Commentary: 2023 State of DevRel Report — Key Insights
Just a bunch of first impressions
The State of Developer Relations 2023 report is now public. I am happy to see someone is investing their time to curate this knowledge and insights for the internet. Thank you, DevRel Agency.
This is and will be an opinionated worldview. I may learn something from you or contribute to your thinking. While reading this, open the report in another browser tab.
Cheers!
The People
Career Paths
The age group between 25–44 is about 68% of this industry, combined with 100% of DevRels in India having a DevRel experience between 2–5 years. It implies the lack of adept leaders best qualified to devise clear career paths for DevRel professionals as they grow in India.
Since over 50% of those who have 5–15 years of DevRel experience are from the Bay Area and California, If you live in India, working for companies that offer remote work, reporting, and mentorship opportunities with co-workers at these locations can enhance your career.
The fact that 54% feel a career path needs to be defined proves so.
Contracts
It is uncommon to see a 3.2% to 10.2% growth in a single year for the number of Independent/Freelancers. There are a couple of things we can speculate:
- We will see an uprise in professionals wanting to establish credibility in this space to attract opportunities for themselves.
- Companies find outsourcing tasks more efficient.
Degree
The report reveals that about 23% of DevRel professionals did not have a Technical Education. Because Developer Relations has "Developer" in it doesn't mean one needs to be technical enough to get a DevRel opportunity.
On the other hand, about 86% are learning to practice DevRel on the job. It's interesting to note that many roles in the software industry, such as software engineer, product manager, sales, and marketing, usually have a degree, formal education, courses, or boot camps as learning resources. However, a little formality exists around becoming a Developer Relations (DevRel) professional. Both exciting & worrying.
Activities
I like how content development is split into education (55%) and technical (50%) categories. They indeed demand different skill sets. The education category demands traits such as magnetism, while the other demands the individual to be more illustrative.
It is exciting to see Developer Experience as a new entrant in 2023 — implying that more and more teams have started to recognize some holistic point of view towards this.
However, the activities performed at the role level aren't as insightful. It can be applied similarly to other industries as well.
Titles
The survey asked people about their titles before joining the DevRel industry. Even after grouping similar titles, there are about 15 groups ranging from Founder to Student. What other industry can be so welcoming?
Salaries & Compensation
Compensation for Developer Relations practioners continues to rise.
On and before 2020, the total compensation was consistently hovering at $125,000. Since 2021, it rose to become $225,094 in 2023. While this is a global heuristic, it must apply to India, too, yet the US will remain the primary beneficiary. That's an impressive 80.08% increase in 3 years.
Of all the companies that employed DevRel talent headquartered in the US, only 51.4% are from the US, and the rest are spread worldwide. Companies in the US know how to harness DevRel talent compared to India.
The average base salary in India stands at ₹9,16,000 / year over power purchasing parity.
In companies that run the DevRel program in India, there are 340 DevRels employed (globally) for every 60 companies headquartered in India.
It's a comparatively good difference compared to any other region. That means every other company (in India) should have at least 6–7 members on their team. If you don't see that around you, it probably means others are (probably) employed by one among 36% of companies in Silicon Valley.
The Companies
In a year, the smaller companies (<200 employees) running a DevRel program spiked from 31.7% to 53.1%. This is a damn good trend. This means experimentation in running these programs rises, and learnings are due a few years later.
SaaS, Developer Tools, and Cloud Infrastructure are the industries that want DevRel programs the most. If you are a developer advocate, then it is most beneficial for you to add domain expertise in one of these areas.
Developer First companies have doubled since 2020 from 32% to 62%. There isn't enough DevRel talent supply. This means companies' growth must demand other functions to accommodate a viewpoint for developer experience. For example, some marketers or engineers are made to see developers as their end users.
Developer Plus companies have dropped (x2) since 2020 from 67% to 38%. This doesn't mean these companies have failed because they are developer plus, meaning other revenue-generating factors keep the company afloat. This effectively means Developer Plus companies could have done better to run DevRel programs effectively.
The Programs
The developer community size for both small (<200 employees) and medium (<1000) companies is less than 5000 community members. Optimistically, if the conversation rate adds business value to 5% (global best-considered average), you are on a good trend if you have ~250 monthly active developers.
Small companies invest ($10k-$50k) more capital into DevRel programs than Medium companies (<$10k).
Strategies and Challenges
85% of DevRel programs aim to drive awareness and adoption of their products. 76% of them report to marketing (31%), product(26%), and engineering(19%) respectively.
Yet the top challenges are:
- 41% attracting new developers and 39% engaging existing ones.
- 44% struggle to create technical content continuously
- 32% feel there are limitations with the product they advocate for
It is evident that an individual needs a different set of skills to solve each challenge, yet the team should be armed with individuals to solve all three. This kind of team demands a leader who can manage these skill sets coming together. Yet, 70% have less than 10 years of experience in DevRel.
Twitter is no longer an effective online channel for DevRels, dropping from 65% to 39% in the same year. It probably means many DevRel teams did not drive enough value from Twitter in one year. Surprisingly, a decentralized social network is rising, currently at 3.4%. It’s Mastodon.
Orbit & CommonRoom are new tools that suddenly took the 3rd and 4th spots for DevRel teams to manage their community programs. We were early adoptors of Orbit when its launched. We bet on Orbit, because the philosophy behind it gives us trustworthy lens about the people whiles others obsessed about usage oriented metrics.
Tremendously worrying aspect — 44% of teams never audit their developer experience regarding journey maps or friction logs. Only 1% did monthly.
All 81% of teams think their documentation offering is average. This is instead a good sign, always helping DevRel teams think about how to improve their documentation.
The Practice
It’s astonishing to see that 60% of the DevRel teams feel the awareness of the impact created within the organization is the #2 challenge for them. Yet, we don’t see any tactics to solve this problem. This a space for a playbook to emerge, a needed one.
62% believe better-shared practices and measurements with other teams like program management or product is the best-suggested way to drive recognition & credibility for developer relations. This can come as a double-edged sword with grey areas. There must be a better way to think about this.
Commentary
I went through the reports one after another, started to relate to some of them, and thought of more ideas from the data. So, I began documenting these thoughts in this blog post.
I appreciate you sticking along and hearing these opinions — of course, held weakly.
