out what's the experience to bridge there. Maybe I've got their dream job. Right? And what I'm trying to do is then I can find out and learn about what people are doing. We hire on our team, and I'll just close with, I have openings for engineers, service engineers, people that are building skilling platforms and cloud services, and what these are engineering roles within, you know, Azure engineering all up.

Right? And those are roles are as important to us they support docs and skilling and learning, and those are important as to say our serverless or Kubernetes stack. Right? That matters. Docs, those those roles do that.

We have roles for writers. The ultimate source event, I need James governor. Right? Docs, accessibility, localization. Right?

We hire for that. All of these roles are developed relations to me. Skill and training development. We all piece this together. We focus a lot on advocacy, which is, like, you know, a profession that I grew up in, and we all work on.

And that's great. And we can talk about some of the roles for that, but I what I'll tell people is a role in developer relations can be so broad based. And and it can go from dev to PM to you name it. But think about what you wanna go do, how you wanna help, and then we can have a conversation with those other roles. And just the last bit is maybe think about things as a jungle gym right now in your career.

Right? So often we focus as, these ladders, and I'll leave you with this, like, how do you build up some bridge of experience? Maybe you wanna jump over and be a PM for a bit. Right? I've done that for own ship product, and I love it.

Maybe you wanna do some other roles in engineering and build those skills to kinda jump you out. I'll stop there, but we have lots of openings. Follow me, DM me, you name it, or Twitter. But today, I wanna help the professional up. So thank you.

Tamao Nakahara: Okay. Great. Uttam, have there been any, maybe, unusual places, unusual in the sense that where you've found potential candidates that maybe some people may not be thinking about when they're looking for a DevRel job?

Speaker 4: Sure. Yeah. And I think a lot of us take very different career paths and trajectories. I remember the talking to the DevRelCon in London where I shared my own journey of how I ended up being in in Devil. And and I can have no clue of Devil before I ended at Google and the work that they're doing.

Before I answer your question, really quick, like, within Google, continuing to hire across multiple different roles as well from Android to cloud, DA roles, tech writers, general program engineers. And also, there's a unique role that I represent, this is part of my teams, the program managers. And and these are the folks, in different regions and markets and really focusing on the ecosystem in those regions, from developers to start ups to partners. Now now coming to your question, the best advice I the best advice I give for anyone who's looking for a role is actually to go through a referral. You find someone in that organization and in that company and if you can go through them, your chances of actually having the application reviewed and and getting a response is significantly higher than if you apply through a direct channel.

And this is where I think there's there's a tremendous support across this panel depending on which company you end up selecting. I think few folks will be very, very happy to do guide you in direction. One of the channels I have been quite successful personally in hiring is actually from the top contributors in the community. When you're looking for DA roles, for tech writer roles, for program managers, for community managers and and I remember Jeff's social media post leading up to this panel, like, you passionate about helping developers? That's actually a clear signal where you are you are able to assess someone and how passionate they are beyond the one day to the interview that you will do.

And that gives me tremendous confidence. That that's a little bit long drawn, but that's that's a channel where I have had a lot of success hiring strong candidates.

Tamao Nakahara: Excellent. Adam, if you don't have anything, it's fine. I don't wanna pressurize people to feel like they have to add to a list.

Adam FitzGerald: Everybody stole my thunder already. It's fantastic. I I wanna echo the things that Gracie, Tom, and Jeff have already mentioned. Like, you know, first of all, I do think the community of users is one of the best places to go find people for DevRel. They've already feel acutely the pain that the developers are experiencing with your tools or platform, and so they've got a great sort of sense to bring into the organization and use that to solve problems for the larger audience.

I do also agree, like, is lots of people DevRel, like, Utran said, he didn't know DevRel existed. Lots of people that are in adjacent spaces don't think of themselves as building a career in DevRel. And it's kind of okay to say to them, this is a path. This is a journey you're on. How can I help you get to the place you wanna get to?

And it's okay to take a tour through DevRel to go somewhere else as well. Like, there's plenty of people that I've worked with that have wound up in, you know, CTO style for responsibilities or in program management responsibilities or engineering responsibilities after having spent time in DevRel. And there are people who have built careers in DevRel as well that I've worked with. So you can as long as you're helping people get to the place they wanna go to, you're gonna have a a better chance having a reasonable conversation with them. And then, you know, there's lots of different parts of DevRel.

