Navigating impact in DevRel: a guide for the mindful job seeker

SJ: So I probably don't need to say much more. That was a wonderful intro. Thank you so much, Amanda. A lot of that is going to be on this slide, including Joanie, upside down. Joanie. I think the only thing I want to say on this slide is A follow my cat on Instagram, and B, it's very cool to be here because I'm local. I live in Brooklyn, moved here three years ago. Very exciting. And so today I want to talk to you about, alluded to when we're listing off the companies that I've worked for, following your heart and embracing your own values when it comes to the job search and sort of continuing checking in on those values as you're working at a job in DevRel specifically. I do think actually now that I think about it a lot, this can apply to any job, but my experience lies in DevRel, so that's what I'm going to be talking about.

So when we talk about these values, what I want to share is that I've ho around so much that I've kind of gotten to a point where I am very clear on what works for me in a job, and I'm hopeful that some of the things I'm going to share today will be through school for you as well. So the things I'm going to talk about today are kind of figuring out what those values are for you and how you can make those choices and navigate them. Applying them to things like network. This conference today is a great example. Applying them to being able to more clearly spot the red flags that pop up either in your interviewing process or while you're at your job. And then those red flags can also help you avoid burnout. If you're aware of what the red flags are, hopefully they're going to take you to a place where you're not necessarily going to get yourself to the mode of burnout.

Unfortunately, I myself have burned out many times, so I have many stories to tell about it. And then I know this is sort of this weird existential time that we're in Deel. There's been a lot of layoffs, a lot of anxiety for us. Let's just talk about some of the basics of how to be prepared for that. And I know Shy was in the back, is doing a talk about that right after this. And so I won't talk too much about Glenn because we have someone doing a whole great talk about that. So all of that's going to sort of come together and talk about how you can use your own personal values to pursue a career that's really aligned with your heart.

So we talk about defining and honouring your personal values. So I refer to myself as the Goldilocks of Dore. Literally no one else calls me that. That's just something I've decided. It's just not like a thing, it's just what I've decided. And the other reason I call myself that is because I think my last five, six years have been largely at developer plus companies like MailChimp, like Shopify, where the developer is not the sort of end customer, the developer is adding value ultimately the customer. And specifically these have been at SaaS companies that are focusing on medium, small tom, medium businesses. I always forget to breathe on under these, hold on a second, just to breathe. Okay.

Alright. So the way that I like to look at it, I don't know if any of you are familiar with a podcast called the Community Pulse. Back in the day, there was a moment where I was a host, one of the hosts of that podcast, we did a really cool episode back in 2020, all about navigating next in Deborah. And it was at a time when there were questions starting to emerge around some of the ethical questions that come up when you're doing DevRel. I think at the time there was questions around some of these bigger contracts that companies are taking with equipment manufacturers, things like that, things that are kind of tough things to navigate. It turned into a really interesting conversation about how we can sort of check our own compasses internally to make sure that the work we're doing is aligned with what's most important to us and how we can make sure that the projects that we lead and the companies that we give our talent to. So yeah, I'm going to just take advantage of that right now.

All right. Breathing and hydration are really important. That's a big takeaway from this top. So as I was saying, that talk resulted in me kind of thinking about, well, how can we actively make sure that I'm aware of what my core values are, what my code of ethics is, and use that to navigate how I'm looking at opportunities and looking at the work that I'm doing every day. I definitely suggest, I'll send you a link to that after this, but it was a great episode. And so why I say the Goldilocks of DevRel is because I hopped around and then it came back to a place that felt just right and that's how Spot DevRel team for the time being. We're in a place right now where I feel like the project I'm working, this is actually probably the first year in my career where I feel like the work I'm doing is truly aligned with my personal values in my work or my exercise of identifying those.

I started just by writing down what makes me happy, what's exciting to me. And for me, it came down to connection with folks, facilitating that connection. It came down to having fun, making sure I'm able to laugh every day with people I work with. And then it came down to equity and equity in all kinds of different things. When it comes to DevRel, I think we're doing a lot of work, especially when it comes to developer plus work. We're working with platforms and ecosystems where there's guidelines, there's things that we're asking developers to do and we need to make sure that those guidelines are equitable and give everyone an opportunity to be successful on that platform. And that comes down to the work that I do every day. We just launched a developer mentorship programme this week at HubSpot, and it's all about elevating folks who may not have the access to some of the barriers to entry because HubSpot, I don't know if anyone here has ever tried building anything on the website.

