Ask HN: Why do developer advocates exist?
I mean this in the most non-inflammatory way possible. I want to understand what is the motivation of big companies behind having developer advocates on staff.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.