Interview Intro

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Richard Rodger:  [0:00:00] Welcome to the Voxgig Podcast. We talk to people in the developer community about developer relations, public speaking and community events. For more details, visit voxgig.com/podcast. All right, let's get started. 

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If you feel you need to do more to build, sustain and nurture your community, this interview is for you. I’ve invited Jono Bacon, a former guest, back on the podcast to talk about community building.  Jono got his stripes as Ubuntu community manager for Canonical, so he knows a thing or two about communities. This episode is a deep dive – maybe just a little irreverent. 

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Okay, let's take it away. [0:00:43] 

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Main Interview

Jono Bacon

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Richard Rodger:  [0:00:44] Jono, welcome back. Welcome back to the Voxgig Podcast. Wow, a lot has happened. A lot has happened. Has there been trouble in paradise? Have you started a new company? Are you doing new things? [0:01:01]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:01:03] A lot has changed since we last talked. I was doing – the short answer is yes, I launched something called The Community Leadership Core, which is an accelerator, and it’s designed for companies who have invested in building communities or dev rel, to deliver consistent growth and engagement every quarter. And it’s a mixture of hands-on coaching, training and accountability. It’s all tailored to someone’s company. And that was where I got to, and the journey to this point was arduous, painful and incredibly annoying. Because I was- [0:01:39] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:01:39] Sounds like developer relations. [0:01:41] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:01:44] Pretty much. Because I had a consulting business that I’d been – I started consulting in 2008 on the side, when I wrote The Art of Community and put that out there. And companies would reach out and say, “Could you help us with implementing some of this stuff? And then I went fulltime with consulting back in 2015, I think it was. 

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And everything was going great. I was fully booked and I had my clients, and I was making plenty of money and all that kind of stuff. But I was getting a little bit = a bit disillusioned and a bit bored with it. And I wanted to mix things up and have a broader impact. And was – I tried – played around with pre-recorded training and group coaching and all these other pieces, and then ended up landing where I am today. But that’s the fun of it, is you have a go; see what works, see what doesn’t work, and drink a bunch of coffee in the process. [0:02:33]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:02:34] Absolutely. It’s a survival story, and I would have my own one due to COVID. We’ll get to that. But what do you actually do? I’m – am I a SaaS company with an API and an SDK that suddenly wants to build a community? Do I talk to you? [0:02:54]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:02:56] Yeah. A lot of my members are companies with a tech product or service. It’s not exclusively dev rel, but it’s a big chunk of my current membership is dev rel companies. And it’s where you’ve hired a dev rel person or a community manager or an evangelist, and you need to make sure that you can show results to justify why you’ve invested in those folks. And to build your business, but also to build an amazing experience for your community members, for your developer community, or other community. 

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What I provide as part of the Community Leadership Core is everything that wraps around achieving that. From the leadership perspective, it’s putting in accountability and workflow to make sure that at the end of every quarter, you can clearly say what you accomplished, what you delivered and how that ties to the goals of the business. 

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But from the perspective of the people on the ground with their sleeves rolled up, with their veins full of energy drinks and cranking, it’s providing an environment where you can grow your skills. You can always get help and solutions to your questions, and be part of a group of other people who are on a similar journey, a similar pathway. A big chunk of it is people not just learning from me but learning from their peers, and feeling that sense of, I’m not confronting those issues alone. So, that’s how it works. [0:04:22]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:04:23] There are a million and one challenges building a community, so do you have a framework that you take people through? Or is it more ad hoc? Just to give you a concrete scenario, let’s say I’ve got a little meetup; I’m getting 10 people a month turning up to it. I’m buying a little bit of pizza and beer. And I keep on posting things on Twitter, but nothing is happening; it’s always about 10 people. [0:04:50]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:04:54] I have a multitude of frameworks to solve different pieces of the problem, and I broadly break it down into what are the strategic and tactical things that you do to get more people to your meetup, to get more people into your Discord or whatever. And then how do you – what is the accountability framework? How do you make sure that at the beginning of a quarter you can identify a clear set of goals, and at the end of a quarter, you can show what you did and how you delivered it. And make sure that you’re always moving forward. 

