The ethics of community

PJ Hagerty: My name is PJ Hagerty. I work at a place called devrelate.io, and this is a song called It's the Message Not the Shine. If you wanna know more about devrelate.io, you can check us out at devrelate.io. Pretty simple, easy to follow. These are some of the people that we work with.

If you want more information, info at devrelate.io, you can find out everything you need. But let's get to the point of the talk. So this talk focuses on the idea of DevRel working against its main purpose. So we wanna bring communities together. That's our main goal.

Jeremy just touched on this very, very deeply. Both physical and social, we wanna improve community health and growth. So we're gonna take a look at some of the perceptions from both inside and outside of dev the DevRel community, kinda shine a light on things that are becoming all too commonplace. So sit back. Some of this may be a little bit less than delightful to hear.

So we're gonna start with the idea of what's a cult of personality. The term cult of personality can be defined thusly. Let me put on my definition voice. A situation where a leader, often a dictator, has been falsely idolized and made into a national or group icon and is revered as a result. So this may sound overly political, and I get that, but it's actually closer to the mark of where we need to be than you might think.

And to be honest, it's an easy trap to fall into. Who doesn't wanna feel like a rock star when they take the stage? Who doesn't wanna hear the applause and feel the adoration, get all the Twitter likes, see all the Instagram stars or hearts or whatever you reason to say. You wanna believe that the words you're saying, whether you're saying it in talk or you're saying it in a blog post or you're saying it on a podcast or during a Twitch stream, you wanna believe that this is exciting to the masses. Right?

So the idea that we, DevRel practitioners, should strive for a level of fame is not really consistent with what our field is meant to be focused on. The focus should be on the community. This may sound redundant, especially to this audience, but our focus needs to be on others, not ourselves. And this likely starts at the top. So let me give you a little history.

Developer relations is a, in our perception, a really new field. Used to be that when a company or a product or a brand needed to to have community interaction, they sent one of their more gregarious developers out into the world to do a talk or meet some people or hang out in a Meetup or meet potential clients at a conference or a Meetup somewhere along those lines. Even earlier than that, it was often the creator of the software or hardware who had to be responsible to take the message of people. And to say that this was often disastrous would be, like, a huge understatement. Not every company had a Steve Jobs or or a Steve Ballmer or even a Bill Gates.

Most were, like, awkward. They were unable to deliver the message that they wanted to do, that they wanted to share about what they were building. And frankly, they put off a lot of people they were supposed to be pitching to. This was just a sad situation. As time went on and startups began to disrupt the tech landscape, take that for what it's worth, things started to change.

So for the record, this is not a new phenomenon. Around 1995, as bigger companies began to fall behind current technological trends, things like open source and agile, smaller, fast, more flexible companies, again, adopt the landscape and show up at more events and conferences. It was in the late nineties and the early two thousands that we began to see the rise of smaller events, meetups, user groups. All of these began to form around around small communities, usually in the same region, and all of them had the kind of same concept. You know?

Building small, minimum viable product kind of style applications, things toy things that you could do to learn a programming language or learn a new tool or learn a new way to design things. And some grew into bigger events while others generally in remote areas became just an opportunity to meet with like minded folks, discuss the latest and greatest things in the greater world. So the people with the money came in, and this is part of the problem. This is a more recent development, but I've noticed since, like, 2014, 2015, the venture capital folks figured out what we were doing realized the importance of getting involved in the community. And getting involved is paramount.

We all know that. Right? Unfortunately, the VC saw it as a platform somewhere between marketing and sales. Just my opinion. We don't belong there.

DevRel is starting to leave the confines of engineering or community teams, for better or worse, and suddenly, we're in the limelight but not always in the best way. I use this picture as a perfect example. So this is my friend, Tony. He is a developer at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New He actually writes software that helps to fight cancer. He writes code every day.

But when they wanted a face to show diversity, to show scientific endeavors, they put a lab coat on him and made a commercial, stuck him on on the ad. He's not a doctor. He's just a guy who writes code. But when you wanna put a face on something, sometimes you don't think about the consequences of those actions. So this is a little part of the issue, checklisting.

So as a startup landscape kinda ebbs and flows, the idea of needing to build a DevRel team or get a dev advocate or community manager becomes just that. It's a checklist item. At first, some of us, and perhaps especially those in DevRel consulting, this seemed beneficial. If more people were hiring DevRel positions, this would benefit so many communities. Right?

More coverage, more ways to educate and inform. That's what we want. Right? Unfortunately, there was a large gap between understanding what DevRel is and what the perception of DevRel is. At first, many of these investment firms and c level offices who wanted DevRel believed it was a presales or marketing technique, a way to get people to push products on stage at events, and that is just wrong.

It began to feel like as an advocate, you're basically a commercial. Sell. Sell. Sell. That's the only value that we brought to the product.

And as we became sought after in this field, some folks began to realize that they could leverage the less than informed organizations to make a name for themselves. No need for a technical background. No need for community interaction. Fly in, fly out, hit the event, and leave. Just a desire to make a name for themselves or be the face of a company.

Now there's something to be said about wanting to be wanted. There's nothing wrong with that. But doing that is about the individual, not the company, not the community, and definitely not the technology. When we as practitioners start to realize we're doing this, red flags should start going up in a lard and bell should sound. And it's an easy track to fall into, sharing crowds, podcasts calling for you.

