01 HISTORY ✣

The Death and Rebirth of Developer Relations (2022 – 2026).

Between late 2022 and mid-2024, more DevRel professionals lost their jobs in a concentrated period than in any time in the field's history. Blog posts, conference keynotes, and LinkedIn essays asked whether the discipline had a future. B…

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Between late 2022 and mid-2024, more DevRel professionals lost their jobs in a concentrated period than in any time in the field’s history. Blog posts, conference keynotes, and LinkedIn essays asked whether the discipline had a future. By late 2024 a corrective narrative had set in: bad DevRel was being killed; good DevRel was being rebuilt with stronger business alignment, clearer reporting structures, and more disciplined metrics. This file is the story of that contraction and the rebound.

The conditions for the contraction

Three conditions converged:

The 2020–2022 hiring boom over-extended the field. Cheap capital, zero-interest-rate policy, and pandemic-era growth made it easy to hire DevRel teams larger than the actual business case warranted. Some companies hired evangelists before they had a community to evangelise to, before they had a product activation funnel to feed, or before they had a clearly developer-led product at all.
Goals were often unclear or vanity-driven. Many DevRel orgs reported to marketing and were measured on signups, follower counts, blog views, and conference speaking slots — none of which connect cleanly to revenue. When budget cuts came, finance asked “what is the business outcome here?” and the team often could not answer.
Macroeconomic shift. Interest rates rose sharply through 2022. Tech valuations compressed. Many companies announced significant headcount reductions across all departments. Functions that could not show direct revenue contribution were among the first to be reduced.

Notable events of the contraction (2022 – 2024)

Twitter / X (late 2022 onward)

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter closed on October 27, 2022. In the following weeks, roughly 80% of Twitter’s workforce was reduced or departed. While not all of those cuts were specifically labelled “developer relations,” the impact on developers was substantial because:

Developer-facing teams (API, developer platform, partnerships) lost most of their staff.
Twitter API pricing changed dramatically in early 2023, killing or migrating thousands of third-party developer products built on the platform.
The platform’s role as the centre of “dev Twitter” — informal but profoundly important to the global developer community — eroded. Substantial migration to Bluesky and Mastodon followed through 2023–2025.

Microsoft Cloud Advocates and broader Microsoft cuts (2023)

Microsoft announced approximately 10,000 layoffs in January 2023 and additional cuts later in the year. Reports from inside Microsoft and from affected employees indicated that the Cloud Advocates team was substantially restructured, with portions of the team affected. The restructuring did not eliminate the Cloud Advocates program but reduced its scope and reshaped its focus, particularly around AI-first work.

Google (2023–2024)

Google announced 12,000 layoffs in January 2023. Subsequent rounds in 2023 and 2024 affected various developer-facing organisations. Daniel Azuma, formerly a senior software engineer involved in Google’s DevRel and Ruby/cloud work, published a reflective piece in September 2025 describing how Google’s DevRel organisation “had a partial implosion” in 2022 and how DevRel/engineering hybrid roles were “reorg’d back under more traditional engineering organizational boundaries.” Additional reporting in May 2024 indicated cuts affecting Google developer teams.

Heroku DX (Salesforce, 2024 – early 2026)

Heroku’s developer experience team — long one of the model DevRel orgs — was affected during multiple Salesforce restructuring rounds. Salesforce announced approximately 1,000 layoffs in early 2026 specifically affecting Agentforce AI and Heroku teams.

Smaller-scale cuts across the industry

Throughout 2023 and 2024 a steady drumbeat of smaller-scale DevRel reductions was documented on layoffs.fyi, on LinkedIn, and through community discussion. Frequently cited examples included Stripe’s late-2022 cuts (which affected some DevRel functions despite the company’s broader DevRel investment continuing), Stripe-comparable mid-stage developer-product companies, and various API-first startups whose Series-A or Series-B investments had over-built their DevRel teams.

The discourse: “Is DevRel dead?”

The phrase “Is DevRel dead?” became inescapable from late 2022 through mid-2024 — written by, among others, practitioners like Mary Thengvall, James Governor (RedMonk), Adam DuVander, and Phil Leggetter. The strongest version of the argument was that DevRel as practised had been:

Defined too vaguely, with conflicting goals.
Reported to the wrong function (usually marketing).
Measured on metrics that did not predict business outcomes.
Hired into too quickly, without first establishing community foundations.
Maintained as a “cost of doing business” rather than a strategic capability.

