“Live up to the time, the creation of non-stop, this article is participating in 2021 year-end summary essay competition”

Developers run it, a handful of people at the best of times

Jobs is said to have greatly admired a book called the Innovator’s Dilemma. The book explains why big, mature companies ignore emerging markets, missing opportunities and even going bust. This brings us to the most influential business theory in the early 21st century — the theory of disruptive innovation.

When we use this theoretical template to examine the development of IT technology, IT is not difficult to find that the trajectory does match surprisingly:

  • Closed source office software was updated every decade until open source software (OSS), and the rest is history.
  • Nokia was the absolute king of the mobile market until Android/iOS and the rest is history;
  • “IOE” used to be the only option for enterprise services, until cloud computing came along and the rest is history.

In fact, from the perspective of the development of the industry itself, the time nodes of many revolutionary changes are often directly related to the upgrading of technology. If you look at the hottest technologies of the past decade, you’ll see some interesting things: the first years of mobile development in 2014 and 2015; The first year of AI in 2018; 2019 is the first year of blockchain; Low code year 2020; 2021, the first year of the Metasverse (to be continued)…

Some of the above so-called first year, really successful, for example, behind the first year of mobile development represents the Historical process of China’s Internet from PC to mobile Internet. And many more technology vents are short-lived, either quiet or dormant, waiting for the next cycle.

The value of technology is favored by capital, the speed of technological update exceeds the innovation cycle of the Internet, and the value of technical people is unprecedented, which may be the reason why we call today the best era of technology. In this era of the best technology, the spotlight is focused on the technology of writing code, creating value products, but often ignore a small group of people who have just emerged in China in recent years — developers.

The contempt chain of technology is often from AI, back end, front end and then to operation and maintenance and testing, while the contempt chain of Internet is often from technology to products and then to operation. Developers run, and developers run…

What is the reason for the developer community to come out?

June 15, 2015 was my “first year” in the developer community. In a flash, it has been nearly 7 years. Such a long period of time has settled down. Even if I touch fish every day, I can find some phenomena, put forward some questions and express some feelings.

In the previous era of consumer Internet, there was a classic judgment made by major e-commerce companies under massive big data:

Unfortunately, the Chinese developer community is predominantly male. From this logical point of view, it seems that capital should not pay enough attention and investment to developers as a group. However, who let us encounter a so-called “industrial Internet” era turning period?

Industrial Internet, comprehensive cloud computing and digital transformation of traditional enterprises all say the same thing: It is no longer enough to rely on consumption and export alone for economic development. Instead, we need to boost domestic demand and promote structural reform. By what? Core technology, my friends. Who mastered the core technology? Developers!

As a result, the developer community has entered a golden week:

  • From the perspective of third-party developer communities, CSDN, InfoQ, 51CTO, Sifou and Rare-Earth Nuggets, both old and new developer communities, are developing rapidly, and the new communities are even catching up.
  • From the perspective of enterprise self-built developer community, whether it is the old accumulated community of cloud computing community, Cloud Plus community, Huawei developer community, or the Internet nouveau riche, the concept of community has become more popular.
  • From the perspective of open source and foundations, Linux Foundation and CNCF are expanding rapidly in China, and local Gitee, Orchid Protocol and Open Atom Open Source Foundation are also growing up.

As mentioned in the previous article, the expansion of community culture has been accompanied by the spread of open source culture. This year, I was lucky enough to have some exchanges with friends who do open source investment, and found that capital support for open source entrepreneurship is much stronger than before. Snowflake and Databricks are examples of international open source startups and ipos. PingCAP, the domestic open source unicorn, exemplified the wealth myth that can be created simply by going public. On the other hand, in the current era of “we media for everyone”, it amplifies the communication strength of industrial events. In the past, the market media people dream of “out of the circle”, in today’s look is not what difficult. But if we take a closer look, we will find that the developer community “out of the loop” is often not a good thing, such as log4j bug.

Therefore, we can summarize such a current situation, namely:

Technical personnel represented by developers have more and more decision-making power in the enterprise/team for the selection of technical products, which leads to the focus of investment on the value of developers by head cloud computing manufacturers. Under the guidance of the national policy of advocating digital transformation, capital, enterprises and third-party institutions have realized the importance of developer community and started to increase investment. In the process of the gradual rise of local open source and the gradual sinking of community culture, the recognition of the developers themselves to the community is also continuously cultivated. This, coupled with the diversity of media, has accelerated the popularity of the concept of developer communities.

That’s when the developer community really comes out of the loop and the best of the technology is confirmed. Don’t believe it? Not long ago, I just gave the block chain technology exam to my daughter-in-law in the street office. Can you believe it?

Developer operation, realistic bone feeling

If the full explosion of the developer community can be called ideal beauty, then the development of the key job direction can be called the reality of bone feeling.

In my past work experience, I have come into contact with many JD with similar job descriptions but different name definitions. Some are run by developers, some are run by technology brands, some are run by open source communities, some are run by developer communities… One hundred and one.

These works have a common name in foreign countries — Developer Relations, abbreviated as DevRel. At present, this term has not been widely adopted in China. Most of the time, we use developer operation to refer to it. What is developer operations? The job sequence belongs to operations, and the people or products that operate are called developers. From the perspective of the purpose of setting up the position of developer operation, the enterprise ultimately hopes that this position can make the final audience become users of a certain technology/product. After all, “transformation” is a problem that every operation needs to consider.

Maybe we can make a general definition of this:

Developer operations is a position for developers to become the end users of a certain technology/product through operations and other means.

