Pros: Monzo ticks a lot of boxes for me: - Broad and inspiring company mission ("make money work for everyone") - Challenging problems to solve - Exceptional people to solve them with - Fair pay and generous options - Excellent work/life balance The biggest thing is the mission. There is so much potential for making money work better for people. And doing the hard work so things "just work" for customers is one of our core strengths. Now we're also moving towards profitability, I think we're in for a really exciting few years! I also really value the 1:1 culture. I love speaking with new Monzonauts – especially hearing that the reality of working at Monzo matches up to their expectations 🙌 – but it's equally possible to speak to people like Jonas (CTO) in their office hours.

Cons: As a bank Monzo operates in a (rightly) heavily regulated industry. Sometimes that slows us down; it means we can't necessarily do everything we would like, and if something goes wrong, it can be painful to make right. We're also growing up. The core values of Monzo "the startup" live on, but we're a mid-size, systemic bank now. Any change we make can impact over 5 million people. That's amazing when it goes right, but we also have to take a lot of care to make sure it does so. And edge cases now affect hundreds of people! If you want to work on platform challenges, I'd suggest you specifically apply for a role in the Platform team. We have a lot of great tools and abstractions which speed us up working on product challenges, but I know some engineers on product squads sometimes miss lower-level technical problem solving. Some of the reviews on here are pretty mixed. I think some of that reflects the difference between customer support ("COps") and the rest of the team. If you're reading this and considering applying as a COp, I'd encourage you to go ahead and make your own judgement. For sure we've had growing pains in customer support. And some of the benefits might not be what they once were. But we still have huge positive intent, and the very core – including COps getting options like everyone else – remains.

Pros: People really care deeply about the product and the customers. I feel like my opinion is respected and that I'm taken seriously. We have long ditched the "move fast and break things" approach and are focused more on building sustainably. The people are genuinely lovely. In web, we're encouraged to share our ideas about system design and technology - it's a group effort. Flexible working hours. I can leave the office at 5:30-6 and switch off from work - I'm encouraged not to have Slack on my phone. We have on-call engineers to deal with problems out of hours, and on the one occasion I've had to deal with a problem I could take time off in lieu. We can take mental health days as well as sick days. Monzo is a very open book when it comes to mental health which is so important. As for benefits: annual learning budget, free lunch twice weekly, subsidized health insurance.

Cons: You need to be quite outspoken if you want to make an impact. I think the fast paced environment can be off-putting for some, but rather than saying "it's not for everyone" we should be addressing how we can make it more inclusive. Diversity is not bad for gender (could be better, especially in engineering) and we're great at LGBTQ+ representation but we are quite poor in terms of BAME representation. We've just hired a Head of Diversity & Inclusion though and I'm excited to see how she can help. I've had a few different managers in the time I've been here which has been a bit disruptive but they've all been good!

Pros: I have nothing positive to say

Cons: I've worked as a software engineer at several companies and Monzo has been my worst experience by far. I was miserable every single day I worked there and it negatively impacted my mental health. If work isn't the most important aspect of your life and you aren't okay with working late almost everyday then this isn't the right job for you. - Unrealistic expectations, there's a huge amount of pressure to deliver quickly with no recognition. If you cause one incident it will haunt you in performance reviews while all the good work you've done is ignored. It felt like I was doing 2 jobs at once and when I wasn't at work I was stressed / anxious about going back to work, this began to affect my mental health. Most people on my team seemed to usually start work around 8am and finish at 6:30pm. My team lead seemed to work until late every evening and submitted PRs at 11pm. - Toxic Culture, the comments here about the company feeling like a cult are all on the mark. If you're not in the clique your thoughts and feelings are ignored. Monzo is worshipped as a benevolent entity, it cannot be criticised and neither can the 'Monzo way of doing things' (reinventing the wheel). You will feel like an imposter (because to them, that's what you are!) -Monzo fails diversity when it comes to hiring from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Sometimes I felt like I wasn't accepted socially because I didn't get a degree from a red brick institution. - Hire to fire policy, you are made to compete with your team instead of collaborate with them. Everything goes into dataland and your manager will compare how mang deployments and PRs you ship compared to the rest of your team. If you are the lowest performer on your team you will be put on a PIP. This is how unwanted people are quietly pushed out of the company, it's taboo to discuss people getting pushed out also. - Oncall is a joke, I pushed into doing it by management and was on call for things I'd never worked on. - Very difficult to find information, most of the time the rest of my team ignored questions. Everything is on Notion and the Notion search is terrible. You will spend a lot of time searching Slack to find links to Notion pages which hopefully won't be too out of date. Judging by the onboarding experience, you're just expected to know everything on Day 1 so you won't be needing the documentation to do your job 🙃 - No bonuses and low pay rises.