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I have a broader philosophical framework that weaves these together, which is, a lot of people, frankly, when they build communities, they start too far along in the process. What they do is, they say, “Here’s our Discord. Here’s our forum or whatever. Go and check it out.” And those people, when they go into a platform like a forum or Discord channel, they get system shock. They see all these people they don’t know having conversations they don’t care about. It's usually a bunch of Q&A, and there’s no reason for them to come back. 

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So, I – the way – my philosophical framework, you could say, is we get really clear on our audience. We define their pain paints. We onboard them to really easy to consume value; we nurture them, without necessarily even bringing them into the community. And then we’re bringing them into the community. 

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Because at that point, there’s already been kind of 5-8 touchpoints, where they’ve got a lot of value at very low friction, so when they come into the community, they don’t have that system shock. They don’t have that – oh my God, but who are all these people? Should I care about this? They already trust that it’s worth going in there. And then all those individual pieces, like how do we define what our audience cares about and what our pain points are? How do we onboard them? How do we nurture them? 

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I have workflow for each of those individual pieces and then I bake it all together into a quarterly management workflow, which is where we’re really clear on goals, concerns, build out an action plan and deliver results. Everything’s very structured, but it’s got enough wiggle room to make sure that people can apply it to their own world. [0:06:58]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:07:00] What you’ve described sounds like the virtual equivalent of, I turn up at a meetup and I don’t know anybody, standing in the corner.  Talk was okay, but I’m not coming back. [0:07:12] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:07:15] Yeah. Exactly. That – it’s the kind of thing where – that is exactly the experience we want to avoid. And the problem with a lot of people who approach communities is, because they have spent so much time building out their community platform, or they put on an amazing meetup and they feel like they’re providing all the value; that they’re providing this great experience, that sometimes it’s easy to forget what it’s like to get in there. 

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A classic example is people who run webinars, is they put together a webinar; they pick a subject, they build all the training slides out the – all this stuff. And they’re like, “This is going to be complete – people would love to come and join this. They’re going to get so much out of it.” My view is the opposite, which is, you’re asking for an hour of somebody’s time. [0:08:04]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:08:04] Right, yeah, that’s precious. [0:08:06]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:08:06] It better be good. And it’s – for us, an hour might not be a big deal, but that’s a lot to ask, so you gotta make it worthwhile. For somebody to show up to your meetup and they don’t know anybody, or they’ve never been for the – this is their first time, there, that’s a lot to ask. 

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So, we gotta gently warm them up and get them in there. And I – the good news is, there’s so many creative ways in which we can do this. And my goal with the Community Leadership Core has been to make it really easy to consume – firm these things up so it’s really easy f to get people started. [0:08:40] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:08:41] Can you give us some examples, just to get tactical for a minute? How do you get somebody ready to participate at the actual community level? [0:08:49] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:08:52] For example, the first piece of – that kind of onboarding, nurturing piece – I’ll give you an example of what I do with my own community. Often, I’ll run an online event. Could be – I don’t like to call it a webinar because I don’t run webinars. It’s some training and then there’s breakout groups and people have share sessions, all this kind of stuff.

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But what I do is identify a problem that my audience has got, and then I bring them in and I give them a ton of value. I run this thing called the Community Ignition Workshop last year and it was four sessions; it was completely free. Two sessions a week, live sessions, where I would teach, and then there’d be really practical things for people to execute and work on. 

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And the pain point, the problem that I was solving was, how do you get started building a brand-new community? And then what happened is, people would sign up for that, and even if they didn’t come, they signed up to my email list. And anyone who signed up to my email has probably seen this, that my emails are unbranded, very few sales emails. And every email has got – it solves a problem; it solves an issue. 

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So, the idea is that they come to this free workshop and then they continue to get pain points solved. And I’ve optimized all those emails based on where I’m seeing people having issues and challenges. And then what happens is, even if I never bring them into a community platform, they’re getting a tone of value if they’re consuming that content. 

