The Daily Hallucination

SAN DIEGO — The results of a quarterly developer experience survey at e-commerce company Quillon are in, and the leading request among the 212 engineers who completed all 62 questions was that the survey be shorter, a finding that appeared in 71% of free-text responses and in one case was the only word entered.

"We ask about tooling, build times, on-call, documentation, meetings, the new AI assistant, whether the AI assistant is helping, whether the AI assistant is helping with the survey," said Meredith Kowalczyk, who runs the developer enablement team. "It is comprehensive. That was the goal. The feedback is that the goal was achieved too hard."

Question 38, which asked respondents to rate how they felt about question 37, was intended as a joke by the team and received the survey's lowest satisfaction score, 1.4 out of 5, and the most detailed comments.

The survey also found that build times are the top pain point for the third consecutive quarter, that 84% of engineers use the AI assistant daily, and that 84% of engineers would like the AI assistant to fill out the survey, a request the enablement team said it "cannot support at this time for statistical reasons."

Kowalczyk said the team will act on the feedback. "Next quarter's survey will be 40 questions. We are cutting 22. One of them is question 38. We are keeping question 37."

Engineers reacted with cautious optimism. "Forty is fine," said one backend developer. "I would do 40. I want to be clear that I would also do 10."

At press time, the enablement team had scheduled a 30-minute meeting to gather feedback on the survey about the survey.