As part of our effort to continuously improve our team, today we released the results of our annual internal tech survey, which is sent to technology-centric employees across the company to understand their sentiment, experience, ability to innovate, and customer culture obsession. The effort is driven by developers for developers and has been part of Amazon’s builder culture for more than 20 years.

The survey was conducted this year by the Amazon Builder Experience team led by Eric Docktor. The team was formed in February to continually improve the day-to-day experience of builders across the organization and empower individuals and teams to do the same.

Read the email Eric sent to staff (below) to learn more about this year’s results:

I am pleased to announce that the Tech Survey 2022 results are now available on the Tech Survey website. The Tech Survey is an important tool in how both the tech community and individual teams can understand and continually improve the experience for tech builders across the organization. Over the years, the survey has changed a lot—the questions and job families we include, the size of the participating community, and the features we provide to help you understand your results. But the focus has remained the same: hearing directly from the tech community what’s going well and where there is room for improvement, and empowering teams to make those improvements.

As you review the results with your team to identify your team’s successes and areas for improvement, I wanted to share some key insights that I and the Software Builder Experience Team (ASBX) noticed. This is the first year that ASBX has managed the Tech Survey (with ASBX only convening in February 2022) and we have been impressed with the increased response rate, with a participation rate almost doubling this year compared to last year. We see this as a signal of increased engagement in the tech community and increased confidence in our collective commitment to improvement. The ASBX team will continue to look at the results over the coming weeks as we determine what is working well and where we can continue to raise the bar. I hope you will do the same with your team.

Some of the highlights of the survey are:

• We saw one of the highest scores for “I enjoy working for Amazon” (86%) and “I recommend Amazon to others in my field as a great place to work” (81%) as the answer choices for these questions changed in 2019. and we saw the lowest negative responses to those questions. This is perhaps the biggest headline for me — we know we’re busy, and the ASBX organization recognizes the repetitive work some Amazon software developers must do to keep delighting customers. Throughout the company we have set ourselves the goal of always being better and this result inspires me.
• In this regard, 91% of respondents feel encouraged to share their ideas, 74% are confident they can achieve their career goals by working at Amazon, and 91% say their manager creates an environment in which they can voice their concerns.
• Respondents believe in their organizations and leaders, with 85% of respondents saying their managers seek diverse opinions when making decisions, and 82% saying their skip-level manager is an effective leader. We saw the highest scores ever on other manager-related questions, including managers helping team members understand what’s expected in their role, managers providing actionable feedback on performance, and managers clarifying how performance Is evaluated. I’m very happy with these results because I know from my own Amazon experience that it’s hard work. I encourage managers and teams to look at their own results and not take this as a declaration of victory. It’s work every year!
• Customer centricity remains high: 86% of respondents said their teams are working on the right things for customers, and 75% said they are genuinely innovating for customers.

While there are many areas to celebrate, we will continue to focus on areas where we still have work to do.

While 74% of respondents said they can achieve their career goals at Amazon and 10% are considering moving internally to advance, we also see that 5% are considering leaving Amazon in the next six months. Of that 5%, about half cited base salary as their primary concern. As you probably know, earlier this year Amazon announced increases in pay bands across many job families, including an increase in the US base salary cap. The compensation team has learned a lot from the feedback from this announcement, and the team regularly evaluates data to reflect changes in the market as it continues to review compensation packages at Amazon.

We’ve also heard that bug fixes create frustration for some teams, with about 22% of those who write code reporting that bug fixes usually or always interrupt their work. We’ve heard a desire to streamline processes and maintenance so builders can spend more time innovating. We are working to simplify or automate this for the software you use (more on this below). And if you’re on a team seeing these disruptions related to code your team produces, we hope you’ll use these findings as a call to action to invest in your own test automation and quality processes.

The next step in the Tech Survey cycle takes place at the company, organizational, team and individual levels. We expect teams and leaders to engage with these findings, learn where they’re headed (and maybe sign up for a talk on Amazon principals to show us how!) and where opportunities exist to transform your to improve their own teams.

From a business perspective, the ASBX team will continue to review these results for feedback on our own roadmap – and areas where we will be committed to making improvements across the business. We’re also looking at how we can deliver improvements directly at ASBX. To that end, I would like to share some key achievements since ASBX was founded in February:

• Year-to-date, we’ve automatically fixed 20% of blocked software issues — software updates that need to be made so urgently that teams are prevented from deploying anything else before the update is complete — up from 0.5% in 2021. Software Developers has didn’t lift a finger to incorporate these upgrades into their applications. We placed a big bet on it in 2022, thinking we could significantly reduce the hassle at Amazon, and we’re thrilled with our early results. We will continue to push this program to increase the percentage of blocked software issues that get fixed automatically.
• We launched the Pipelines Efficiency Dashboard in June to show teams at Amazon how healthy their pipelines are and where there are opportunities to improve pipeline health. So far in 2022, the percentage of pipelines that are regularly merged from the Live Version Set has increased from 61% to 83%. Software vendors also used the dashboard to find and fix stuck pipelines, which reduced the total number of manual interventions on stuck pipelines by 6.6%. To put that in context, that’s almost 17,000 times per week that software developers weren’t interrupted from building to solve administrative pipeline issues.