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But then if I do bring them into a community – usually when I start talking to people about the Community Leadership Core, other things that I run, and they’ve received four or five of those emails, they’re very receptive. So, I’m a big believer in firming something like that up for most communities.  If we look at a meetup for example, my recommendation would be, have a really simple mechanism to get people to the meetup for the first time. 

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You have – we say if you’ve never been to one of our meetups before, if you show up at this specific time, we’ll bring you in, either individually or as a group, and we’ll welcome you; we’ll introduce you to people. We’ll ease that process for you. And then when the meetup is done, you then start sending out additional content and material that continues to help people learn and grow. 

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So then, they’re like, “Holy sh***, this was amazing. This was the best possible experience. I went to this meetup and I got so much more. It was easy to consume. I had a great experience. People were really friendly. I want to go to the next one.” That’s how I’d like to approach it. [0:11:26] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:11:26] Yeah. Certainly, the very idea of having a pathway into the community, it’s shocking that it’s almost revelatory. And I think about my own experiences of attending meetups. And maybe the good ones, maybe there was somebody who was more socially aware that made that happen naturally. I do remember attending a meetup in – it was one of the very first times I was in San Francisco, your home town. 

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And I’d been going to a couple of meetups in Dublin, Ireland which had been, as we say here, “Great crack altogether,” as in, lots of fun. Lots of good, clean fun, no illegal substances. And I was expecting the same sort of friendliness, chat, just general camaraderie. And I went to this meetup – I don’t know if it was representative. I was in San Francisco for a few meetings and I had a free evening and went to a meetup. And it was like a business meeting; nobody was talking. The speaker did their thing; it was some tech talk. And everybody just left. [0:12:47]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:12:49] Yeah, it sucks. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:12:50] There was no fun. Where was the fun? I don’t know; that’s probably not representative. But the contrast was incredible. [0:12:58]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:12:59] It’s not not representative. [0:13:00] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:13:03] I wasn’t really there for the talk; I was there for the fun.  Or community. [0:13:09] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:13:09] You remind me of the very first community I never – in person community I ever started was a Linux user group, when I went to university in Wolverhampton in the UK. And I started this Linux user group, and the first meeting we had, there was me and two other people. 

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And I deliberately held our meetings in a pub, and instead of a boring old university computer science department, where you’d have these people droning on over slides and drinking terrible coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. I was like, “That sucks. I want this to be sociable and fun.” 

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So, we’d all get together every two weeks in a pub. We’d have some food; we’d have some drinks. You didn’t have to drink alcohol. And it was a lot of fun, and it was exactly what you were just saying there, Richard. It was about making the human connection, and then the topic and the domain comes next. And sometimes people forget that. [0:14:10] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:14:11] And we should stress; there’s no need for alcohol. In fact, meetups that I run these days, that’s not even a feature. It’s less expected and less necessary these days. [0:14:24] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:14:26] Yeah, I agree. It’s about creating an environment where people loosen up. Alcohol is a shortcut to people loosening up, but it’s – there are many methods. The environment – even things like music. When we used to run – we used to run a conference in the UK called LugRadio Live. We were very deliberate about making sure that when people entered into the venue AC/DC was playing. 

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Because no-one on this planet dislikes AC/DC; they’re the universal band. You might not be into them, but you don’t dislike them. And it’s that good time, party rock and roll when people walk into the venue, and it creates a feel. It’s different to that terrible San Francisco meetup where you walk in and everybody’s looking very straight-faced and stern and using the word enterprise and leverage a lot. It’s like nah, that sucks. [0:15:23] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:15:24] Yeah. I thought the cool people were in San Francisco. I don’t know what happened.  It was a bit of a system shock. So- [0:15:33]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:15:33] They all moved to Dublin. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:15:34] Exactly. I think there is a really important here and it’s just to be intentional about the welcoming process. Whatever tactics you use, that’s the big message that I’m – that’s what I’m hearing here anyway. [0:15:51] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:15:54] For sure. Although I would caveat it a little bit with – be intentional, but we have two mottoes in the Community Leadership Core. One is progress over perfection and the other one is iterate to awesome. The problem with intentionality is, sometimes people can get in their own heads about it. I heard Richard and Jono talking about different mechanisms of making meetups more interesting. I’m going to sit there and I’m going to brainstorm and come up with these big ideas. 

