I ran it across 5 quarters. It had 100% participation each quarter.
Nudges
Survey Kickoff
Welcome to Thrive Market’s developer experience survey. The goal of this survey is to help teams, managers, and leaders understand the developer experience and identify areas to improve.
This survey takes about 5 minutes to complete. Managers, please ensure that everyone participates. Please reach out to
$linkToMeif you have questions.
Wednesday, T-2 before deadline (managers)
Hey
$person, please ask your teams to fill out the DX survey in standup today. thx!
Thursday, T-1 before deadline (directors)
Hey @Recipient, it looks like there are teams that you’re over with individuals that haven’t filled it out yet. Could you follow up with the team leads (or the engineers?) to make sure folks respond? Thank you!
Friday, T-0 (ICs)
Hey @Recipient. You’re on my list of people who hasn’t filled out the DX the snapshot. Please make this happen today? :care:
Adhoc ping (just when I’m feelin froggy)
Remember when I said I would nag you until you did this.. this is me doing that.
$person. Buddy. Friend. Take the 5 minutes please. :plead:
Example outputs
Q1 2026
The DX survey finished up early thanks to everyone’s participation. Thank you so much! The methodology of this report is this super high tech thing called “read literally every comment, click all the buttons in DX and note what the UI says is bad”.
My one ask: What doc / docs would be the most useful for you to do your job better? What are you missing?
This quarter our DXI increased by 3 points. This means that, according to DX’s model, we have gotten about 30hrs/eng/year in productivity savings. If we multiply that out, it’s like we hired a bit more than another whole engineer. We’re still 5 points off from the industry p75, so more to go there. As a reminder, DX is a qualitative survey. This means that this survey is based in feelings/vibes, not hard numbers. We also have hard numbers, but that’s not this survey. Relative to last time Worse People were grumpier about code maintainability, the ability to deliver incrementally, and how easy it is to iterate locally.
- Code maintainability is affecting the entire org with a particular focus on web. Android is the one exception. They are happier than the industry p90 about maintainability! Something maybe change w/ the data crew in the past quarter, because they are feeling much worse about this than they did.
- Incremental delivery: When looking at industry p75, we beat out the benchmark on incremental delivery for client devices. Backend and data are still lagging.
- Local iteration speed has gotten worse for most folks in the past quarter. This is surprising given the investments (and positive comments) about the magento local stack.
Better
Planning: There were better planning processes in the past 3 months. This showed up as increased happiness especially in the ERP, BE Core, FE Core and Habit Formation groups. Not everyone was thrilled, though, so maybe those teams should share their magic sauce.
Local dev environments: Setting up a local development environments saw broad improvements. This is in tension with the reduction in local iteration speed. I think one piece here is that getting initial setup is easier now, but validating incremental changes are not. This might be due to the number of interconnected services we have and stitching those together not being easy.
Industry comparison
Compared to the industry p75 benchmarks, we’re much worse at:
- documentation (28 %pts)
- cross-team collab (25 %pts)
- deep work (12 %pts)
- code maintainability (12 %pts)
It’s super not clear to me what documentation people are missing. If you have thoughts/needs/desires, give a shout. I’d love to solve this. I think written docs will be more useful in the future as they are context fodder for the AI machines. While this was a very high priority for people, the DX question “On average, how much time do you lose each week due to missing, outdated, or unclear documentation?” says that 59% of people lose less than 1hr/wk. I don’t quite understand the difference there.
Deep work is a big problem, especially in the devops, data and product worlds. From the comments, it sounds like there are constant interruptions that really undermine the ability to do important strategic work (product) or actually complete the things we’ve started (devops, data, et al). This almost certainly ties into the lack of documentation, as you get interrupted by people who can’t or won’t self-service that information from the available docs. Notably, the Product Engineering group + BE core seems to be doing great (relative to everyone else) on this. Maybe due to the roadmapping exercises?
The comments mentioned how difficult it is to do cross-team collab. Every team has their own agenda, schedule, etc. This is especially difficult for the platform groups (50+ percentage points off of p75 benchmark) because we’re not included in the planning cycles of the product teams.. but have needs from on those product teams.
When looking at code maintainability, it’s not great. The people who are happy about this by a big margin (relative to p75) are Data Analytics, ERP and Logistics. Sitting right at p75 are buy & track and FE Core. Most other teams are 10-25% points off from p75 with a notable exception of backend core at -53%pts from p75. This is a good time to remind you that this is how people FEEL about the code maintainability. When we layer on quantitative data, we get a slightly different view that’s probably for a future round of analysis.
The common priorities of the people
- We need more time for deep work. This means fewer interruptions, more time for strategic thinking and finish what we start.
- We need easier to find, up-to-date, high quality documentation. (and I’m still foggy on what exactly those docs ARE)
Next steps
We need to marry these qualitative results up w/ the quantitative data we have access to. I’ll look into it and report back what I find.
My one ask (in case you don’t scroll up): What doc / docs would be the most useful for you to do your job better? What are you missing?