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3 Things I Tell Our New Engineers

Tom Keeber
Dunelm Technology
Published in
3 min readMar 23, 2022

We have Engineers from all different backgrounds and all different experiences. Its one of the things that makes Dunelm a great place to work.

It’s vital that new starters to Dunelm understand some of our core beliefs and motivations so that we can continue the culture and ways of working that have made us so successful.

So as a Principal Engineer these are the 3 things I talk to our new starters about.

1. Its all about Quality

Different companies make different tradeoffs when it comes to software quality. For example, engineers with more agency or consultancy experience might find that they have been asked to focus completely on time to build rather than other quality aspect of software. This is all good. It’s important to understand the different approaches companies take to build software. But what works in one company may not work at another and at Dunelm we focus on building high quality, flexible, tested software. (What software quality means within Dunelm will form the bases of future blog posts)

So what do I tell new starters

Focus on ensuring quality — not solely on time to build.

Focus on the right solution — not the cheapest.

Focus on strategic flexible solutions — not quick fixes and hacks

Focusing on how we build something is as important as the result

Everyone is responsible for Quality

OK — slightly cheeky here — this is far more than one thing :-)

There are numerous aspects to ensuring quality in software. These cover multiple areas of engineering such as automated testing, IaC and CD/CI, but also move into Ways of Working and other less tangible practices. I feel a blog post coming on….

2. Culture of empowerment

It’s vital that we maintain and build on Dunelms’ culture of empowerment, autonomy and ownership.

Yes we have an on-paper hierarchy and yes we have career progression as part of that. But from a culture perspective our hierarchy is flat and our teams autonomous.

Everyone has an equal voice in the team — use your experience to help the team improve. Whether that is ways of working, testing, new technology or anything else.

Anyone can question anyone. With autonomy comes a need for open and honest conversations. It’s really important for Engineers to question Technical Leads, Principal Engineer or anyone else. Likewise, they will question you.

3. You built it, you support and own it

As Uncle Ben once said with great power comes great responsibility. We give teams the time and autonomy to build great solutions. As part of that we expect the team to self organise around supporting what they build in a production environment.

You built it, you support it

This means we want our Engineers to be engineering for failures, for visibility of our what is happening in our systems and making sure that the support side is as little impacting as possible.

But of course, we don’t expect this to “just happen” As Principal Engineers we support our teams with best practice, standards and anything else the team needs. We’re not setting teams up for failure here (and if we were, it would just be a learning exercise :-) )

Thanks for reading

I’ve talked about 3 things here that I believe set a tone for new starters at Dunelm Engineering— but of course its only the start of a journey. Where we go from here is shaped by our Engineers and other Chapters. But one thing is clear — our focus on Quality, Autonomous teams and Empowerment won’t change.

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Published in Dunelm Technology

Tales about the great technology being used and the talented team behind it at Dunelm — the home of homes. Covering everything from high level whim-driven musings about technological trends right through to deep-dive technical discussions and personal projects.

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