I have started noticing a pattern in job descriptions for Developer Relations that makes me pause.
Somewhere between five other responsibilities, there will be one small line that says something like: “Create YouTube videos.”
That line is usually sitting beside documentation, community management, demos, webinars, social media, product feedback, events, customer support, and sometimes even sales enablement. It is written as though creating videos is something that can be spun up in an hour between meetings. Yet these jobs sit vacant for months, as though the red flags weren’t LOUD in the first place.
Video Production Is a Whole Workflow
A good video does not start when someone presses record. In reality, it’s everything behind the camera that makes video production real work. For me, it all starts with figuring out what the video is supposed to do in the first place.
For each video, I’m always outlining: Who is it for? What problem is it solving? What value do these few minutes bring to a viewer? How shareable is this content?
Making videos just for the sake of pushing content is not valuable, and it does not create long-term impact for the viewer. I’ve been seeing this more lately with the rise of AI video content creation being promoted, when really, the average person does not want to waste their time watching content that was not valuable for the creator and is not valuable for the viewer.
The other side of this workflow includes the coding/building, scripting, recording, re-recording (unfortunately), audio cleanup, editing, captions, thumbnails, publishing, distribution, and ongoing monitoring. All of that time and effort is often disregarded.
So to see it downplayed to a single job description line of “make videos” is pretty much a red flag to people who have the skills to contribute. In turn, that can prevent a company from getting a good hire overall.
The Technical Part Makes It Even Heavier
Technical video content has another layer that people sometimes underestimate: the content has to be correct.
If you are making a tutorial, the code needs to work. The product flow needs to make sense. The demo environment needs to behave for others. The explanation needs to be accurate enough for a developer to trust it, but clear enough for someone new to follow along. Behind a lot of the technical content you see are years of experience that have built the confidence and authority needed to share that knowledge.
So beyond the creative work, it is also a combination of technical communication, product understanding, developer empathy, and debugging under a deadline.
That balance is what a lot of DevRel people struggle with. You have to be technical enough to earn trust, clear enough to teach, creative enough to keep people watching, and strategic enough to make the content useful beyond the moment it is published.
When someone executes that balance well, it is rarely admired because it looks effortless from the outside. It becomes “expected.” People only notice the work when the demo breaks, the explanation feels confusing, the pacing drags, or the video does not perform. But when everything works, it is easy to forget how many separate skills had to come together to make it feel simple.
Why It Gets Treated Like a Side Task
I think video gets underestimated because people only see the final file.
They see a ten-minute video and assume it took ten minutes of talking plus a little editing. They see a short demo and assume it was quick because the output is short.
But shorter content can be harder. A polished two-minute video often requires more decision-making than a loose twenty-minute walkthrough because every second has to justify itself. The same amount of time it takes me to produce a tutorial can also be the same amount of time it takes me to produce a 30-second video, and it all comes down to the strategy behind each one.
When making a video is squeezed into a role with five other major responsibilities, the quality usually has to give somewhere. The person making it either burns out trying to do everything well, or the videos become rushed, inconsistent, and treated like content slop.
If Companies Want Video, They Should Resource It
I am not saying every company needs a full production studio or a giant content team. But if video is important enough to put in a job description, it should be important enough to plan for in the long term.
That could mean giving people dedicated production time, access to editing support, clearer goals for the video’s performance, better tooling (and funding), a realistic publishing cadence, or simply acknowledging through the role that video work is real work.
It also means being honest about what the role is. If someone is expected to own video strategy, create technical tutorials, edit everything, publish consistently, manage community, write docs, support launches, and attend events, that is not one role. That is a content department wearing a single job title.
And bundling it all under a “Senior” title is not going to work either. Wishing you luck in that search 🫡