• Author: Ken Struys Developer Experience (aka DevX) mission is to increase developer velocity at Reddit. • We build (and buy) highly leveraged tools used across the entire software development lifecycle to enable feature teams to focus on what we hired them to do; build the future of Reddit. • In this post we’ll cover how we use our Engineering Excellence Survey to focus on the most important problems to accomplish our mission and lessons we’ve learned building our survey over the last 3 years. • DevX was created because there were a lot of gaps and broken tools slowing down delivery across the developer experience at Reddit. • When I joined to start and lead the org, I was approached by many eager engineers that wanted to share their experiences and highlight areas of focus. • While there were some common themes that emerged, the sheer variety of problems proved to be a challenge given that the team was already occupied by putting out immediate fires.
Article Summaries:
- Reddit’s DevX team has been using an Engineering Excellence Survey for three years to pinpoint bottlenecks in the developer experience. Launched after the company’s first internal survey, the process collects feedback from roughly 1,000 engineers via a Google Sheet converted to a Typeform, with results visualized in Looker Studio dashboards. The survey has generated over 600 responses, revealing issues across the software‑development lifecycle. DevX emphasizes a customer‑first approach, reading all feedback personally and keeping the toolset lightweight to avoid costly survey platforms. The initiative has helped prioritize improvements that accelerate feature delivery and overall developer velocity.
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