DevRel layoffs and recovery

The broad technology layoffs of 2022 to 2024 substantially reduced DevRel teams at Twitter, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and many smaller companies. Blog posts, conference keynotes, and LinkedIn essays asked whether the discipline had a future. By late 2024, the argument had shifted towards stronger business alignment, clearer reporting structures, and more disciplined metrics, while hiring began to recover in parts of the market.

The conditions for the contraction

Three conditions converged:

The 2020 to 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 those measures connects 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 to 2024)

Twitter / X (late 2022 onward)

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter closed on October 27, 2022. Twitter cut roughly half its workforce on November 4, with further layoffs and resignations following. While not all of those departures were specifically labelled “developer relations,” developers lost several parts of the company they had relied on 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 had been the informal centre of “dev Twitter” and important to the global developer community. That role eroded, followed by substantial migration to Bluesky and Mastodon through 2023 to 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 to 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 “reorged back under more traditional engineering organizational boundaries.” Additional reporting in May 2024 indicated cuts affecting Google developer teams.

Heroku DX (Salesforce, 2024 to 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, smaller DevRel reductions continued to be 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), 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?” recurred from late 2022 through mid-2024. Practitioners including Mary Thengvall, James Governor (RedMonk), Adam DuVander, and Phil Leggetter wrote about it. 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.

Taken together, these accounts describe a contraction and reassessment rather than the disappearance of the field.

What survived

During the contraction, some categories continued to hire or retained a clearer route to business value:

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 sat in product or engineering rather than marketing, placing them in a different budget and organisational context.

Renewed hiring (2024 to 2026)

Five developments accompanied the recovery:

1. AI companies created new DevRel roles

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 created new developer-facing roles. Some people displaced by the earlier cuts moved into this category, although no field-wide count establishes how much of the laid-off workforce it absorbed.

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 organisations in 2024 to 2026 often made 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). Moving beyond a marketing-only reporting line changed where the business-value discussion happened; it did not settle that discussion by itself.
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

The Linux Foundation announced its intent to form the Developer Relations Foundation on September 16, 2024, then announced the foundation as fully formed on August 25, 2025. Its stated purpose was to advance developer relations as a professional practice and make its business value more widely understood. Inaugural Steering Committee members included Wesley Faulkner, Arun Gupta (JetBrains), Divya Mohan (SUSE), Stacey Kruczek, Tabs Fakier, Ana Jiménez, and others.

4. PLG made DevRel structurally necessary

At product-led companies, documentation, sample code, community help, and developer onboarding all affect activation. DevRel often owns or contributes to those surfaces, which gives the team a measurable place in the conversion funnel.

5. Compensation correction

Compensation changed with the hiring market. By 2024 to 2026, some well-defined DevRel roles at developer-product companies again advertised total compensation comparable with adjacent engineering and product roles, although the pattern varied by company and region.

Practices that improve resilience

For any DevRel leader reading this in the future:

Connect every activity to a business outcome. Use AAARRRP or an equivalent framework to show what each activity contributes. Activities without a clear outcome are harder to defend during budget review.
Avoid sole reliance on marketing as your reporting line. It can work at scale, but it can also leave the team exposed when marketing budgets are cut.
Hire community foundation before evangelism. Speakers are more effective when the company already has an audience and a place for that audience to remain involved.
Document the team’s strategic contribution continuously, including between budget cycles. Executives who do not understand DevRel cannot defend it.
Build measurement infrastructure before a budget review. Instrument activation, retention, and influence while the programmes are running so that historical evidence is available when decisions are made.

The contraction intensified pressure on DevRel teams to document their business role, reporting structure, and measures. It affected strong and weak programmes alike; the later organisational changes reflect how practitioners and employers responded, not a clean selection for quality.