I don’t mean people who promote (in both tech and marketing sense of the word) the final product of the business, but rather people behind e.g. React, Andular etc.
Off the top of my head, I can only see this: you want to hire good people, so you push your internal projects to opensource, hoping to increase adoption, get bug fixes etc. So you need someone to promote the project and make sure there is a core group on the edge between possibly less sociable (?) developers and wider audience. Is that even close?
I can also come up with a bunch of counter-arguments to this but I’m not really good at high-level thinking that probably lies behind these decisions so would appreciate any reasonable explanation.
This is probably related to the “why open-source at all” one since if the product is internally successful and solid, the only reasoning to open-source it besides pragmatism (hiring) would be altruism and I find it hard to believe it can actually influence decisions in large enterprises.
Again, I’m asking this completely honestly and I don’t mean to diminish anyone’s role or motivations. Attribute any possibly offensive tone of my question to my ignorance please.
In other cases it is about an ecosystem. For Tensorflow, Google is seeking market dominance because they also offer the ecosystem around machine learning - the cloud. For that you higher people to promote your product, give people examples to get started, and sometimes interface and help users.
No one will use your software if they cannot figure out how to use it.
For every 1000 people who know what your company/product is,
100 people will go to your website,
10 people will call/email your company to ask a question.
1 person will end up considering buying your product.
So build a dev advocate team, you will increase the amount of people who know what your product is/ask questions about your product. Furthermore people calling your company after interacting with a dev advocate isnt someone who just saw your logo, or heard what your company could do from another business person, but the people calling will actually know at least something about how your product works/interacts with the customers infrastructure. So the pipeline for interactions with people will likely convert to sales at a better rate than people from marketing/sales.
Dev advocates are able to talk about code (unlike most sales people), So if you able to convince a customer's dev team that your company provides value, you at least have some additional help convincing business people to buy your stuff if their dev team wants it.