It's not all just the, you know, the glitzy shiny DAs. There's a lot of people behind the scenes that go do a lot of hard work in making documentation really real for people. So, yeah, everything that the the rest of the panel said already, I'm in total agreement with. Has she caught hiring still? So lots of interesting stuff there.

So that's my pitch. I would go pitch. Yeah.

Tamao Nakahara: I hope I hope that that pitch is through.

Uttam Tripathi: Can I just add one tactical thing? If you're watching on this call and you're looking for a job and we're out here talking, hey. Long term this, you're probably going, come on for gosh sakes. I've given 800 resumes. Oh my gosh.

How do I actually get in there and reach out to it? And then first thing I'm just gonna say is, like, it's about hustling out there. Right? And I'm and and and persistence. And I'll be really honest.

You've probably DM'd me, and I probably haven't responded certain times or maybe I did. And that's nothing personal. Like, I it's like, I can reach out and try, and it's often, like, at different times or maybe other things going on behind. The thing that I'll tell you is persistence, and it's not about the most shiniest person that's out there. We use and I've hired people that may have been called rock stars, but some of my best, most effective advocates are the people that we build and the people that we develop and create.

And and that to me is the best part of my job. Like, I've been on stage. I've been 20,000, 10,000. Who cares? Right?

I don't have to do that anymore. My job right now is the next generation. And I almost even some things of our advocates, look at that. It's just so much more fun. It's almost like building the next cast of a Saturday Night Live.

And, man, the people in the next generation of advocates out there are amazing. Just keep reaching out to us, and and don't feel that you gotta be some rock star that stands up a certain way. We're looking for people that are lifelong learners, people that can synthesize, and then finally, people that have a connection to a community. And so if you're out there and you're active and you care for a community, and that's not just speaking. Like, the community folks out there, this is a a thing that of a a way of people are that I respect so much.

The community people are the people that stay till three, four in the morning till the last one is taken care of, whether it's in a Slack room or in person. And we look for that, and you look for people that wanna help. And so just the only thing I'll say is, like, hey. How do I get in there? You could put a resume in.

But as what Tom said, look, it's just it's gonna be very difficult for that to stand out just through the amount of resumes and the way the system work. Work your network. Work someone who knows someone and just keep at it. And, if you're looking for a job at Microsoft, I'll just put this here right now. Are you looking for all?

Jeff Sand at Microsoft. Fastest way. Send me a note. That's all you need to know. That's my direct email, and I'll get you to someone to talk.

So thank you. Just keep hustling up there.

Grace Francisco: So what I just wanna add a quick thing there, to Jeff. I worked under Jeff for a while in I did tour duty through Microsoft for eight years, and I worked in a couple of different roles. I was a DA, but we called them evangelist back then. Jeff, if you remember way back when. And then I was a program manager, so there are many different roles.

So I wanna thank Jeff for the opportunity because I grew up through that system. That's where I learned a lot of the basics and foundational elements of evangelism. So I just wanna shout out for Jeff. So thank you for that. And also, Adam Sullivan, who may or may not be listening in on this, was also one of my leaders who went on to Salesforce as a great leader in evangelism.

Just wanna shout out for him. And there there are just so many different touch roles. And one of the best people I ever hired was someone who went into this pilot program that I created for champions at Atlassian, and he was one of my best champions. At some point, he said, hey. I'm kinda interested.

I mean, I love Atlassian. Can I apply? And he he worked for me there, and he's working for me now. So, shout out to Peter. You've been great.

And so I love having, champions in community as part of DevRel.

Tamao Nakahara: That's great. So to kinda summarize and then, open up, it feels okay. Obviously, work your network, connect with as many people as possible. But networking, you know, maybe you're not that social when you go to a conference and all that. Some of us are, like, hugging a lot of people.

Well, not anymore. But there are many ways to be social through different platforms. Right? Like, you know, maybe you're just really passionate about docs and and you're you're helping clean them up. And we had actually one of our uncomm speakers earlier talking about how, like, he just got really excited about a problem that he saw.

And through solving that problem, he was also able to kind of beef up his skills with a particular language. And then he decided, oh, well, it appears maybe there's missing tutorials. And so we saw kind of a a gap. And so your way of helping and then and actually one of the things he shared was he just put a note like, hey. If if this helps, reach out to me.

Or if you wanna chat about it, reach out to me. Right? So it doesn't mean that he was out there, like, you know, talking with people and getting business cards or what have you. But there there are other ways to be very social and connected. So maybe we can dig into that a little bit more because my next question was, like, you know, what are the kind of platforms and areas that you look for?

