Software Engineer • Former Employee
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 You will spend a lot of time searching Slack to find links to Notion pages which hopefully won't be too out of date.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.