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We have one at Airbnb, and it's great. They regularly put out tools for internal use that help the whole company move faster. Everybody still ends up doing some local development environment optimization, of course, but having a small team that's dedicated to making things easier for the whole company is really valuable.

this post about the "engineering effectiveness" team at twitter is relevant: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/flowers/

i hadn't heard of this before, but i think it's a great idea and am surprised i don't see it more often.

"We were charged with increasing the happiness and productivity of the engineering team."

Fogcreek is a deviant, if progressive, company. You will find the norm is to pay lip service to the "happiness and productivity of the engineering team" but when push comes to shove, it is Death-march time all over again.

The person with the "Developer Happiness Team" is not at Fog Creek. Fog Creek are conducting interviews with various people at other companies. Any deficiencies Fog Creek's own development processes may have are irrelevant to this interview, so far as I can see.