The strongest version of the counter-argument — also from Thengvall, Governor, and others — was that:

The function itself was sound; what was being cut was poor implementations of it.
Companies whose products were genuinely developer-led continued to invest, even through the layoff wave.
The “death of DevRel” framing confused DevRel as practised at companies that did not actually need it with DevRel as a profession.

Both sides were right about different things. The reality was a discipline-level correction.

What survived

Through the worst of the contraction, certain things remained healthy or grew:

DevRel at API-first PLG companies. Stripe, Twilio, Postman, MongoDB Atlas, HashiCorp, Snowflake, and similar companies continued investing because DevRel directly contributed to activation funnels.
Open-source-led commercial DevRel. Companies whose business model depended on community contribution (Hugging Face, Vercel/Next.js, Supabase, Linear, Astro, Neon) generally maintained or expanded their DevRel work.
Developer experience (DevEx) functions. Many “DX engineer” roles were structurally insulated from the layoff wave because they were embedded in product/engineering rather than marketing.
Conference attendance. DevRelCon, the DevRel Summit (Product Marketing Alliance), and major developer flagship events recovered to 2019-level attendance by 2023–2024.

The rebirth (2024 – 2026)

Five forces drove the recovery:

1. AI created enormous DevRel demand

OpenAI’s developer platform organisation, Anthropic’s Claude developer ecosystem, Hugging Face’s already-mature open-source community, Cohere, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pinecone, Replicate, Modal, Together AI, Mistral, NVIDIA’s AI Developer Program, Databricks, and Snowflake’s AI-adjacent work all needed substantial DevRel teams. The AI category alone re-absorbed a large number of laid-off DevRel professionals through 2023–2025 and created new senior roles that didn’t exist before.

OpenAI in particular became one of the most-watched developer companies. Logan Kilpatrick led developer relations at OpenAI from November 2022 through March 2024, then joined Google AI Studio as Product Lead. Romain Huet became Head of Developer Experience at OpenAI; Olivier Godement became Head of Product Platform. DevDay 2025 (October 6, 2025) hosted 1,500+ developers at Fort Mason, San Francisco.

2. Structural reform of the function

Companies rebuilding their DevRel orgs in 2024–2026 made systematically different choices:

More C-suite reporting. 20.3% of DevRel teams in 2024 reported directly to the CEO, up from 14.1% in 2023 (SlashData). Removing the marketing-only reporting line solved the “what is the business outcome” problem at the structural level.
Clearer functional separation. Distinct teams for advocacy, education, community, programs, and developer marketing.
Disciplined frameworks. AAARRRP, the Orbit Model, and the DevRel Capability Maturity Model entered mainstream use.
Tighter integration with product. Embedded advocates per product area; quarterly voice-of-developer reviews; PRD input from DevRel as a standard practice.

3. The Developer Relations Foundation

On August 12, 2025, the Developer Relations Foundation was announced under the Linux Foundation. The Foundation’s mission is “to elevate the professional practice of developer relations and increase awareness of it as a driver of business value.” Inaugural Steering Committee members included Wesley Faulkner, Arun Gupta (JetBrains), Divya Mohan (SUSE), Stacey Kruczek, Tabs, Ana Jiménez, and others. The Foundation institutionalised the field at a level it had never had before.

4. PLG made DevRel structurally necessary

Companies operating under product-led growth models could not ignore DevRel because their conversion funnel ran through documentation, sample code, community help, and developer onboarding — every one of which is DevRel-owned (in whole or in part). When CFOs realised that DevRel and PLG revenue were the same number, the budget conversation changed.

5. Compensation correction

The 2020–2022 boom had inflated DevRel compensation in some segments; the correction brought it back into alignment with engineering at the same level. By 2024–2026, well-defined DevRel roles at developer-product companies again offered competitive total compensation.

Lessons from the contraction

For any DevRel leader reading this in the future:

Connect every activity to a business outcome. AAARRRP or equivalent. Anything you can’t put on the framework is a candidate for the next budget cut.
Avoid sole reliance on marketing as your reporting line. It works at scale but creates structural fragility.
Hire community foundation before evangelism. A great speaker without an audience is invisible; a great speaker with a community is force-multiplied.
Document the team’s strategic contribution continuously, not only at budget time. Executives who do not understand DevRel cannot defend it.
Build measurement infrastructure before you need it. Once cuts begin, it is too late to start instrumenting activation, retention, and influence.

The story is not “DevRel died.” The story is “DevRel grew up.”