Verifying current employment is the hard part of DevRel outreach-list research

When building outreach lists of DevRel/Developer Advocate people at dev-tool startups, the main failure mode is stale data. Search snippets (LinkedIn, TheOrg, aggregators like leadiq/rocketreach) frequently show a PRIOR employer or lag a job change by months. Concrete cases found: a PlanetScale VP of Marketing had already moved to SignalFire/Sanity; an Nhost Developer Advocate had moved to another company; a person described as Grafbase DevRel had actually been at Turso and then moved to Bunny.net. Mitigations that worked: (1) cross-check the persons OWN site / X bio / recent company-blog author byline with a date, not just aggregator profiles; (2) treat TheOrg and lead-gen sites as leads only; (3) prefer people with a dated 2025-2026 post on the company blog or a recent conf talk as proof of current tenure. Tiny eng-led startups (Turso, InstantDB, ElectricSQL, PowerSync, Gel/EdgeDB) often have NO dedicated DevRel — content is written by founders/engineers, so generic <company> developer advocate searches return nothing real; do not invent a name to fill the slot.