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And the most important thing is to just do something. There’s a bunch of science that has identified that the most productive and successful people commit to action right away. They don’t think, I’ll – what I learned in the Voxgig Podcast, I’m going to note that down and we’ll do that a month from now. 

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It’s like, no, just get on with it now. Do something; do some semblance of what you’re thinking. And then you just iterate over and over and over until it’s right. So, intentionality is good, but just make sure you get out there and have a go, because people are not sitting there with score cards to see whether it was 10 out of 10. And the benefits of having a go and getting started far outweigh the disadvantages. [0:17:10]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:17:11] Let’s turn to another little scenario. This might be based off, certainly some recent experience from developer advocates that I’ve spoken to, that have spoken public about this issue. You get hired as a developer advocate, but you’re given the entire dev rel activity of the company; you have to do everything. Write sample code; write articles, organize meetups; do webinars; go speak at conferences. Coordinate between departments; do some customer support. 

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A lot of companies have teams that can do that, but a lot of startups have inflated expectations about what a dev rel can actually achieve. Do you see that much in your work and what advice would you give to somebody in that situation? Because we are here; we want to do the job. We love the job; we love the community stuff. But how do you deal with taking on a dev rel role where you’re expected to shake magic pixie dust over the community and generate leads? [0:18:27]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:18:30] It’s such an interesting topic and there’s so many layers to it. A couple of thoughts on this. One is, there’s ambiguity around the title dev rel and what that means; there are many different incarnations of it. And secondly, too many dev rel people don’t manage this process effectively.

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[Break in audio, 0:18:56-0:19:23]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:19.23] Should I – where should I go from our- [0:19:25]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:19:25] Yeah, the pressure on dev rels. And I guess – we’re just reflecting on that as an aspect of the job, so I’ll give you the floor again. [0:19:36] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:19:40] There are a couple of components to this. One is defining what dev rel is; there’s many incarnations of it. And then the second is, there are frankly too many dev rel folks who don’t sufficiently manage this process effectively. If we start with the first one, I don’t think there’s a single definition of dev rel. 

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There are people who are – when – they’re a dev rel person, they’re primarily an evangelist. Their incentive model; their energy comes from speaking at events, creating content, doing live streaming, stuff like that. And then you’ve got other dev rel people who are more on the community management side; they live and breathe being on Discord. And then you’ve got other people who love creating code samples. And it’s a mixture of all of these pieces. 

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And I don’t think we can expect founders and executives to understand or even differentiate between those different nuances. It’s important that if you go for a role at a company as a dev rel person, that you clarify upfront where your expertise is, what you like working on, to make sure it’s a good fit for the job, to avoid those kinds of situations. 

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I’d like to think that those roles will become clearer as time goes on, but I’ve been in this business now for over 20 years; I don’t think it’s going to happen. There’s always going to be a certain amount of ambiguity there. But it leads to the second point, which is, the vast majority of dev rel people who I’ve ever met are wonderful, talented, incredible people with that really magical mix of passion for people and passion for technology. 

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But a lot of people don’t manage dev rel and think of it as a function in a business. Sometimes they think of it as, this is obviously the right thing to do, to help developers be successful and to give them a tone of value, and other people should get that. And it becomes sometimes somewhat evangelical in how people try to explain that. And people who don’t intrinsically “get” that, they’re seen as muppets, or they don’t understand. 

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And I don’t think you can take that view. At the end of the day if you’re – anyone who’s listening to this who is a founder or has started a business, you know that you have to make every function in your business ultimately drive towards success for the business. Whether that’s revenue, whether that’s your products get better, whether that’s reduce the support costs or whatever, there’s got to be a clear out come for dev rel. 

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And it’s absolutely essential to be proactive in mapping that out. This is one of the things we do in the Community Leadership Core, is we get really clear on what those metrics are every quarter. Because otherwise, if you don’t, what gets some people in hot water is, they join a company and the founder’s like, “I just want you to go and do what you do. Dev rel is super important. Go and do that.” 

