I applied online. The process took 2 weeks.

• Phone interview with a backend engineer
• Tech task (web crawler in Go)
• Code review

I put the code review stage in quotes because it really wasn't. At no point did they ask me about my code except to challenge my use of recursion. I acknowledged that recursion is suboptimal, but I had set it up in a way that it limited the number of HTTP connections and had done time tests. It also was the last bit of logic I implemented, and because the whole thing was fully tested, end to end, that bit of logic could easily be swapped out. I fully expected this to be a topic of conversation and even mentioned it in my README. Unfortunately, the interviewer didn't seem pleased with the fact that I had acknowledged the area for improvement and continued to ask deeper and lower-level technical questions completely unrelated to my code. It really felt like he was trying to prove I was an idiot, and the whole interview felt demeaning. Admittedly, I was completely thrown off and started to get really turned around. The questions, even after having asked colleagues how they would respond, seemed extremely vague and like he was expecting a specific response.

At one point the interviewer asked why you would limit the number of processes on a machine, which was a topic I had off-handedly mentioned due to the introduction of the connection limit that I put in, and I said due to the limitation on resources in a machine that you would not want to hit. This didn't seem to satisfy him, and after what felt like forever, I flat out told him it sounded like he was looking for a specific answer and asked him what he was looking for, and he simply said "memory". The interview had a tinge of hostility throughout, and by halfway through, I was pretty convinced that even if they offered me the job, I was not interested in ever working in an environment that seemed to support this type of contest. I'm a woman, and it felt like a huge red flag to me.

I also asked about testing, and the interviewer said he's on a team that is too important to have time to test! I also asked about the fact that Monzo doesn't do CI/CD, and he said it's not needed. I sincerely hope that Monzo's interview process doesn't represent the culture and that this interviewer is just an outlier. I was told in my feedback that I had really solid code but that I lacked really basic CS knowledge and would require too much mentorship. How did my poor female brain produce such solid code without someone to hold my hand I'll never figure out!

What is an HTTP request?

Describe recursion.