The importance of job titles
Laurence Moroney: I don't think, ultimately, there is a difference, unless you really think about semantics. I'll give two reasons why I prefer using "advocate" over "evangelist." Firstly, evangelism gives the impression that it's a one-way street. You're saying, "I'm here to tell you the good news." That's literally the definition.
To be the best evangelist or the best advocate, there needs to be a two-way street. I advocate our tech to developers and I advocate developers' needs to our engineering people and to our product managers. As a result, I think "advocate" is a much better description.
The second reason is that Microsoft, when I worked there, used to call the role "evangelist." Nowadays, the role is called "advocate" at Microsoft. One of the things that I did at Microsoft was I trained and equipped what we called "field evangelists." I was based in...