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But that magical unicorn year has an end date, and if you don’t have something to show concretely around the end of that time, it won’t necessarily be the founder. But some  other executive is going to say, “Why are we investing in this function and not investing in another function?” Especially as more seasoned leadership comes into the company and starts to build it out, especially when you get into growth stage companies. 

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I get really sad when I see really good dev rel, who are so naturally talented at what they do, but they don’t manage the connection point to the impact on the business. And then they leave and they – it’s emotionally disruptive and awful and all the rest of it. And it’s important that we get clear on that. [0:23:33] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:23:35] And it feels like – there have been quite a few dev rel layoffs this year, 2023. And now that you explain it in those terms, that feels like a reasonable cause maybe, or an aspect of what’s been going on this year. As companies rationalize, they go, “Well, what is this person actually doing for us?” And there isn’t a clear line to value. 

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What I’ve also seen happen is, if there’s a mismatch between the things you’re good at and the things that are expected. You might have produced a ton of code samples, but you didn’t get a meetup off the ground. Oh no, where’s my meetup? You’re fired. Or you were hired because you’re supposed to be building big community numbers. I want 1,000 people in my Discord. You wrote a ton of code samples. Does it matter what the company is? There’s a difference between the very developer-focused companies and the enterprise companies. Are these input factors that need to be considered? [0:24:42] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:24:45] I’d say there are a couple of variables in there. Oen is what the type of product is. If you’ve got a product that people can consume online that has a reasonable level of complexity to it, it’s rich pickings for a dev rel or community function. If you’re – to pull a random example, GitLab. There’s a million ways in which you can use GitLab, and you can integrate that into your world. 

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But if you use another example, like there’s a site called – I think it’s called removebackground.com or something like that. And all it does is, you upload a picture and it removes the background. Not a lot of – you don’t need a community around that. So, when you’ve got a software product that can be consumed, that’s really helpful. 

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It’s harder to build communities around hardware, for all the obvious reasons, of availability and things like that. Where there is a big differentiator is the stage of the company. If you’re early stage, first 10 people, pre-seed, maybe bootstrapped or angel investment, that’s a very different set of dynamics than if you’re in a growth phase – you’ve maybe received a series A or a series B. Or if you are a big enterprise company. 

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And where the bigger the company gets the more cross-team dynamics and politics play a role in that. So, if you’re good at that; if you’re good at cross-team politics, then work for a bigger company. But if you hate that, if that sucks for you, don’t go work for a big company, because you can be miserable. [0:26:21] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:26:22] I have a slightly different topic. We were talking before we started recording, and you were like, “Can I swear?” And I was – “Yes.” So, I’m going to swear first. What do you think of enshitification? This is where you have an established community or various online forums that might have been running for a long time, because they might go bad or eventually private equity people come in and try to squeeze every dollar out of them. 

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Is it something you’ve seen? We’re not going to talk about big social platform; that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking more about communities that might have existed for a very long time around certain technologies or certain companies that go bad. Have you seen that? Have you personally seen that happen? And what can you do to stop it happening? [0:27:15] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:27:20] It does happen, and it’s an evolution of enshitification, as opposed to usually an overnight thing. [0:27:28] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:27:28] Such a great word. I love it; I have to say it. [0:27:30]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:27:31] Yeah, I love it. It’s a gradual change, and usually, nine times out of 10, what happens that I’ve seen is that a community or dev rel function that was generating good results, that was up and running, gets moved into another team. And then the team lead of that team has a different set of priorities. 

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And a lot of that is massively dependent on that team lead, and the expectations set by the leadership of the company. That’s the main time that tends to happen. And we need to be careful with this, because one thing that concerns me in dev rel is, I’ve met a lot of people over the years who say, “I will never, ever work in a marketing team, or I will never, ever work with sales.” And nine times of 10, that’s outright ignorance. Because you can’t make a broad-brush statement like that for all marketing teams or all sales teams. There are great marketing and sales leaders out there who get dv rel and understand it. 

