About us

About us

The DevRel Collective exists as a place for DevRel professionals, Community Managers, and others to share resources, learn best practices, support one another, and be amongst our peers. We participate in and nurture communities as our jobs, but we, too, need a community of our own. This is that place. We are over 1,800 professionals (and growing all the time!) from all walks of life and all over the world.

If you’re a DevRel Professional and are looking for your people, here we are! Join us!

Why is this an exclusive group?

We feel it’s important for those of us who are pursuing this career to have a private and safe place to talk about our struggles, offer suggestions and congratulations, seek advice, and create professional relationships with others in the industry. As a result, we limit access to this group to those who are actively engaged in a career in Developer Relations or Community Management for a technical community.

If you are actively involved in developer communities or event management, we welcome your input on our public Github repos and appreciate your support! Please let us know if there is anything we can do to support you. If you are curious about Developer Relations, whether as a potential career path or as a company, please take a look at the resources listed below and don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions.

Application

How our Application Process Works

A brief primer on how we process and evaluate applications to join the DevRel Collective Slack community.

TL;DR

• This group is for active, practicing DevRel Professionals
• The Admin Team is made up of volunteers, doing their best to verify applications and admit new members
• The Admin Team is not looking to exclude people, but to include DevRel Professionals

The Process

All Applicants must submit the application form. Once an application form is submitted, a member of the Admin team will review the application, typically within two weeks' time.

Direct invites to the Slack group are not allowed by members of the community, and will be rejected automatically. We have found that having a basic application process, overseen by the Admin Team, has been effective in keeping the community cohesive and a ‘safe’ place to share about being a DevRel.

Applicants who don’t have a traditional DevRel title are typically rejected by the application process itself, before an Admin Team Member even sees the application. In those cases, the applicant sees an immediate response from the form itself stating that their application has been rejected, and informing them that they can reach out to the Admin Team with further detailed information if they feel like their application was rejected in error.

Note: We strongly discourage simply re-applying and changing one thing on the application in hopes of being admitted. Any attempts to ‘game the system’ are not looked upon favorably.

If an applicant is a DevRel professional with a non-traditional title, we ask the applicant to select the “Other” option for their current job title. By providing additional context around the DevRel initiatives and tasks they perform as a member of their DevRel team, applicants have an opportunity to provide the Admin Team with the information necessary to approve their application.

This is to provide those who are either not clearly in DevRel, or who are DevRel adjacent, an opportunity to tell us about the DevRel responsibilities they have that are otherwise non-obvious, as this can be highly specific to an organization and individuals taking on responsibilities outside of their job title.

When reviewing applications, we try to verify job titles in good faith, especially when that verification could lead to approval. We rely on the applicant to clearly convey their intent to join as an actively practicing DevRel professional.

If an Admin is unable to verify the information in the application, they may reach out to the applicant directly via email for further clarification. If it’s been more than 2 weeks since your application, and you haven’t received an invite, please check your email (and junk mail folder!) for any follow-up correspondence from the Admin Team regarding your application.

If an applicant misrepresents themselves on their application, we reserve the right to deny their application without comment.

Typically, DevRel management and higher - including VPs and C-levels - are a “no”. While we value their knowledge, some of the Q&A that can come up in this Slack team can involve requesting assistance with office politics - something that we’ve heard members of this group explicitly say would be difficult if their managers were also members.

We have found that this group is best suited for those who are actively doing DevRel activities in their day-to-day job, not just managing DevRel Teams.

Note: If your application is approved you will be sent an invite to join the Slack community. Slack invites are valid for approximately 90 days. If you have not accepted your invitation in that time and your invitation expires you will need to re-apply.

We look forward to your application

DevRel Definition

A Working definition of DevRel

We define a “DevRel Practitioner” as one who performs the functions of “Dev Advocates / Community Managers / Developer Experience” as their sole, full-time job. There are many roles that are related, and while we recognize their contributions, we do not class them as a DevRel Practitioner. These could include those who:

• as an adjacent or separate function of their full time role, run a meetup group or organization; or
• performs some tasks which may involve writing blog posts, speaking at some events, and others, while also primarily filling a different role in their company, like:
  • Software Engineer
  • Product Manager
  • C-level
  • Product Marketing
  • Technical Writer

and many more which are not explicitly laid out as DevRel roles.

Developer Relations is, in its ideal abstract, “paid altruism”. Companies pay people in these roles, which include, but are not limited to:

• Developer Advocacy
• Technical Evangelism
• Technical Community Management
• Developer Experience

These roles exist to work with, and for, the broader community of the tech industry. The primary goal is to meet the needs of the technologists in that community as well as deliver feedback internally to employers about gaps and trends in the market or concerning their product that those in the DevRel organization and discipline notice. How this is functionally implemented will vary depending on the type of parent company as well as organizational reporting structure.

The most common employer is a company that is building, maintaining, or has a core business which is otherwise focused on the types of technology used to create and maintain code bases and their supporting infrastructure. For example, these include, but are not limited to, languages, frameworks, SaaS products for the implementation and maintenance of operational technology, cloud providers themselves, and their supporting ecosystems.

All DevRel roles need to have strong relationships with Product, Marketing, and Engineering within their employing company. In general, DevRel practitioners report to one of these three organizations directly, and interfacing with the other two. Practitioners may interact with Business Development (BizDev) and Sales, but reporting to either of those organizations generally creates conflicts of interest. The reporting structure generally also impacts how the DevRel practitioners meet the needs of the community, being either more product-focused, marketing-focused, or engineering-focused - though never exclusively.

Thus, the area or areas of specialization of the DevRel individual or team will typically be informed by the intersection of the industry needs and the interests and priorities of their employer. As with the reporting structure, the area of interest will never be solely informed by one or the other

Jobs

DevRel Job Search

Resources

DevRel Resources