And, of course, many roles are very different, but, you know, blog posts, YouTube videos, GitHub page, the code sample apps, engagement with open source, docs, you know, kind of owning meetup groups. Obviously, again, it's very different per the job title. But, you know, what like, for me, I'll tell people if you're looking for a dev advocacy role, in my case, you will be speaking. I will be looking for a video sample. And if they're like, well, I've never done it before.

I'm like, you can talk to your phone. You can have your friend hold up your phone. You can go to a local meetup and do a five minute talk. Now, you know, Deborah O'Conn, we just did an unconf and we recorded everything. And, you know, hopefully, we'll do more of these in the future.

That's been a perspective for me. But, like, what have been your essential go to places? And if someone's like, how do I get started? Like, this is this is what's gonna stand out, you know, when you share your resume or your links.

Adam FitzGerald: Yes. So I don't yeah. There's a couple of things I think about here. I'm in agreement with you on the advocacy. I'm looking for some kind of evidence of where you've been speaking.

If you haven't got a public profile, if you haven't got a video view from a session you've delivered, we always include even when I was at AWS, we always included during the interview loop a presentation portion where you had to pretend you were talking to a meetup when we're evaluating your presentation skills. So that's an essential part. As far as things you kind of have to practice, it's a skill you can acquire very quickly and there's lots of really great ways to get better at it, But you have to you have to practice that in order to be feel like that's a reasonable part of your responsibility. And so, you know, look for opportunities to go do that. Look for opportunities to to engage.

I can guarantee you 90% of your meetup leaders are dying for speakers. Right? They're always that when you run a meetup program, the leaders of your meetup groups are always asking, when can you help me with a speaker? What can you do from getting me a speaker? They're dying for people to speak, so you should be have lots of opportunities to deliver some content there.

I'd also say if you're on the docs and the content side, honestly, contributing to the open source documentation is a great place that we found. Like, pretty much all of us, I think, have had docs open sourced in some kind of way or open for contribution in some kind of way. The people that go in there and actually correct problems and and identify issues and point out things, those are incredibly useful. Those are that that's a great place to go find people that's super engaged with the technical material. You can make a very direct assessment of their ability to write.

That's really good. And then when I was at AWS, we hired the top answer on Stack Overflow for AWS questions. So he was great. He was all over it. Turned out it was just you know, it's the fact that he could go get paid to do that as a full time job, he didn't even think existed.

So we just went ahead and got got him and brought him into the dev role team. So there's lots of different places where you can go make a reputation for yourself, whether it's through the docs channels, through the community forums, or whether it's through your local meetup organizers. Use those places to showcase what you can do, and that gives you your advertisement as a potential to be hired by, a company that's called the DevRel program.

Uttam Tripathi: Adam, that's it's really, really sharp. You know? Like, the first thing that I tend to go look at someone and I think a lot of people will go and you'll get intimidated. They'll say, wait. I don't have any video views or on my videos or only 23 people.

And I'm like, great. You held a 23 person conference and had people over. What I go and look at in that stuff is, hey. When somebody tells me, hey. I've done this on blogging or I've done a lot of the of content, first thing I go look at is the blog.

Right? And then I go look at the dates. And what will frustrate me if they do it as if the first most recent blog post was, like, the day before the interview, and they haven't kept it up. Right? Like, I'd say, you know, the thing on this is when you do share and you wanna share, like, think about the context with it and and do.

But I go through and I go, oh, they blog. Oh, wow. What a great post. Let me go back a year ago. Hey.

Is this something new? And then and then how did they care about it? Right? For us, it's about craft. Right?

And so I'm looking for someone who's gonna the quality that they're gonna put into it, and are they gonna finish it? And and what did they how did they convey something to an audience? I'm not looking for perfection. I'm not gonna look for commas. But, like, if they wanted me to share something, was that a little bit of a stage or a stunt, or is this something that they truly believe in operating in?

I you look at video and so forth, and what I will say is I look at a bunch of stuff, and I think we have to be careful as an industry sometimes about how much we think about video with how much we're shifting it. It's absolutely like, we'll go through and blast people. Hey. Have you done a talk? And I can we can teach great speakers to be better speakers, and we can we can help grow people that way.

