Life as a Software Engineer at Street Group
Dom, you’ve been at Street Group for nearly 2 years now, how’s the journey been so far?
I don’t mean to start off with an answer that sounds particularly ‘cheesy’, but it genuinely has been incredible.
I made a decision in the late 2000’s that I’d never be employed again, mostly due to my experiences up to that point and my aspirations at that time. So when circumstances changed in 2022 and I needed to find employment again I started searching with such strict parameters of what I needed the role and company to be, and Street Group has not only achieved each of those requirements, it’s excelled on them.
Over the last 2 years, this journey has given me so much more that I thought it would, after spending so long working for myself and being responsible for my own growth and success, coming into and becoming part of this team has been an amazing next step, with so many prospects of further ‘next steps’ within the company.
I can’t even say that this journey has been a “rollercoaster filled with ups and downs”, as there have been so many ‘ups’, but so few ‘downs’ than I can count on one finger, which I know sounds too good to be true, but it’s just how it is here.
What does being a Software Engineer mean at Street Group?
Being a Street Group Software Engineer is so much more than any software engineer role I’ve ever seen or experienced anywhere else. At Street, it’s:-
- collaborating with all areas of the business, such as Marketing, or Commercial, or Support, or the People team
- being involved in those ‘bigger’ discussions and decisions within the department or company about it’s direction and approach
- getting your head down and working on your own
- pairing up and working with a colleague
- contributing and working with your full team
- getting involved with UX/UI to help shape and form how something will look and feel
- putting yourself forward to work on bigger projects than you wouldn’t normally go for, with the confidence that the wider team will help guide and support when needed
- supporting your team and helping them achieve whatever goal or intention is set, whether that be a colleague, or your immediate team, the engineering department, or the whole company
- sharing your own knowledge with the rest of the company, and learning from them in return
- oh, and we do some coding too
Being a Software Engineer is so much more than just writing code. And I love it!
How does working here compare to your previous jobs?
Before joining Street Group, I actually had my own business, also a CRM in the property industry, but a different target audience. I worked for myself, and mostly by myself for the best part of 10 years and I loved it! I met incredible people, did incredible things, and got to travel the world. Then, with huge changes in my personal circumstances with the arrival of my son, as well as global circumstances due to the pandemic, my career and business needed to take a turn.
At the time, I was so nervous. It had been well over a decade since I worked for someone else, let alone as a software engineer. The advert from Street Group was the first advert I saw and I thought “this is too good to be true”, this is the exact kind of role I’d like, in the same industry that I’ve been a part of for so long, and they’re going to pay me to write code which it a huge passion of mine, not to mention all of the benefits listed on the advert.
Coming into the company, after my history, I was a little nervous. It felt like it was going to be a huge change, I was worried it would feel like I was “going back to working for someone else” or “just building what someone else wanted me to build without having any input, say, or influence in direction”.
Within the first week, it became very clear that I had absolutely nothing to worry about. While there are overarching company goals, we have a huge amount of influence in how we collectively achieve those goals, what we build, how we build them, how we deliver them. And not only that, but they’re so much ‘autonomy’ to be as involved and pioneering as you would like, which suits me and my mindset down to the ground.
Plus, the amount of knowledge and knowledge sharing within the company, either though just day-to-day conversation, or our regular Lunch and Learn sessions, utilising our L&D budget, or as we recently had our annual Street Con event, where the entire engineering department has a ‘conference’ filled with talks on all kinds of subjects from our own people, there’s so many opportunities to learn and further your own knowledge and to give something back.
Needless to say, two years in, it still doesn’t feel like I’m ‘working’ as I’m having so much fun. It definitely was the right decision.
What’s your favourite memory over the past 2 years?
One of my biggest achievements actually came from something relatively small. Last year we had a launch event for some brand new features on the Street CRM, mainly around the Letting Management and Accounting area, but we also added some new features to other areas, and one of the features that I build was the ability for agents to tag their colleagues in notes left anywhere within the Street CRM, just by typing the @ symbol and then their name, or selecting them from the dropdown. Then when that note is saved, the tagged agent gets a notification to say they have been mentioned, and can go straight to that note from anywhere in the system by clicking the notification.
Compared to some of the other features that were presented on that launch day, this wasn’t a particularly huge or complex bit of work, it took a day, maybe two to mock out, build, test, get approved and deploy, but the reception that this feature got when it was presented in the Launch video, not only from people within the company but from agents watching the event was an incredible feeling, and now, seeing how many times that feature has been used (2,200 times in the last 30 days alone!) is amazing.
Tell us about your biggest achievement since joining us?
