Inside The Top 10% Of Engineering Orgs
Plus, the long-term implications of the Reddit blackout, how a CEO demystifies software development, why Discord is betting big on devs, and what Figma can teach us about being customer-obsessed.
Fact: You can’t become better at anything unless you understand what getting better would actually look like. This is especially true in the case of engineering teams.
Following the analysis of 2,000 dev teams and over 4 million code branches, the 2023 Engineering Benchmarks report is out.
To walk us through the performance metrics of the top 10% of engineering teams, LinearB’s Director of Developer Relations Ben Lloyd Pearson makes his first Dev Interrupted appearance.
From how long elite teams take to complete code tasks to the size of their pull requests, this is a great episode to understand where your dev team stands and where they have concrete room to improve.
“70% of organizations who adopted visibility into metrics improved their cycle time and then 65% of these organizations improved their PR size with code-review automation.”
Episode Highlights:
(2:15) Introductions
(7:38) Research behind the engineering benchmarks
(11:23) Delivery lifecycle metrics
(14:51) PR automation tooling
(18:32) Elite developer workflow metrics
(25:40) State of business alignment metrics
(34:19) Predictability and planning accuracy
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. What Tech Has Learned From The Reddit Blackout
With the future of one of the world’s most popular websites still unknown - some subreddits are back up while others remain dark – there are a few known knowns that engineers have learned so far.
’s guide on what the implications of the Reddit blackout have been for the broader tech world is a great place to start.
2. Demystifying Software Development: A Conversation with Engineer-turned-CEO
There’s really no industry like software development, where new processes, workflows and practices are evolving on a daily basis. One of the most reliable sources of where software development is going and, most importantly, where it should go is LinearB CEO Ori Keren.
Check out Ori’s recent interview in Primary, where he spoke about what it’s like to run a company after spending a career as an engineering leader, how he thinks about competition and his thoughts on generative AI and engineering workflows.
Read: Demystifying Software Development: A Conversation with Engineer-turned-CEO
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3. Discord is betting big on devs. Can they overtake Reddit?
Up until a few weeks ago, tens of millions of developers relied on Reddit as their go-to way to learn and connect with other engineers but thousands of subreddits remain shuttered.
At the end of last year, we spoke to Discord about their plans to make the platform more developer friendly. Could those changes make Discord the go-to destination for developers? Discord thinks so and is betting big it will happen soon.
4. What working at Figma teaches you about customer obsession
With its recent acquisition by Adobe, Figma has 20 billion reasons to believe it’s mastered how it connects engineering, product and its end users. In this stellar insider guide on what that connection looks like, Figma’s VP of Product Sho Kuwamoto and
run through what it takes to design, build and update a piece of tech customers can’t live without.
This week’s Download was sponsored by the Benchmark → Automate → Improve Summer Workshop Series.
Benchmark. Automate. Improve. These are the most important themes that drive elite engineering organizations. That’s why we’ve set up three workshops over the summer on how to practically apply each of these to your own development teams.
Benchmarks focuses on how elite engineering teams use metrics. Automate looks at how automation has been used at elite orgs to improve developer workflows. Improve is a guide on how the top 10% of teams allocate developer resources.