It's kind of hard and complicated and we're very aware of that and there's so many different things and ways you can build on the platform. And even if you have a very specific task, it's intimidating. So we've paired folks with folks who've done the hard work of figuring that out themselves to sort of build that level playing field with folks. And so what does that look like for you? What is it that gets you up in the morning, even if it doesn't have anything to do with work? What are your hobbies that motivate you and how can you look at the core of what is making you happy about those things and apply it to your sort of list or your room break personal value use. And then when it comes to I have randomly took pictures of myself in here doing relevant big stuff, look, I'm networking and IO back in the day, I put my name, pictures of myself, networking, but then I could find anyway when it comes to your values driving things like networking, I don't know about y'all, but my social battery especially post post, I mean, I dunno if we're post pandemic, but you know what I mean is extremely minimal.

I get so much energy and inspiration from events like delcon, but I also get extremely exhausted easily after even I showed up literally four my talk I might have known after, but it's just, I've also been to many conferences this summer, so that's partially why. But to me it's really important to use my social battery and apply it to the places where I feel like align most with my values. So I only come to events where these are my people, y'all are my people. It's so cool to be able to connect with people who actually understand what we're doing every day. And so I'm not just going to go to a networking event for the sake of going to a networking event and that aligns with me. But if you are really interested in building out your personal Rolodex, maybe that aligns more with your values and you want to go to a networking event and meet as many as people as possible, but just understand that, I don't know, I think we all probably agree that these things can be taxing over time to do too many of them.

So pick and choose what feels right. The only other thing I wanted to add that's here is also I gave myself a challenge to do this talk without any notes. So every time I've done it, it's been kind of different. So anyway, you're getting the gist of it, don't worry. I think one thing I want to say is that I think the vast majority of networking I do is actually online. So if I meet all of y'all and then we connect on LinkedIn, if we hit it off and I have a great connection in live with you, I'm going to throw you that card on LinkedIn When you have an announcement, I'm going to give you that thumbs up and it means a lot when I get that back from people. I know it seems so small, but it's a big deal. And so you're nurturing those connections.

So the story I want to tell about this is that you never know when these great connections are going to be stro full for you. One example is, I think you were saying that all of your jobs have been through Community Network, very similar. I don't think I've ever cold applied maybe back in the day a long time ago, but I don't think I've ever cold applied for a de job and had it worked through, worked out. So the way I got into HubSpot, I left Shopify to try to run my own thing for a while, a consultancy run developer community. And turns out running a business is hard. Sales are really hard. I have newfound respect for salespeople that I never had before running my own company. So huge shout out to people who are doing their own thing and running consultancy. It's really, really tough work.

So I realised it wasn't for me partially. I also completely ran out of money and I was having a conversation with some folks that some of you might know, Tim Falls in this room and he was telling me how he was talking to someone who was looking to build out their team in a HubSpot. It wasn't a fit for him. So he's someone who I feel like is very, very values driven, if you know what I'm talking about. And he used to do developer community at Srid and we just copied a lot of stuff and we worked together at Keno. He basically was like, oh, I mentioned your name. And it turned out the hiring manager and the lead of the DevRel team had met me just a couple times at hackathons, and I remember her too. It was just a really lovely connection. It wasn't like this deep thing, but she was like, oh, sj, I remember her.

And obviously I had to interview at the job, but I don't think I would've had that door open had it not been for then just sort of fortuitous she'll be meeting in a hacka bud. So you just never know. Okay, there's Joni peering over my cat's delicatessen bag and I have a little bit about red flags, and the reason I put that picture there is because it represents, that was probably day two of living in New York and I had just ordered my first delivery of Kat's. So let's see, how do I start this one? So there's so many times where I have ignored red flags and I like to think that if you're close to your values, then you're closer to being able to recognise those red flags more easily. And they're individual, they're different for everybody. The story I'm going to share is how I left HubSpot the first time to join MailChimp, and I want to sort of give a caveat that I'm by no means disparaging any of these companies, but I'm talking about how this stuff is all so so personal and how timing is everything.

MailChimp reached out to me at a time when I had moved to Boston for HubSpot and my heart of hearts love Boston. It's a great city, but not a city where I wanted to live. And so I was trying to move to New York. I was trying to figure out a way to move to New York and it wasn't possible with HubSpot at the time. They have now done an amazing job of becoming remote hybrid friendly, but at the time it just wasn't an option. And so MailChimp reached out to me again, one of those LinkedIn InMails, and normally I hesitate to reply to those, but this one was really cool. They were looking for a developer advocate though, which is typically not my jam at all. I like community because I really like facilitating connections. I'm not that face of developed advocacy that is standing in front of the room doing talk this ironic, I'm doing it now, but I don't usually do this.