These two wins really underscore the two main ways in which the ASBX organization is driving improvements for builders. In some ways, like automated patching, we’re going to introduce things that will make things better for you right away. And sometimes, like fixing stuck pipelines, we can’t fix it for you, but we can increase visibility so you know where to invest to improve your team’s builder experience. We’ll continue to innovate to make you more efficient as we’ve done by improving SIM ticketing search, centralizing upgrades to Amazon Linux 2 for 1.8 million hosts so you don’t have to, and reduced Apollo deployment time by 75% for large enterprise fleets. And yet, we know there’s still more work to be done, and we’ll use what we learn in the tech survey (and other feedback forums) to inform our roadmap.

I hope you and your teams take some time to digest the technical survey to learn what improvements you can make as well. I’m excited to see what we all make of it!

Let’s keep building together

Eric

MANSFIELD, Ohio – Mansfield, Ohio is historically associated with the rust belt rather than the corn belt. But over the years it has built a strong farming community, with farms and gardens in the city, in addition to rural farms in the surrounding area.

This year, Mansfield Senior High School is helping students become more involved in agriculture by adding an Agricultural Economics and Strategic Entrepreneurship program to their technical apprenticeship.

“We have all these urban gardens springing up around us, and our school itself is really working to build that aspect of entrepreneurship for our students,” said Nikia Fletcher, the school’s Director of Technical Education. “It made sense to have an agriculture program.”

Students in the program learn agriculture and business both in the classroom and on field trips to other farms and businesses and in a new elevated tunnel the school added this year.

“It’s something we’re really excited about,” said Sean Adams, the school’s agribusiness teacher. “We are ready to build [the program]and I think it’s something that’s very good for our community.”

program

The Agribusiness program is a two-year program for senior high school students who earn college credit and industry-recognized credentials through the program. It includes an Agriculture and Natural Resources class for ninth graders to help them decide if they are interested in pursuing further education in agriculture. There are also plans to form an FFA chapter at the school.

Adams is also currently teaching a greenhouse and nursery management course for juniors and seniors. For this year he has six students in the class and about 15 students in the entire program.

Adams coaches football at Mansfield Senior High School and has previously worked as a special education teacher. He has a farm raising Black Angus cattle and the occasional pig or chicken near Bellville, Ohio. When he saw that the school had a vacancy as a teacher of agriculture, he decided to give it a try.

community

Before adding a program to its technical apprenticeship, the school conducts an extensive local needs assessment, examining how the program could contribute to the community. Farming was a natural fit because of the work that other organizations, such as the North End Community Improvement Collaborative, are doing in urban farming in Mansfield.

“We looked at the landscape of our community and said this would be a great way to add to Mansfield,” Fletcher said.

The program also helps students explore entrepreneurship by learning how to market the vegetables they grow, in addition to providing some vegetables for culinary programs in the schools.

“We want students to understand that they can do things with their hands, and they have a few options,” Fletcher said. “They can go to college or get certificates and go into the workforce or be their own boss if they want to.”

To touch

Students in the Greenhouse and Nursery Management class are preparing the school’s new elevated tunnel to plant some fall vegetables that they will harvest in February and replace with more winter vegetables.

This fall, Adams has been taking the students on field trips to processing plants and farms, and hopes to later expand the program to include some livestock farming. He got permission to raise some meat chickens with his students at school.

Students learn in class, particularly about the business side of farming, but Adams wants them to focus on hands-on learning for most of their time in class. This is the part that resonates with most students.

“Just going into the greenhouse — I never really knew how that worked, so it was a good experience to have Mr. Adams teach me, show me how to do that,” said Elias Owens, a junior in the program.

students

Agriculture classes begin before high school in Mansfield. The elementary school even has a greenhouse. And not a few of the students in the program already have experience with agriculture.

“It’s amazing how ingrained farming is in us, because that’s what our ancestors had to do in the past,” Adams said.

Ja’ontay O’Bryant, a junior at Mansfield Senior High School, has worked for a city farm in Mansfield for two years. Junior Cameron Barnett’s family have a farm near Ashland where they raise a wide range of cattle. Zyion Brown, also a junior, has a grandma who has always been interested in gardening.

“I think this class will help me understand what she’s talking about and help her with the garden,” Brown said.

Adams sees the program as something that could lead to a career path, but can be valuable for students whether they decide to pursue a career in agriculture or not.

“The urban farms are a big deal in Mansfield. It could be a career path,” Adams said. “I think success is only measured by the kids learning something and ultimately becoming a productive citizen.”

Urban farms

Urban farms throughout Mansfield give Adams some examples to show the students what farming can do.

“You don’t have to have 100 acres to do something that’s lifelong and sustainable. It’s a good career,” he said.

This community was helpful to the school as it made the program work. The tall tunnel was built before the start of the school year, but it wasn’t immediately ready for planting.

The students have been clearing rocks and building soil beds with the help of one of Mansfield’s city farms as they prepare to plant some fall vegetables.

Kingwood Center Gardens, a historic site known in part for its gardens and greenhouse, is also adjacent to the high school. Adams has partnered with the Gardens so his students can help and learn from the staff there, and so the staff can help them clean up and utilize the space around the tall tunnel.

“I told these guys, you’re going to be my age and you’re going to drive by here and think, ‘I was one of the pioneers of this’ … It’s something to be proud of that you’re the pioneers of this place,” said adams