Everybody wants to have an interview. People say you're a thought leader. You're having a million followers in social media. These are the things that become important. All these things work to support the mental image of someone being some sort of superstar.

Sadly, this is what some organizations want. And I should know, I was taken in by this at a large enterprise company that convinced me people want PJ. Just go be PJ. This turned into probably the worst part of my career in dealing with communities. It did harm to me as a developer.

It did harm to me as a DevRel practitioner, and there was no value in what I was bringing to the community. And, frankly, the company had no interest in what I learned from the community. So where is the value in developer relations? Where's the value in community interaction? It was a huge mistake.

So it might sound perfect, but what happens when we take on these masks and stop focusing on what is we should be doing, namely helping our organizations find a place in the community and helping the communities we work within to find their voice in the organizations we work for. Part of what happens is you put off the company, and they start to feel like they need to press fame over community. Or some of the practitioners start to feel that fame is more important than the community. Maybe difficult to hear, and it may even end the relationship you have with an organization, but it's important that companies learn to value their DevRel team members. This might be a bit like going solo but still trying to be in a band, so to speak.

If you understand the kinda theme behind my slides, you know what I'm doing there. So you'll need a guidebook to share with those people. And most people will be opposite oppositional to understanding that that value is the community, not the DevRel practitioner. It's not about us. So without some sort of mitigation, DevRel begins to gain a negative reputation for the things we do.

It starts out as small, a few hot takes on Twitter about the nature of community work. This is an example here of how people see how we grandstand about their work, how we self aggrandize what we do, and that it's not really about the community. It's not so much that working with people is new to tech and or that's such a bad thing, but it's more of an issue that talking about how great you are for doing it and using it as a platform to promote yourself is wrong. It's wrong. I can't say this enough.

Promoting yourself as a community advocate is wrong. It doesn't foster community. It doesn't add value to the company or organization that someone represents. The backlash covers up any good work that any people out there might be doing. One person self promoting and working as an individual could destroy the work of so many other people in the DevRel community.

It sends a us so so many steps back to, you know, the whole programmer day. Even if you're not a bro, even if you're not even a dude, even if you're not even representing as a dude, it sends us so far back. These perceptions might seem callous or hard hearted, but at the same time, what they're actually doing is showing that we're trying to be influencers, and we're not following the community in what we wanna do. Our goals are often the same as any other position. We want to learn, and we wanna grow.

We do this by practicing humility, putting the needs of others before ourselves, building on the foundations of the relationships we create with both community members and the communities we work for. These are the right reasons to get into this line of work. Once you're aware and I know this picture is kind of antithetical to what I'm saying, but I thought it was funny, so I stuck it in. Once you're aware or are willing to admit there's a problem, it's important to work out the causes. For many people, this could be having an internal dialogue, establishing what led to going too far with the selfish part of creating a cult of personality, figuring out if there's a way to walk back and start doing the work that the community needs us to do.

If there are problems outside yourself, it may require bringing this harmful behavior to a DevRel practitioner's attention, and that's difficult. If you aren't sure if this is something you are guilty of or at risk of doing, the best thing is to ensure you check with others. This is easy when you work on a DevRel team or have a manager usually, but we'll get to that part. And it can be difficult though when you're on your own, when you're a single DevRel person working in an organization. Often, work can become an echo chamber.

So what if this making of a personality has nothing to do with you? What if it's not about the individual because you didn't make it that way? What if the problem is the boss? What if the problem is that the organization is working to push you forward as a personality or a face? What if they even go so far as to control the messaging to a point where you don't build your talks?

You don't decide what you're gonna speak on on the podcast. You don't pick your Twitch streams. You don't pick your Instagrams. You don't pick your tweets. There's companies that do that.

So what do you do? The risks here go far beyond repping the organization the way that they want it represented. You could damage your standing in the communities that you're a part of. Sadly, there are events and forums and even publishing sites that ban individuals and organizations that they feel are pandering or just selling. In other words, they aren't adding value to the communities they're trying to interact with.

So, luckily, I think we all know Mary wrote this great book. This is to me one of the biggest tools when I have a manager that doesn't understand what I'm doing or one of my clients doesn't understand what the point of developer relations is, I send them Mary's book. We all love Mary's book. I don't think I need to go on too long about Mary's book. We all know about Mary's book.

So in conclusion, cult of personality has no value. Creating yourself as an influencer in the world of community relations, developer relations has no value. We need to teach people what we do. What's our purpose? What's our point?

Because just like Jeremy said in the talk before mine, if they don't see the value in community work, that job will go away. We need to practice DevRel with humility. We need to practice DevRel with community in mind, and we need to practice DevRel with value. So go out there. Use your voice.

Bang the drum for the people who need it, for the people who don't have a voice. Find people who aren't part of the community and bring them in. Be a participant. I always like to say, every team that I work on, every team I've worked on since I started doing this over ten years ago, I always tell them, you need to go out in the community. The community is not going to come to you.

You need to be a purpose participant. There's never a need to be a star when you can join your community and your organization together as a constellation. With that, thank you very much if you wanna get ahold of me. All of the information is right there. Feel free to tweet at I'm at Asplenic, and thank you so much for having me.