But I think it's people who use in our world, we think about who uses the Internet as a pallet to communicate. And you wanna have an eye look for, like, some of our best advocates today are hackers. And and, of course, they're engineers in our world. Like, they they are in an engineering pipe, but they can hack media. Right?

They can sit there and go, wait. I'm gonna use Twitter here, and then I'm gonna use some random service that nobody ever did with a bit of duct tape to go tell a story and get somebody started, and they have that creativity. That's what I'm looking for, and I can build that in anyone. Right? I can find somebody who cares about design, and I can see a level of quality you know, Ashley McNamara.

Right? Ashley is an amazing advocate in so many ways. And and it often happens through art. Right? Because that creativity happens through what she creates, and she's able to connect and communicate with an audience.

And if I describe that another way in a context, people would be like, wait. Is she an advocate, or is she a designer? No. She's an amazing developer advocate. And so you're looking for people that can craft that.

Really need time and shift in our industry, and there's never been a greater time for our profession. Like, the writing roles, the training roles, the world needs us. The world needs us. And I'd say, come work for me, but also, like, come get a role for any of these other people because we gotta help. We have a job to do as DevRel.

Tamao Nakahara: That's great. Uttam, do you have any, thoughts? Like, do you look at GitHub? Do you look at for particular roles?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So so plus one, two of the things that Adam and and Jeff just said. One thing I wanna this was a sentiment that came out from a previous question. I just wanna dispel that. Like, yes, we want people to go out to network, just the networking itself is is is not the end.

Right? Like, the the folks the thing that folks are mostly looking for is intent and and and how your passion in helping developers and contributing. So when you're networking with with folks on this panel or others, it should be with that context and not just the network for the sake of networking. Now coming back to the, to the question, looking at videos for a DA role and in some cases also having folks to do a presentation as part of our interview should be expected. Like, maybe one of the rounds is when you are asked to do a presentation twenty, twenty five minutes.

Similarly, if you are interviewing for developer program engineer role, expecting more programming based questions is is is reasonable. GitHub contributions actually matter quite a bit. Folks do look at that as a signal because sometimes interviews are trying to pick signals which are beyond those few hours that you that they'll be spending with you as an interviewer. And that's where going back and looking at your blog post that you have done, the GitHub contribution, the YouTube videos that you might have published. Those are those gives interviewers a lot of confidence.

There is another set of role that I hired quite a bit in my team, and these are, like, looking at oral developer relations strategy. Because there are multiple platform options right now for developers and, like, what what's the trend? What are the insights happening? So sometimes I will probe folks on questions like, can you describe the landscape, of developers in your country? So a question like, okay.

What's the population? What are the plat popular platform choices, etcetera? And that gives you a sense. It's like, is this person focused pretty much on the tactical stuff, but they're all or or they're also building strategic insight on how the platforms are evolving and they're shaping. So so that's that's, that's an additional skill I would try to test in some of the roles that I had in my team.

Tamao Nakahara: I think that's a great point. So to summarize a little bit, we often hire for someone who's gotten, you know, validation within a community. And that might be a geographical community. It might be a a language community. It might be, you know, some kind of user type of community.

And that's that's the value that they bring. Right? They they not only are a member and they're active, but they also have knowledge and they can articulate. This this is how this community speaks and this is what gets them excited and this is what's gonna matter. So just wanted to emphasize that.

So kind of are also with these platforms, you know, I mentioned the GitHub blog post and all that. Jeff, you mentioned a little bit like, hey. You you maybe only 23 people viewed your video, but great. But how much do these numbers matter? Do you look at number of Twitter followers, GitHub stars on their projects?

I'm sure people wonder that. Like, how does it matter? How much?

Uttam Tripathi: Yeah. I I mean I mean, I always watch vanity metrics. Right? I think in our jobs and things, we talk about metrics. We talk about metrics.

And I've actually kinda quit talking about metrics in some ways for my team. We talk about OKRs that we set all up for our team. And what I move more into is you look at the craft. And I'll tell you, look. If I see someone who has an amazing following on Twitter or connection to community and they're doing massive reach, like, we probably have already talked or and if we're not, like, call me.

And, I'll give you my home number. But it's not really about that. Right? It's about a connection to a community. Right?

And I will tell you, because of our platforms and scale, if we create forms for people, we're gonna be able to create the next, you know, of a advocate that has reach. You know, I look at the mode that we're in right now, and one thing I think about is, you know, what's happening in the Twitch space, the streaming space, the virtual event space. I think that there's gonna be a massive sprawl in some port of of virtual events. And so on this area here where you're saying, hey. How do the superstars stand out, does that stuff matter?

