The Role of DevRel at Google With Richard Seroter  ## Metadata - Author: [[Screaming in the Cloud]] - Full Title: The Role of DevRel at Google With Richard Seroter - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/6a3a5639-753a-4f78-8db2-3cb71a6abd44 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **AI Moves Beyond Hype** - AI is no longer just a hype trend but a real technology with user interest. - Focus should shift from model size to actual user experience and value added. Transcript: Speaker 2 I mean, it's counter cultural now to not start every conversation with let me tell you about our AI story. And hopefully we're going to get past this cycle. I think the AI stuff's here to stay. This does not feel like a hype trend to me overall. This is legit tech with real user interest. I think that's awesome. I don't think a year from now we're going to be competing over who has the biggest model anymore. Nobody cares. I don't know if we're going to hopefully lead with AI the same way as much as what is it doing for me? What is my experience? Is it better? Could I do this job better? Did you eliminate this complex piece of toil from my day two stuff? That's what we should be talking about. But right now it's new and it's interesting. ([Time 0:03:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b356ac1a-c8a9-4435-a312-c6940e82a4bf)) - **Keep Skills Sharp with AI** - It's vital to use AI to enhance skills, not replace responsibilities. - Always verify AI outputs as you would advice from a "slightly drunk friend." Transcript: Speaker 2 If it will, I think that's my only concern personally with some of this is I don't want this to erase expertise or us to think we can just get lazy. I think that I get nervous like, can I just tell it to do stuff and I don't even check the output or I don't do whatever. So I think that's when you go back to get enterprise use cases. If this is generating code or instructions or documentation or what have you, I need to trust that output in some way or more importantly, I still need to retain the skills necessary To check it. So I'm hoping people like you and me and all are you every all the users out there of this stuff don't just offload responsibility to the machine. Just always treat it like a kind of slightly drunk friend sitting next to you with good advice and always checking out. Speaker 1 It's critical. I think that there's a lot of concern and I'm not saying that people are wrong on this, but that people are now going to let it take over their jobs. It's going to wind up destroying industries. No, I think it's going to continue to automate things that previously required human intervention. But this has been true since the Industrial Revolution where opportunities arise and old jobs that used to be critical are no longer centered in quite the same way. The one aspect that does concern me is not that kids are going to be used as to cheat on essays. Like, okay, great, whatever, that seems to be floated mostly by academics who are concerned about the appropriate structure of academia. For me, the problem is, is there's a reason that we have people go through 12 years of English class in the United States and that is it's not to dissect the work of long debt authors. It's to understand how to write, how to tell a story and how to frame ideas cohesively. And the computer will do that for me. I feel like that potentially might not serve people particularly well. But as a counterpoint, I was told when I was going to school my entire life that you're never going to have a calculator in your pocket all the time that you need one. No, but I can also speak now to the open air asking any math problem I can imagine and get a correct answer spoken back to me. That also wasn't really in the bingo card that I had back then either. So I am hesitant to try and predict the future. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's fair. I think it's still important for a kid to know how to make change or do certain things. I don't want to just offload the calculators or I want to be able to understand as you say, literature or things, not just have it print me out of book report. But that happens with us professionals too, right? Like I don't want to just atrophy all of my programming skills. Because all I'm doing is accepting suggestions from the machine or that it's writing my emails for me. Like that still weirds me out a little bit. I like to write an email or send a tweet or do a summary. To me, I enjoy those things still. That's not toil to me. ([Time 0:09:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7eba616f-b021-44ea-ae8a-2883d69471d3)) - **Modern DevRel Is Product-Focused** - Modern DevRel focuses on measurable product-led growth, not just flashy presentations. - DevRel teams build tutorials, tutorials, code labs, and help developers use platforms effectively. Transcript: Speaker 1 Let's be clear, but it's becoming a bit more pronounced. And as an outsider, I look at Google Cloud's DevRel presence and I don't see as much of it as your staffing levels would indicate to the naive approach. And let's be clear. That means from my perspective, all public facing humorous, probably performative content in different ways where you have zany music videos that, you know, maybe I don't know parody Popular songs to celebrate some exact birthday they didn't know was coming ahem ahem, or creative nonsense on social media. And the lack of seeing a lot of that could in part be explained by the fact that social media is wildly fracturing into a bunch of different islands, which unbalance is probably a good Thing for the internet. But I also suspect it comes down to a common misunderstanding of what DevRel actually is. It turns out that it's contrary to what many people wanted to believe in the before times, it is not getting paid as much as an engineer spending three times that amount of money on travel Expenses every year to travel to exotic places, get on stage party with your friends and then give a 45 minute talk that spends two minutes mentioning where you work and 45 minutes talking About, I don't know how to pick the right standing desk. That has in many cases been the perception of DevRel. And I don't think that's particularly defensible in our current macroeconomic climate. So what are all those DevRel people doing? Speaker 2 That's such a good loaded question. Speaker 1 It's always good to be given a question where the answers are very clear. They're right answers and wrong answers and oh wow, it's a fun minefield. Have fun, go catch. Speaker 2 Yeah, no, that's