Another one of the features, which we will actually be launching at our next Showcase on the 28th February (subtle plug, see you there) is a huge revamp and rebuild on how agents are able to set goals and track KPIs for their employees, branches and company as a whole within Street, and as an addition to that, create their own dashboards that appear when they log in, filled with different widgets for all different types of information that the agent might want to add, from how many viewings have been booked that month, to upcoming calendar events, to any recent mentions that agent has received, to the weather in the local area, etc, etc.
When we built that feature, we ended up listing all of the different types of widget that would be valuable for an agent to add to their own dashboards, and that list was huge! And with everyone eager to build all of these widgets, it became very apparent that things could get out of hand with so many devs across all different teams in the company getting involved and building things their own ways.
I took it upon myself to try prevent this from happening, by not only building out the structure of how a ‘widget’ component should look in the codebase, and what files each would require, but I created a command that any engineer could run, and by answering a handful of questions the script would set up everything they need! It would add all the files they need into all the correct places and it meant that an engineer could run this command, answer the questions and have everything they needed to work on the actual widget within a matter of seconds.
The benefit of this became greatly apparent during a War Room day that we held in the office where any engineers who wanted to be involved could come in and build widgets. Within the first 5 minutes, after explaining what command to run, all 10 of the engineers in the War Room were amazed that they had all the files they needed and were writing the logic to populate the widgets. We added so many widgets that day, and I’ve been told many times by so many different levels of engineers within Street that it was only possible because of the work I’d done, which felt like a huge achievement.
Is there such a thing as a typical day or week for you?
I think a ‘typical week’ for me is one where every day is completely different to the last. There haven’t been many days in my near-2 year period here where I’ve thought “Hang on, I’ve done this before…”.
Some days we’re getting our heads down into our IDE of choice (for me it’s PHPStorm) and working on some backend Laravel service logic and writing out PHPUnit tests, some days it’s more frontend, building out Vue components, some days we’re having discussions across the team about upcoming projects on the roadmap and breaking them down from a technical approach, or refining the next batch of tasks to make sure we all have a collective understanding and to see if we can iron out any issues in advance. Then, there are days where we get to share knowledge and ideas, as we just have at our recent StreetCon event; an internal conference for the entire Street Group engineering department to come together, and share a day with speakers, good food and lots of conversations (and the occasional bit of friendly banter).
That’s the great thing about working on an engineering team at Street, no matter what you’ve done today, you can guarantee that tomorrow will be filled with completely different, exciting things to get stuck into!
What’s one reason why you think someone should join us?
Just one? I couldn’t possibly narrow that down to just one, so hopefully some lightning responses will help? We’re:-
- fast-paced and fluid
- sharing and open by default
- filled with opportunities for
- personal/professional growth
- innovation
- social and friendly, there isn’t one ‘bad egg’ in the company
- and, we have dogs in the office!
What’s one reason someone shouldn’t join us?
If you’re happy staying in the same place in your own personal or professional development, or enjoy just sitting at a computer. doing the same, monotonous thing day in, day out, then Street definitely isn’t the place for you!
What are you most excited about for the next 6/12 months?
At the end of last year, our owner’s told us that 2024 would be a huge year for Street Group, and that we’d see huge growth, new hirings, new teams formed, and lots of opportunities across the entire company to get involved in new, exciting things. Initially, we all thought “that’s excellent, I wonder when we’ll start that…?”
The first day back in the office in 2024. That’s when!
That’s how fast paced things are here. New teams have already formed, new people have already joined the company with more on the way, new products are already being built, and it’s only February!
For myself, I’ve set some goals and objectives for the next 12 months, some things I’d like to achieve within the company, for my own career and for my own personal development and I’m so excited, not only at the prospect of what they are and what they’ll mean when I’ve achieved them, but the fact that the company and people within it are also committed to helping to make sure we achieve our goals too. It now feels like less a case of ‘will I achieve them?’ and more of a ‘when?’…
Who’s your favourite office dog?
I have so many favourite dogs in this office.
- I love Charlie because he’s such a little ‘dude’
- I love Nala because she’s a law unto herself
- I love all the dogs that we have in the office
- but I reserve a special place in my heart for the old boy, Ringo.
Late last year, I sadly had to say goodbye to my own old boy, Barney, at the age of 15, and I see a lot of Barney in Ringo, and in a weird way I think Ringo knows as he always comes for a stroke when he’s in the office.
In fact, he’s in the office today and has already been over for a cuddle… I’m now covered in hair! But it’s worth it!
To find out more about life at Street Group, follow us on LinkedIn, see what our team are saying on Glassdoor, or visit our careers site.