I definitely am looking for people that we can go develop that are gonna be able to stand out and resonate with an audience and make an emotional connection, create content that entertains and informs, and that's a rare, rare skill in craft. And so the things that stand out on that are your ability to connect and develop and care for an audience, follow through, the ability to do different modalities. And I think some of the streamers and the things that we saw in the gaming industry. Right? You look at the nitros of the world.

Right? Who's gonna be the first advocate to hit a 100,000 viewers? Right? You know, who's gonna be the first one to hit a million people following them on streaming? Right?

Some of these people are around 10,000 and so forth. If you look back at our build conference, right, this our engineers who participate in that, they changed their sessions and delivery to be more streaming like. The exit row for your conference right now is 300 pixels away. It's the exit door is, like, 300 pixel away. They click x and leave.

And so if your ability to hire to retain an audience and not talk long, long, long like I am and get people moving on, you know, you know, our things that we're gonna go do, and you'll you will stand out, and you will have a career. But I'd say focus on the content and the craft, focus on the audience, and all great things will happen with your content. And you will end up having a great role. It's rare skills.

Speaker 4: K. Go ahead.

Adam FitzGerald: I wanna follow-up on what Jeff's saying about the shift to sort of, like, streaming as an engagement platform. I think there's something here that is often overlooked is that it isn't necessarily about video. It's about interaction. And if you are treating your streaming platform the way you treat your webinar platform, then you're doing it wrong. Right?

Because your webinar platform, you just pipe any recorded content you want into it, and everybody's gonna go consume it in a silent room somewhere, and maybe there's a little bit of chat interaction. If you can make your streaming in content much more engaging, a mechanism for taking customer or engagement feedback from the participants directly into what you're doing, then that can be a lot more fun. When I was at AWS, we kicked off streaming on Twitch. I mean, that was it four years ago now? Was our first Twitch stream at AWS.

And one of the funniest things we did, there's a guy, Randall Hunt, who worked for me, and he did did Twitch Plays the AWS console. And he allowed what he did is he took the stream of chat from the Twitch session and you allowed it to move the cursor and click buttons inside his AWS console. And so we had people in chat directing what was happening to the cursor and starting servers and opening databases and doing all That kind of interaction, that kind of engagement is something you can't replicate in an in person event. It's something you can't replicate in a webinar. There's a room there for innovation and the way that people think about doing things with these streaming platforms.

We haven't even scratched the surface of yet, and you see on the gaming side, these guys that are doing gaming streamers, they got, like, custom emojis and they've got, like, poll mechanisms and say what they're gonna go do next. We've got a when we think about streaming as a platform, there's so much room for innovation when it comes to DevRel there that people that can go now that, they'll have low loads and loads of opportunities.

Uttam Tripathi: All I wanna say is, please, for the love of god, people don't recreate everything that sucks about events when we go virtual. I literally think I had somebody talking to me about how to have, like, a bag to collect swag and walk around a virtual event. And I was like, please don't recreate everything that's bad. Like, let's not have execs up for seven hours bloviating about, like, behind a podium. Four minute.

I and let's move the stuff out of the session, the learning and the skilling and the hands on stuff out of it. But, like, it is the greatest opportunity for industry, and it sucks that so many people are hurting around the world. But we have a job here to go do. So thank you. Adam is so spot on.

Tamao Nakahara: Absolutely. That reminds me of a a company, that was using Second Life, and I asked the person they had artists making their avatar, and I was like, oh, what cool thing did the artist make you? Oh, they put me as a person behind a desk. I was like, you're in Second Life, and they made you a person behind a desk.

Uttam Tripathi: I could talk to Seven Life Second Life long time. Grace probably even helped me with them. And all that ever happened is people came flying around flew into me and smashed into me on stage because there was this new thing. It was like it was really, really disruptive in in a long time ago. But wherever the modality is, we're a developer in our we gotta be there.

Tamao Nakahara: So it's Animal Crossing.

Grace Francisco: Yeah. I just wanna echo some of the comments that Jeff and Adam made here. And, you know, we we talk about developer relations, and I I tell this story a lot right now, which is a long time ago when I was still at Microsoft, actually, I was working on open source initiatives. Now I had spoken at one of these open source conferences, was walking around after my talk, and one of these developers walked up to me and said, so, are you relating it? And I looked at him like, oh oh, he's talking about the relations part of my title.