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So, it depends on the team that you’re talking to. If you are working for – if you’re going to be moved into a marketing team – and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that that marketing leader does not value dev rel; considers other things to be a more important focal point for budget and resourcing – you might as well start looking for another job. Because it isn’t going to work out well, unless that marketing leader has got marching orders from the founders or from the CEO that this has to be a core function of the business. And even then, that won’t get you that far. You need someone who really understands the value of this. [0:29:23] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:29:26] I see, yeah. And it’s interesting that you mention the senior leadership, the CEO and people like that. Because I see a newer generation of companies now where the founders, and often a CEO, is very much leading the developer relations function. To literally name someone, Matteo Collina, Platformatic; he’s on Twitch. He’s on – he’s writing blog posts; he’s doing open source. He’s – as well as being one of the founders, he’s one of the core developer advocates. [0:30:05] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:30:09] It’s fantastic when founders do that, especially technical founders. Because so much of the early culture of the company is forged there, and the early culture of the dev rel community is forged there as well. The tricky thing is that that will ultimately come to an end at some point when that person has to go and – has to lead building out the broader company. You can do that when you’re less than 10 people, but when you’ve got 300 people working for you, your days are going to be spent on other things, unfortunately. There’s usually a kind of- [0:30:40] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:30:40] Spreadsheets, yeah. 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:30:42] Yes, Spreadsheets and HR and- [0:30:44] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:30:44] Doc 2 compliance. All that fun stuff. I wonder is it possible though? Could you preserve your position and say, perhaps, that effectively you become a figurehead. You’d have to give up executive control, but- [0:31:04] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:31:07] There’s two angles to this in my mind. One is, what do you as a human being enjoy and get your energy from? As human beings, it’s important that we figure out what we get energy from, how we enrich our lives with that, whether it’s dev rel or whether it’s family or music or progressive vegetarian grind core, whatever you’re into. [0:31:31] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:31:33] AC/DC, even. [0:31:34]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:31:35] AC/DC, which many of us get energy from. But then the other element is, the code hard reality of a business is, where can you have the most impact with your skills and expertise and talents. If you’re a technical founder and you found a company and you’re the CEO – let’s say you’ve got a co-founder. And you’ve received a round of funding and you’re focusing on product market fit and building out the community and hiring. 

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Should you be Twitch streaming or should your talents be spent elsewhere? And it’s a really tough one, because it should be both. But other people could do the Twitch streaming, but only you can make those decisions for your company, because of the nature of being a leader. And that’s where I know a lot of founders struggle with going through that journey. And it’s primarily a lot of VCs helping through that journey, where they say, “This is part of building a business.” 

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I learned this with my own company, and my business coach was instrumental in this, where I was – I love doing so many different things. That he’d say to me, “Look, I know you love doing this, but if you want to grow, you gotta hire somebody to do that for you. You can’t do everything.”  He said, “What are the things that you can’t hire people to do? That’s where you should be focusing your efforts on.” But it’s – I like that because it makes sense, but it’s also very unromantic to have that viewpoint, because you should do really well as well. [0:33:15] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:33:17] The same thing applies if you’ve been working as a developer advocate, and you’re then asked to lead a dev rel team, because that’s a management role. I know, and I’ve had quite a few on this podcast. And you do get the feeling sometimes they do miss the conference driven development, as we call it. Where there’s a new feature and you gotta get it out by the conference. You miss that excitement, and instead you’re stuck in a world of one on ones and 360 reviews and that type of thing. [0:33:57] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:33:59] I do think that there’s a real cognitive dissonance in a lot of people around this, which is where you love going to the conference, going to the meetups. You love being on the ground with your developers and your community members; you love the intimacy of that kind of work. But then the business corporate culture, the world that we live in, says, “But you’ve got to become more and more senior. You’ve got to become a manager and then you’ve got to become a VP and an SVP and then a CEO.” And my view is, f*** all of that. Do what you love doing. 

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I remember when I was at Canonical, there were two guys, Scott James Remnant and Colin Watson, who were remarkably talented engineers. And I worked in the engineering management team with a bunch of other people, and they were asked to become engineering managers, even though I was running the engineering room at Canonical. I sat on the engineering management team, which was honestly the best possible place it could have sat. 