But it’s too much of a forward slash to actually ask these dev-run friends what their day job is:

  • New media you have to do, the public number, short video, live, these matrix can not be opened each?
  • Copywriting you have to do, product updates, advertising slogan, community slogan should not be written clearly?
  • Do you have to do the content, not the user story, technical ability, customer case?
  • BD you have to do, media, friendly communities, government relations should not be expanded one by one?
  • Do you have to design the poster, the official website page, the product periphery should not be arranged?
  • Before and after sales, and even sales, you have to do it. What are the developers concerned about and what is the product feedback?
  • …

Why not recruit more HC? You know what I mean? Cost reduction and efficiency increase, okay?

You a positioning belongs to the support department, to put it nicely may set up a “mid-stage” department title, in fact is not a handyman – you do not make money you still so much poor pay attention to? Go away.

This is congenital grip: developers operations do not recognise the value of the community business owner, collaborative business department for positioning of the community is a source for a lot of time, the whole department haven’t a few cents a year budget, can only rely on their former accumulation in front of each technology media brush face support, secretly also fell a nickname “white piao blame”, difficult!

A couple of days ago, I came across an assignment for the interview in my moments — a film review of the American TV series Mr. Robot. At that time feeling is, who can think of me a party history graduate, how to do so many years of developer community? Who can think of a translation study, finally also become a developer community…

Then came the truth — the original developer operation of the entry barrier is really low. Back to DevRel, the people who do similar jobs abroad are often engineers themselves. What are the benefits of having such a person as a developer community? First of all, they are the target users, understand the needs of users; Secondly, I understand the technology and know what the selling point of the product is. These two things basically make it hard for a lot of half-baked developers to run their entire career.

In China, the possibility of this kind of engineer to do developer operation is not too high, the core is a reason — money. As we have mentioned before, operation is the bottom of the chain of three positions in the Internet. People with low status generally do not get high salary and year-end bonus, and their working hours are not lower than those of technology/product. I transferred to developer operations, for what? The lofty ideal of generating electricity from love or the confrontation with community trolls?

Low entry threshold, limited future development, but with the expansion of the developer community has brought a large number of new jobs, can the developer operation not vacancy? That’s why you can see all kinds of funny technical advertorials on moments:

  • Goodbye microservices, DDD is here to stay!
  • Linux is gone, it’s the era of homegrown operating systems!
  • How did Go kill Java and C to take the top spot in byte?

Shame and shame!

Community, the future of operations

One of the most interesting things I’ve seen recently is that developers themselves have realized the importance of personal branding and have started their own developer operations.

On the one hand, it represents someone who is keen to grasp the current opportunity, on the other hand, it is another manifestation of the absence of developer operations. But the way they operate is a bit wild:

For example, a front end that claims to have graduated from the school to byte, has been in the education line for half a year, and now has a team after being “adjusted”. All kinds of technical leaders and interviewers who call themselves Ali/Tencent/Byte and other big companies, add my wechat to give you dachang experience & learning materials, you will see all the things on GitHub.

So I chuckled when I saw the 45-year-old hot Search who had mastered all the tech stacks but couldn’t find a job, and by today’s understanding of the word “proficient” I would be considered a “world class” developer operation.

For the developer community, which is the root of the ecosystem, there are all sorts of issues. When I was at InfoQ, I found that people were worried about how to sink, how to hit junior developers, student groups, how to provide content like interviews for them to consume. After I came to Rare Earth Mining, I found that people are worried about how to do brand exploration, how to do comprehensive categories, how to hit senior developers, how to attract in-depth content creators.

I’ve seen a war of words these days over what kind of technical content should be good for the community. Some people feel that the most read questions on the site are interview questions and salary headlines, which are too basic and irrelevant to technology. Some people think that there is no superior or inferior technology in itself, while others see it as valuable.

I’ve seen this kind of abuse a lot in my career, and I’ve even received it directly from technical experts. From my point of view, this is an unsolvable problem. Since I made my own content, I have always believed that words that everyone agrees with are not expressive.

From maslow’s pyramid of demand theory to analyze the developer group, the largest scale, the highest flow of the largest voice is certainly the junior developers, which is the root cause of all kinds of interviews, salary keyword title is the biggest concern. But a junior developer can’t be junior forever, everyone grows, and after a certain level of growth, the nature of his focus changes. What the community needs to do is to provide a diverse and inclusive culture, to provide differentiated content consumption, and to provide open feedback channels.

Only in this way can similar problems be alleviated. In a way, this is what technology calls technical debt. It’s like Tetris, where you just keep exposing problems, fixing them, and doing it again and again. It’s the same with communities. As people come, they go. As long as the community sticks to its roots, it will meet like-minded people and survive.

As for some problems in the domestic technology circle, I think any practitioner can cite many, but there may be few solutions. Most of the time, many problems themselves are unsolved, we need to jump out of the industry itself stand at a higher level to look at the problem.

People can not solve the problem, time will solve.

Maybe in a few years, we won’t be worried about older programmers getting jobs, but about not having enough older programmers in the industry.

In a few years, we may not be worried about the value of the developer community, but that the value of the developer community has not been fully tapped.

Maybe a few years from now, we won’t be worried about dev-run careers, we’ll be worried that dev-run talent development hasn’t gotten better.

What do you say?

Commercial break: Who am I?

Former InfoQ Chief editor, worked at InfoQ for many years as new media operation, content chief editor and planning director, good at content marketing, have a deep understanding of cloud computing industry, and like to make friends with developers. Currently, I work in ByteTech marketing brand team, responsible for rare earth digging and ByteTech product promotion.