Yes. And yet, right now, that is the most difficult thing to do in this virtual landscape we're all operating in. So to Adam's point, I think there is a a an opportunity for us to level that up and innovate around how we engage to both your points, but also just relate. Right? That empathy that everyone really needs deeply right now and connecting and finding a way to, like, really connect.

Because in this format, like, we're missing half the communication. Body language is a big part of communication. Right? And the other is eye to eye contact. One of the things that is so wearing for a lot of us and these day you know, hour by hour Zoom calls is that we're not making that eye to eye connection.

So it feels like you're not relating, and it's really hard work now to relate. So I think there's definitely a ton of opportunity there for us to figure that out. One of my dev advocates actually participated in a virtualized conference that was put in Animal Crossings, which is a really popular gaming platform. And I thought, no. There.

See? And gaming is a perfect platform for us to experiment on because those guys and Roblox was with the company I was in last. They understand how to scale things up. Right? And they're always they've always been data oriented.

They eat up data every single day and they make sure all the servers are up and that all the players are engaged. So that's where we really should be looking to make sure that we're engaging and relating with developers. So just a shout out

Speaker 4: for that.

Adam FitzGerald: Yep. The design item DevOps was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. We had somebody from the HashiCorp team was involved in that as well. And that's the kind of that's kind of opportunity there is right now to go do something a little different.

Tamao Nakahara: Yes. And a plug to Austin who spoke about that in the early days of I think on the first week of DeborahCon Earth. So that's a perfect segue. So I was looking for so when you're looking at these materials, and then I'm gonna assume during the interview phase or maybe the early conversation phase, what kind of, like, personal qualities or yeah. What kind of qualities are you looking for outside of, let's say, presentation skills and maybe they have a lot of output?

But, like, you know, are you are you how do you see empathy through their work or through the interview process or sense of humor or creativity? I've often talked about how you can create a sample app that's a hotel booking app, but you can say it's a hotel booking app for unicorns. And then, you know, suddenly you just kinda you just added something to it, but it just makes it kinda funny. And, those types of things are small things, but they, you know, they they add value. So, maybe, Uttan, you've been a little quiet.

Are there things that you, yeah, you noticed, like, as Grace was just talking about, you know, how people make eye contact or maybe they have very empathetic tone when they help people in Slack or in their docs. What are things that you're looking for that you think this is is a potential candidate?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So so that's actually a great point. Like, you can look at the cold skill set the person brings. But for me, my experience, the ones who are more successful are the ones who are able to to have the strong level of empathy with the developers. This is a tough role, like, developer relations, and there is a lot of strain that comes because we're kinda sitting in the middle.

We are working and then sharing a lot of resources to developers, but at the same time, also working with the product teams. And it's our job to make sure that we are we are the advocates on both the sides. That's the reason Google, we started using the term developer advocates from from right at the beginning. This is this in a way represents what the role is. When you go out, you need to advocate on behalf of course the platform that you're representing.

But when you come back in the organization, then you are advocating on behalf of the developers. So strong element of empathy that if it's visible to the work that you are doing if you are a community manager, how much how much how is your community doing? If I would go and talk to one of your community members, how are they speaking about that? How about you? That that that's a that's a strong signal.

Your contribution to docs in some of those areas and and how is that? That that's a strong signal as well. The other elements I would test, and it's it's again, it's important in some of the roles that we put folks in when you are working with cross teams, multiple product teams, is how would you how would you share a difficult feedback? So so the question is, a a team is launching an API. The API is not ready, and your developers are telling you it's not ready.

How would you handle that situation? And and the the thing that I'm trying to test in each of those cases, are you putting the developer first? Are you putting the community first? Is it coming up in the actions that you have you have done in the past? Is it coming up as a team in the interview?

Because if that's not happening, it's very it takes a lot of time to build trust with your developer community, but few wrong actions, you can lose that trust. And and that's an element I look very strongly when we are hiring anyone on the team. Like, we need we need to put the trust with with the developer community, and so that's that's respected. So, like, in addition to all the core skill sets, great speaker, top contributor, all of the other stuff, but are you are you putting the developers in this cost?

Uttam Tripathi: You know, you said something that I thought was so good. And I know it, first of all, I'll just say, you know, Google did, you know, Vic and Dothra back in the time when different people went and said, hey. We're gonna go with advocacy as a name. When we rebooted our work, we picked that up too. And I think it was a very important moment for us in the industry and profession because I think that some of that consistency and what the rules need to be is really important.