terrific. Yeah, in your first part, we do have a pretty well distributed team globally who does a lot of things. Our YouTube channel has, you know, we just crossed a million subscribers who are getting this stuff regularly. It's more than Amazon and Azure combined on YouTube. So in terms of like that audience, counterpoint, you definitely are YouTube, but that's not there here nor there either. Speaker 1 I don't believe you're juicing the stats, but it's also somehow not as, not as awesome to say I were to do it, which I'm working on it, but I have a face for radio and it shows. Speaker 2 Yeah, but a lot of this has been the quality and quantity. Like you look at the quantity of video overwhelms everyone else because we spend a lot of time we have a specific media team within the my DevRel team that does the studio work, that does The production, that does all that stuff. And that's a concerted effort that seems amazing to do really awesome work. But you know, a lot of DevRel, as you say, I don't know about you. I don't think I've ever truly believed in the sort of halo effect of if super smart person works at X company, even if they don't even talk about that company, that somehow presents good Vibes and business benefits to that company. I don't think we've ever proven that's really true. Speaker 1 Maybe you've seen counterpoints where I think of anecdotal examples of it's often though on some level for me, at least it's been, okay, someone I tremendously respect in the industry Has gone to work at a company that I've never heard of. I will be paying attention to what that company does as a direct result. It's conversely, when someone who is super well known and has been working at a company for a while leaves and then either trash the company in the way out or doesn't talk about it, it's A question of what's going on. It's something horrible happened there. Should we no longer like that company? Are we not framed anymore? And I don't know if that's necessarily constructive either. It also on some level feels like it can shorthand to, oh, if we're in DevRel, you have to be an influencer, which frankly I find out terrifying. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, I just the modern DevRel hopefully is doing a little more of product-led growth style work. They're focusing specifically on how are we helping developers discover, engage, scale, become advocates themselves in the platform, increasing that flywheel through usage. That has very discreet metrics. It has very specific ownership. I get personally, I don't even think DevRel should do as much with sales teams because sales teams have hundreds and sometimes thousands of sales engineers and sales reps. It's amazing. They have exactly what they need. I don't need DevRel's a drop in the bucket to that team. I'd rather talk directly to developers, focus on people who are self-service signups, people who are developers in those big accounts. So I think the modern DevRel team is doing more in that respect. But when I look at, I just look forward this morning at what my team did last week. So the average DevRel team, I look at what advocacy does. Teams writing code labs, they're building tutorials. So yes, they're doing some in-person events. They wrote some blog posts, published some videos, shipped a couple open source projects that they contribute to and gaming sector. We have a couple projects there. They're actually usually customer zero in the product. They use the product before chips, provides bugs and feedback to the team. We run Dora workshops, because again, we're the DevOps Research and Assessment Gang. We actually run the tutorial and docs platform for Google Cloud. We have people who write code samples and reference apps. So sometimes you see things publicly, but you don't see the 20,000 code samples in the docs, many written by our team. So a lot of times, DevRel is doing work to just enable on some of these different properties, whether that's blogs or docs, whether that's guest articles or event series. But all of this should be in service of having that credible relationship to help devs use the platform easier. I love watching this team do that, but I think there's more to it now than years ago, where maybe it was just let's do some amazing work and try to have some second, third order effect. ([Time 0:14:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ed844eb9-51ec-4ccc-a076-c381586123d3)) - **Trust Through Stability and Communication** - Trust in cloud services rests on stability, long-term support, and clear communication. - Anchor services like S3 and BigQuery deserve more confidence than early-stage experimental services. Transcript: Speaker 2 It's a fair question. Not everyone's on. Let's update our software on a weekly basis and I can just swap things in left. There's a reason that even Red Hat so popular with Linux because as a government employee I could use that Linux and know it's backwards compatible for 15 years and they sell that. That's the value that this thing works forever. Microsoft does the same with my other server products. You know for better for worse that thing will always kind of work with a component you wrote 15 years ago in SharePoint somehow runs today. I don't even know how that's possible. Love it. That's impressive. Now there's a cost to that. There's a giant tax in the vendor space to make that work. But yeah there's certain times where even with us, look we are trying to get better and better at things like comms and we'd last year we announced I checked them recently. You know we have 185 cloud products in our enterprise APIs meeting. They have a very very tight way we would deprecate with very very long notice. They've got certain expectations on guarantees of how long you can use them, quality of service, all the SLAs. And so for me like I would bank on first off for every cloud provider whether they're anchor services built on those right. You know S3 is not going anywhere from Amazon. Rock solid service. Big query goodness gracious. It's the center of Google Cloud. And you look at a lot of services. What can you bet on that of the anchors and then you take you can take bets on things that sit around it. And then you can take a look at the other side of the screen and say hey I'll use service weaver which we open sourced earlier this year. It's kind of a cool framework for building apps and we'll deconstruct it into microservices that deploy time. That's cool. Would I literally build my whole business on it? No I don't think so. It's early stuff. Now would I maybe use