What’s a good developer survey participation rate?
Results from our analysis of over 200 DX customers.
This is the latest issue of Engineering Enablement, a weekly newsletter covering the data behind world-class engineering organizations. To get articles like this in your inbox every week, subscribe:
Industry benchmarks: Laura Tacho and I are hosting a webinar next week covering new industry benchmarks for measures of speed, effectiveness, quality, and impact. Register here.
In recent years, partly due to the SPACE and DevEx frameworks, more companies have started using developer surveys to better understand developer productivity and the factors that affect it. At DX, one of our products is a developer survey platform, so a question we often get asked about is what survey participation rates other companies are getting.
To answer this, we analyzed the average survey participation rates from 200 companies. We only looked at companies that are DX customers, which is important because DX customers have significantly higher participation rates than others in the industry.
Here’s what we found from the data.
The companies we analyzed achieved an average 96% participation rate in their surveys from their past three quarterly surveys. Again, this is markedly higher than others in the industry: companies like Microsoft, Google, Peloton, and Shopify hover between 25% - 50% participation. Many of the companies in this dataset went from having participation rates around 15-20% before using DX up to 80-100%. For more on how DX achieves this, register for a free product demo.
We also explored whether participation rates vary by organization size since, across the industry, we’ve heard of lower participation rates at larger companies. In our data, we can see an incremental decrease in participation rates the larger an organization gets. Companies with under 100 engineers saw an average 98% participation rate, while those with 100 - 500 engineers saw 95% participation, and larger organizations saw 91-92% participation.
So what survey participation rate should you be aiming for? If you’re just trying to collect some qualitative feedback comments, participation rate isn’t necessarily a critical concern. However, for organization-wide measurement and benchmarking, 80%+ participation rate is a must. Here’s why:
Credibility - Tech execs don't believe in the data without strong participation.
Team-level data - Team-level data is important, otherwise data can’t be used for team action and improvement. Managers can't use the data if only half of their team responds.
Reliability - Measurements and benchmarking aren’t reliable if they’re based on a sparse sample.
For more information on DX’s approach to developer surveys, read this article.
Who’s hiring right now
Here’s a roundup of Developer Productivity job openings. Find more open roles here.
Adobe is hiring a Sr Engineering Manager - DevEx | San Jose
The Trade Desk is hiring a Director of Product Management - DevEx and Platform | San Jose
Multiverse is hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer | UK
SiriusXM is hiring a Staff Software Engineer - Platform Observability | US
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading.
-Abi