I think we can all do some good for profession and people as we work to develop that. Saying that, you met one developer advocate. Congratulations. You've met a developer advocate because they're as unique as the individuals in the world and as many developers. The on our company and and, we really do think of it as an engineering role.

And you have to be able to live in an engineering environment, And we can grow and help you that, but it's Scrum, Sprint, you name it, part of engineering milestones contributing to release and working that way. And product feedback, the ability to synthesize product feedback. If I can have someone that can actually truly help me understand for the node community, like, why we're broken and why we need to be better, you know, we did that there and being able to operate in an environment, pure gold. Right? To do things and connect with the customer creatively, and then you can synthesize that and bring it back to the engineers.

Feedback from advocates is completely different than anything you'll get from an enterprise customer. I promise you. You know why? It's about five minutes to wow to start. Right?

How do you get someone to start? There's no point whatsoever of doing anything on stage if it unless a customer can start doing it. And if you can do that type of work and and and you don't have to be a writer as a profession, but you could be great at it and you can help. And if you can do that, if you can be the helper and and bridge these things as an advocate, your career is set for life. Because no matter whatever the environment is, you're gonna have valuable skills for an engineering team and a product company.

Engineering part of this has changed a lot in our world, and our advocates sit down with the most senior people in our company and distinguished engineers in technical roles, and that's sought after and valued incredibly so in our company. Really important in the engineering part of it.

Tamao Nakahara: That's a great segue.

Adam FitzGerald: I I well, can I I just wanna talk for a second about interview process?

Tamao Nakahara: That's my question.

Uttam Tripathi: It's okay. Yeah.

Adam FitzGerald: So So

Tamao Nakahara: can we just assume is there there's a initial there's a technical and there's a presentation for a lot of dev advocates, or is there another aspect that you guys add to your

Adam FitzGerald: Let let let me talk a little bit more generally first. Right? K. There are there are different ways to run interview processes and a lot of them are dependent upon the company you're interviewing with. Yes.

And so the last pretty much the last decade, I've been working for companies that have taken a behavioral based approach to interviewing. And that's the way that we did things at AWS. It's the way we do things HashiCorp. And I find it a very, very effective means for finding out about these things we're talking about, whether it's empathy or customer awareness or how you operate in engaging with other teams, how you share deliverables. Those sorts of things are the things that are trying to be uncovered using behavioral based interviewing.

So if you're looking at companies like HashiCorp where we publish our leadership principles very, clearly or AWS where you publish your leadership principles, what the interview process is there, the job of that interview process is to have you find places in your work experience that you can express as examples of those principles. So for HashiCorp, whether it is pragmatism or integrity or execution or vision or beauty works better, those principles are things that you should feel like, do I have a representative example for my work history that matches up with all of those principles? If you don't, then you may not be a good match for the company. You may be excellent in what you do. You might be a match better match for a different company.

But for the companies that do think about their principles as a guiding responsibility for having a good match for their employees and how they do hiring, then that's the way to sort of approach those problems. I found behavior based interviewing incredibly valuable. It's helped me level set across different roles and different responsibilities. It's helped me become repeatable and more accurate. And it's one of the things I think is super important.

And so it's like a it's a style or technique you need to recognize. If you're interviewing with that company, that's the way I'm gonna need to prepare for it. If you're gonna interview for another company, maybe you need to practice hypotheticals or coding examples or go through algorithmic tests or whatever it is. But, like, for other companies, they got different responsibilities, different ways they evaluate candidates. For me, in my experience, by the time you've gone to the in person part of the interviewing process, we've already decided you're a functional fit.

You already know that you have the skills to do the job. We're spending most of the rest of the time, at least 75% of our time is spent working out whether you'll be a cultural fit for our organization. And that is something that's really a matter of are you the are you the right person for the organization, not can you do the job?

Tamao Nakahara: Right. Grace, do you guys have specifics on your interview process that would help the audience?

Grace Francisco: Yeah. Actually, I was gonna add, even before you get to the interview process, I think making sure the job description that you post for any of your roles in DevRel are inviting to a whole diverse audience of folks. So the rock star thing caught me because that's one of the things I always eliminate from our job descriptions because women in particular often don't relate to that and that they will automatically eliminate themselves from the process if they see things like expert or rock star. But when you use the words have experience in or have done speaking, they'll apply. So just wanna, like, shout out for, like, diversity and making sure your job descriptions from the very beginning are inviting to a wide range of of recruits.