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And they came into the job, and what I admire about Scott and Colin was that they did it for about three or four months and they were like, “We don’t like this. We’re going to go back to doing what we were doing.”  And I remember chatting with Scott about this and he said it was a tough decision doing that, because your intuition is telling you that you gotta climb the ladder. And I admire people who say, “I don’t want that. I’m not interested in that.” And they prioritize their happiness. [0:35:36] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:35:38] Yeah, it’s a totally valid option. Because there is concern – and the reason I bring it up is, there is concern in dev rel community about what the career path is. Because it doesn’t seem like a great way to the CEO’s desk. You’d be – you can- [0:35:52]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:35:52] It really isn’t. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:35:53] -lead a team of five people; that’s a big dev rel team,. Where do you go next? Maybe you don’t go anywhere next; maybe you just do dev rel, because it’s fun. [0:36:05] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:36:08] Yeah. I agree. There’s an element of do what you want to do. And there – I agree with you. There are very few dev rel people who report into the CEO directly, and there is no – there is an unlikely pathway to being on the senior executive team at a company when you work in dev rel. 

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But maybe the step up then, if you want to keep climbing the ladder, is that you run customer success or marketing or one of these broader groups, of which then multiple teams, of which dev rel is one of them, reports into you. Maybe that’s the pathway, but I would posit, only do that if you would enjoy that work. [0:36:51] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:36:53] Yeah, because you’ve done that. [0:36:54] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:36:55] Really sucks for you otherwise. [0:36:56] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:36:58] Not speaking from experience at all there. Jono, thank you so much. It’s been a really enlightening bunch of stuff that I can apply to our own communities, but also reassuring in a way. Because a lot of people have been a little stressed about the career recently, and it’s nice to know; maybe it’s okay. Just do your job and have fun, and get to meet all sorts of funky developers, strange conferences and meetups. How bad? [0:37:29] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:37:31] And the one final thing I would say on that note is, one of the challenges of the culture that we live in today, where we have such a rich availability of information. We’ve got podcasts like this and you’ve got YouTube channels and books and all kinds of information. We are not starved for information, and it can be information overload and it can cause decision making paralysis. And it can put too much pressure on us to have to make these kinds of decisions. 

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And I would argue, just take it a month at a time; just see how you feel. If you are happy right now doing what you’re doing, then keep doing what you’re doing. And if you start feeling little pangs of, I wouldn’t mind being my boss, whether it’s in the company or somewhere else, and climbing up, then go ahead and do it. I don’t think we have to have all the answers. 

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The one good news of getting older – I don’t know how old you are, Richard, but I’m – I just turned 44 – is life has a way of making these answers easier to understand. At 44 years old, I couldn’t care less about status; it’s meaningless. And in fact, the people who pursue status, from my experience, they’re often the most unhappy people out there. It’s the people who have dialed in what they love and they stick to what they love and they surround themselves with people with good energy, those are the happiest people. [0:38:58] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:39:00] 47. What I care about these days are avoiding – trying to avoid bifocals for as long as possible. [0:39:09] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:39:09] I was going to say bladder control. [0:39:12] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:39:13] Glasses – well, let’s not go there. Glasses on a string, that’s the problem. You see, we’re chill about it, and we don’t need status anymore; who needs that. [0:39:26]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:39:26] No, we’ll turn into those old guys from the Muppets who complain on the balcony. [0:39:29] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:39:31] That is the destiny of every dad anyway. Thank you so much, this has been fabulous. [0:39:39] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:39:39] Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me back on. [0:39:41]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:39:42] Take care, good luck. Have fun. [0:39:43] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:39:43] Cheers, thanks. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:39:44] ] Have fun, bye-bye. 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:39:46] Bye. 

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Endnote

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Richard Rodger:  [0:39:47] You can find the transcript of this podcast and any links mentioned on our podcast page at Voxgig.com/podcast. Subscribe for weekly editions, where we talk to the people who make the developer community work. For even more, read our newsletter. You can subscribe at voxgig.com/newsletter, or follow our Twitter @voxgig. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. [0.40.10]