So I was like, y'all, do you have a DevRel team? And they were like, no. And I'm like, wait a minute. How are you hiring a developer advocate without a DevRel team? And started to ask more and more questions. That opportunity turned into them basically saying, Hey, come and build DevRel at MailChimp essentially. And I'm like, well, that sounds incredible, but wait a minute, how was I so easily able to convince you to build DevRel into the original rules for an individual advocate? So it turned out the timing just wasn't right for me and I wasn't the right person to come in and build DevRel at that organisation. And so I could go into more details about that story, but it was a moment where I ignored the red flag in favour of the silver lining, which was that they relocated me to New York.

And the great thing was it did kind of work out. Sometimes these things like there's checks and balances. I had a tough year at MailChimp, but I really are proud of what I was able to achieve, although it wasn't as much as I could have had I stayed at HubSpot. So balance all of these things, understand the sacrifices that you're going to make and understand where the company fits in. I think one of the things that's super key is if you're looking into DevRel these days, then this is a good time for my next slide.

This one? No, this one. For those of you who have maybe been in this industry for a little while, you may remember a time where we're all wearing, I think a lot of us still wear many hats, but there was a time when the teams were really small and folks were just doing everything. I remember being at events and developer evangelists, kind of like not only were they helping developers every weekend at a different hackathon, but they were also billing docs at the same time and they were doing sample apps and it was just wild and they out, they all burnt out. Every dev evangelist I was saying that distinctly now we don't hear that term as much anymore, has burnt out very quickly after that two or three year period. So I think specialisation is starting to really benefit us and allow us to not burn out. And if you go to a company, they're kind of asking you to do everything. You're going to burnout, you're going to burn out quickly. And it's also a sign that they maybe don't understand what their degra strategy is and how it's going to build into the longer term the company. So the red flag for me is if you're seeing it sort of wear everything, all the hats job, ask more questions and make sure they know how their vision for DevRel aligns with the company strategy.

I won't again talk about this too much, but this sort of elephant in the room is this sort of tough, anxious sort of existential time that we're in endeavour. I should practise what I preach, but the money that I took from Shopify, I sold all my stock and invested it right away into this agency that I tried to build, and I didn't have any more padding after that. I was just like, if this works great, if it doesn't, I'm in trouble. And wow, okay, my tooth. Just one other thing that was what? This is not supposed to be standout. Basically what happened was I learned a lot of lessons and was very lucky that HubSpot reached out to me when I did because I completely ran out of money doing things like building. I don't know why I made a big banner about my company for no reason.

I wasn't wearing hackathons or anything like that, but I just was so proud for myself that I had an agency. I did do some fun work in the nine months that I was renting that, but it save your money. I didn't have a cushion for what would happen when that didn't work out. And I think I may be, I don't know what I'm doing for time at all, but some of the other things are that investing in yourself, but making sure that aligns with what is important to you. Things like a mentorship programme can be, or just even a casual mentor relationship can be valuable for you to sort of keep yourself learning new things, building a strong connection with someone and isn't as sort of, I guess labour intensive or as it involved with a full on course or something like that and learning to go.

Everybody says do it. Here's a picture of me way back in the day with the team that I think helped me realise what was my area of focus, the specialty, which is of all of our community. And we joined all the things that are important to me. We're being very silly here wearing our red hats because back then we were a team called Deliver Outreach. So we called ourselves Devo and I don't know if anyone in this room is okay, some of you remember who Devo is, and we got the red hats made for ourselves so we could walk around conferences and be referred to as the Devo team. There are band that used to wear hats like this, the early eighties, and they sang. That's not wi would be good. Yeah,

Audience member: Important thing for the younger people. They wrote the Rugrats theme.

SJ: Oh, I did not know that. Yeah, from others still lot of tv. Goodness. Well, fun facts, plenty, everyone. I love that. And yeah, okay, if this is being recorded, I just learned that some members of Divo did the regret theme and other cartoon themes. So really important information. So I talked about that. The days the do it all advocate are gone. You have to evaluate these opportunities to make sure they're aligned with what you think you can be not only most effective at it, just because you're good at something that doesn't necessarily mean you can sustainably do it, but it has to align with how you're feeling, like your core and your heart to keep you motivated, to keep you connected with all the things that are going on in your life.