So that's one is where it's starting from the very beginning and setting the the right job description that's that's inviting. Inviting. For us, we always do the presentations. I think that's a really important part for our developer advocate role in particular because it's not just about the presentation. I'm looking for are they relating?

Are they empathizing? How do they do under stress with three or four different panelists who are asking them questions during that presentation? And so really being prepared and understanding. It's not just a broadcast. It's a conversation.

Right? And and making sure that you can have these conversations on demand, in person, I think, a very important skill to have. For our other roles, it really depends. We have program managers as well. We have engineers.

So we craft the interview panel based on that specialized skill set that we're looking for. But to Adam's point, it's also super important for us to make sure there's a cultural fit. So we are looking at behavior as well there.

Uttam Tripathi: I wonder if some people wonder, like, you know, of, like you know, I've interviewed a lot of candidates. We all have had on here. I think I think I give a little advice about the process. Right? One, if you're a company, and I'll even joke, you know, if you're on my team, hey.

Don't listen to this advice. I want you to be on our team forever, but you probably should listen to it. Like, know your market value out there. Right? And and and make sure you're aligned to that.

I I I sometimes meet people that are just, like, have no idea how amazing they are and how probably well they would be treated at any of the any other different company. And you start talking to them and they just have no idea. Or I find some people that it's completely out of bounds. They just, like they come in, they think they're amazing, And you get talking to them through an interview process, and they made me realize, oh, I have this to learn. But I'd say, you know, that process is valuable for that.

I will say it can be very invigorating. It can be incredibly disruptive here. Right? I know different times I left Microsoft one time to go to Twitter. Right?

And I sometimes will get phone calls from other competitors that I'm not going and I'm not interviewing. But, like, my wife will go, please. Like, you're not looking. I said, no.

Speaker 4: No. No. No.

Uttam Tripathi: I'm so happy. That can be disruptive. And I would say the thing on this the advice I would give you is momentum is everything here. This is the only bit I will talk to you is, when if you're looking at another role, look at a perspective. Is this gonna advance that journey and dream that I've got?

Am I gonna build skills? But then also understand, is this the season where I wanna be doing this? And then I I the thing that I ask candidates, I'd say, are you packing a parachute, or are you trying to get a career? Because if you're packing a parachute, you need to get out. Like, let's go find some things, and let's go help you with that because you're in some environment, and let's have one conversation.

Two, if you're looking for a career opportunity, let's spend the longer term. And some of these conversations are twelve to eighteen months conversations that I'm having with people. There are people that are come come on to my team. You know, I heard some different people from Google. I probably gonna a year and a half.

So just think about establishing that relationship, and I'd say decide when you want to go looking at stuff, and don't feel bad about it. The only other thing I'll say is be upfront. You know, talk to when you're talking to us and you wanna talk salary, don't lie. Be open. You know, work those things like this and and stand and be open and look for what you should be wanting for salary and take care of yourself.

And then the last thing is when you go back to your employer and you are looking to move on to a new role, and this is the part that's also scary because I'm over there trying to hire you if you're talking to me. Hey. Please come, and I'm trying to guide you through the process. Do not feel bad. I'll tell you exactly what I tell every single employee that I end up in that moment when one of Adam or Grace or anybody is going off and trying to get them there.

I say, wow. Congratulations. You gotta feel great. You know? They've seen you what we've seen you.

You're awesome. How do we you know, are you thinking about going and have that conversation? Please do not feel bad about looking after your career and your livelihood and your family and all your people by growing and taking care of yourself and investing. Don't feel bad. Don't feel but also communicate.

Really lean into it. Thank you.

Tamao Nakahara: That's awesome. Sorry. We are out of time. We got need to break to our to our uncomm speakers, but thank you so much to all of you. And, yeah, I'll I'll add that I talked to someone probably for a year and we would not we just didn't have the ability to hire in a certain geography.

And then at a certain point, our business model shifted and suddenly I was like, great. You know, I can have a distributed team. And so that long conversation turned into, a fantastic fantastic member of our team. So I'm sure you all have similar experiences for that. Thank you so much for your time.

I hope that, everybody can take away from this. Other video will be posted, and, you gave such great advice. So, we will grow continue to grow this DevRel community as it is growing as well. So thank you so much again. It's great seeing you.

Thank you.