it also with some really boring VMs and boring API gateway and boring storage totally. Those are going to be around forever. I think for me personally I try to think of how do I isolate things that have some variability to them. That's your point. Sometimes you don't know there's variability. You would have just thought that service might be around forever. So how are you supposed to know that that thing could go away at some point and that's totally fair. I get that. Which is why we have to keep being better at comms. Making sure more things are in our enterprise API's which is almost everything. So you have some assurances when I build this thing I've got a multi year runway if anything ever changes. Nothing's going to stay the same forever but nothing should change tomorrow on a dime. ([Time 0:23:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3d1bf871-2721-4989-86eb-c8448a33ccb4)) - **Hidden Dependencies Hurt Trust** - Hidden dependencies in cloud services complicate trust and lead to surprises. - Poor communication around service deprecations hurts customer trust significantly. Transcript: Speaker 1 And again, no one is going to ever congratulate you at all on the decision to maintain a service that is internally painful and engineeringly expensive to keep going. But as soon as you kill something even as for this thing doesn't have any customers the narrative becomes they're screwing over their customers. It's they just said that it didn't have any. What's the concern here? It's a messaging problem. It is a reputation problem. Conversely, everyone knows that Amazon does not kill a WS services full stop. Yeah, that turns out that everyone's wrong. By my count, they've killed 10 full on a WS services and counting at the moment. But that is not the reputation that they have. Conversely, I think that the reputation that Google is going to kill everything that it touches is probably not accurate though. I don't know that I'd want to have them over to babysit either. So I don't know. But it's a but it is something that it feels like you're swimming up hill on and many respects just due to not even deprecation decisions historically. ([Time 0:26:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e46589bc-4c74-4103-81da-048cf6141303)) - **Earn Customer Trust Through Communication** - Cloud providers must prioritize improving communication to earn customer trust. - Deliver strong support, price stability, and reliable services to encourage customer commitment. Transcript: Speaker 2 I mean, communication can always get better. And it's not our customers' problem to make sure that they can track every weird thing we feel like doing. It's not their challenge if our business model changes or our strategy changes. That's not technically the customer's problem. So it's always our job to make this as easy as possible. Anytime we don't, we have made a mistake. So even DevRel, hey, look, it puts teams in a tough spot. We want our customers to trust our us. We have to earn that. You will never just give it to us. At the same time as you say, hey, we're profitable. It's great. We're growing weeds. It's amazing to see how many people are using this platform. I mean, even services that you don't talk about having, doing really, really well. But I got to earn that. And you got to earn more importantly at the scale. I don't want you to just kick the tires on Google Cloud. I want you to bet on it. But we're only going to earn that with really good support, really good price stability, really good feeling like these services are rock solid. And we totally earn that. We're getting there, but not as mature as we'd like to get yet. ([Time 0:27:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/17dd4328-1202-4e96-8a4b-43d88f409e2c)) - **Google Cloud's Security and Platform Focus** - Google Cloud excels in security through simplicity and default posture. - Platform thinking enables integrated experiences like Duet AI across multiple services. Transcript: Speaker 1 It. I agree with you when you, I think there's a spirited debate you could have around any of those things you said that you believe that Google Cloud is the best at with the exception of security Where I think that that is unquestionably. I think that that is a lot less variable than the others. The others are more or less who is the best cloud infrastructure? Well, it depends on who had what for breakfast today. But the simplicity and the approach you take to security is head and shoulders above the competition. And I want to make sure I give credit where do it is because of that simplicity and default posturing that customers wind up better for it as a result. Otherwise you wind up in this hell of you must have at least this much security training to responsibly secure your environment. And that is never going to happen. People read far less than we wish they would. I want to make very clear that Google deserves the credit from that security roster. Speaker 2 Yeah, and the other thing, look, I'll say that from my observation where we do something that feels a little special and different is we do think in platforms. We think in both how we build and how we operate and how the console is built by a platform team, singularly, how as we're doing Duet AI that we've preannounced at IO and are shipping, that Is a full platform experience covering a dozen services. That's really hard to do if you have a lot of isolation. So we've done a really cool job thinking in platforms and giving that simplicity at that platform level. It's hard to do. But again, we have to bring people to it. You're not too going to discover it by accident. ([Time 0:30:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/78f289b0-5b71-4bde-a7b2-d513a3ee485d)) - **Learn More from Richard Seroter** - Explore Google Cloud's free offerings and the daily updated blog at seroter.com. - Engage with Richard Seroter on Twitter and LinkedIn for more insights and discussions. Transcript: Speaker 2 Yeah, hopefully they continue to hang out at cloud.google.com and using all the free stuff, which is great. You can always find me at serodor.com. I read a bunch every day and then I write a blog post every day about what I read. So if you ever want to tune in on that, just see what wacky things I'm checking out in tech. That is good. And I still hang out on different social networks, Twitter and our sorroeder and LinkedIn and things like that. But yeah, join in and yell at me about anything I said. ([Time 0:32:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d56ff223-5ae1-4cf9-a7ee-18830677add1))