Alright, I feel like I skipped a slide. I didn't know I skipped the story, but recapping basically make sure some of the things you can do to learn what your personal values are. It sounds like such a sort of abstract concept, but there's a few things writing down what you love to do and getting to the root of what that is. What is the core feeling? What is the core motivator? And there's literally quizzes online to help you do this. I love a good online personality quiz, and if they're not even a buzzfeed quiz might be able to tell you which Harry Potter house you've been into or whatever. I don't want to mention Harry Potter, sorry. But I did one actually last time and I was like, I should probably add some online resources here. And there's one called Personal Value Es, and they suffered me in big time because I bought the $15 treaty desk that had all the details after, and it came down to the very similar to what I had already talked about, that desire to focus on things that give me pleasure and fun, that connection and the equity. And that's what came out of the quiz. I was just like, Hey, great. So maybe y'all should do that quiz. The networking and specialisation always tied back to those personal values and it'll keep you kind of grounded and try to help you avoid some of the pitfalls of Virga and sacred her money. That's it first. Jennifer, we even meet you all.

Thank you so much, Sarah. That was fabulous talk. What questions did we have for Sarah? But

So in all of your Goldilocks experience, sometimes you have to figure out when it's time to go and under there any signals that you at the end of the room, yeah, this was the story I forgot to tell's. Go back to this you. This was my cute little team of Shopify. Shopify was another interesting experience where I joined that team with the developer community title osten, a developer community function. But again, I won't get into all the details, but the timing wasn't quite right. I did want to show impact though and feel like I was making a difference in the future of their develop platform. So I put together an event series and basically did a North American tour of the Shopify developer platform the summer of 2017. And I was supported to do this, but I was the one going to each event managing all the logistics, setting everything up, hosting events I was bringing in.

We had a handful of advocates, but we also had engineers coming to some of the conferences. They would fly in for two or three events and then leave. I was at all 10 by the end of that, I was completely dead. I knew that I was at a dead end the company for the timing of where it was, they proposed to me, Hey, do you want to come work on the events team full time? Not after that summer. It was just like, no, I don't actually want to double down on this. So for me, that was just the moment where I knew that what I was doing, what was offered to me was a longer aligned with what I felt like it was good at or that I cared about deeply. So that's one example. Some of the other times I think you start to feel that disconnect sometimes it can take a lot longer to be, for you to be calm, aware of it, talk to your colleagues, talk to you, or maybe not your colleagues so much, but your therapist, the people you feel safe around. If you have a therapist, highly recommend it and make sure that if you're starting to feel something that doesn't feel bright with you, explore that. Don't be afraid of it. I think sometimes it can be really scary to feel that, but explore it and take the time you need to see what else is out there, if there's something that's more aligned. More questions for Sarah.

Audience member: Great talk. Going back to this slide that you're here on, do you have any advice specifically for folks at de Who are those Do it all advocates on setting boundaries or maybe working with your work to specialise communicating with that? Because I joined my company very early, we really have a DevRel team and I've actually really enjoyed being a do it all advocate and learning all of these different skills and getting good at all of the things. But how once you identify, or sorry, once you're already that person, how do you kind of out of that place? That's a great

SJ: Question. And I think I've seen this evolution happen at a few different companies, whether I was at them at the time or I've heard stories of it. And I think that it's really important to have a really solid sense of what the overall mission statement is for the work that you're doing, how it connects to the business. It sounds obvious, but sometimes there's a real disconnect between those things and where the company is actually going. And then from that point, you can be great at a bunch of things and it depends on your values. Do you want to manage people who are going to start doing those things? Do you have the opportunity at the company? Start looking at how you can delegate some of the things that you love but you don't deeply love. I mean, maybe you too deeply love all of the things, but I think it's a matter of picking and choosing and trying to make sure what is most aligned with the company and what is most aligned with the long-term future. And then understand are there the resources to grab a team and to delegate resources too. And also, I also want to say, if you are enjoying doing all the things, enjoy it while you can, but be aware of your fundamentals. If you're not sleeping, you're not leaving, you're not taking care of yourself. You have to be aware of those things too. And don't let it be too late. Just try to hone in on those signals and listen to them earlier. Then if you want them to up,

What other questions do we have for Sierra?

Audience member: Oh,

SJ: We can do this.

Audience member: Go next

SJ: Up. How negative. Yeah, don't, I'm not as active on Twitter as it used to be, but I just restarted. I'm like, I'm going to tweet more, but I, sorry, X. But yeah, I'm definitely on the LinkedIns. Where do people go these days? I don't even know where going online anymore.

Audience member: The fan,

SJ: Yeah. Loves LinkedIn and we love it. It's wild.

Audience member: Well, how about we get another round of applause for SJ.