My sister works for a FAANG company, in one of those amorphous, important roles that are impossible to explain to anyone who has not been marinating in the industry. She represents a company that has income, reach, and influence that is the envy of most countries. A colleague described it to her as “being an ambassador”. It’s such a great description, because it really wraps up a lot of things that seem unrelated, and it’s very DevRelish.
An ambassador may perform ceremonial functions, like hosting official dinners, or showing the flag. They may perform delicate negotiations, but you’ll almost never hear about it. They are the first point of both friendship and tension between two countries. They manage embassies that may include cultural attaches, research departments, finance people, and dozens of other jobs that make the relationships between countries work. An ambassador hopefully learns languages and cultural expectations and respects them without ever forgetting where they came from. From the outside, it looks like going to a lot of parties, and cutting a lot of ribbons, but that is only the surface level. Underneath, there is a difficult job of reconciling differing needs with very little real power.
A DevRel is a representative of a company, and hopefully one of the early contact points for people who want to partner with or understand the company. They know their own product and company well, but they’re out in the world, learning languages and cultural expectations, making friends and impressions, managing the… not spies, but the reports on the ground, and funneling them back home. What you see is only a part of the work, but if you could see it all, it would be less valuable.
I’ve never worked for a company that big in that kind of role. I work for companies that are like Ruritania – a small fictional country that represents a chunk of Central Europe without being actually any of it. My companies are quite real, but their embassy is small, and tends to group with other embassies in the same area. Just as Belgravia in London has a high concentration of embassies, so may Monitorama have a high concentration of companies with an interest in liaising with people who care about observability. The really cool part of this to me is that because we’re all talking to each other and the host country, we can find and point out places we make each other stronger. I don’t need to make all the tools, I can tell you about another tool that fits that need, and everyone wins. This is like the “Tiny Twenty” nations described in the satire “The Mouse That Roared“. Together, small solutions can solve big problems, possibly more flexibly than one tool that tries to do everything.
I’m doing marketing now, and I’m not such a visible face of a company. It’s a bit like being the permanent staff that stays at the embassy when the ambassador changes with the administration. I’m still here making sure you know what we do and why it helps, but with fewer dinner parties.
If you think of yourself as part of the diplomatic staff instead of the sales staff, does that change how you feel or what you do?