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Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience - London, United Kingdom

July 7, 2023
Neutral ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I applied online. The process took 3 weeks.

It was very slow for each stage and hearing back. I really enjoyed all the calls with the engineers up until the take-home project review. The take-home project was relatively easy, and you just have to develop it as if it were to be a productionised service. When I then jumped on the call to discuss this, I was with an engineer that I meet all the time at every company, those young ones who know all the jargon off of the top of their head and think their way is the best way of doing something, and often start speaking aloud before thinking through what they are saying. I got this impression from when they were pushing me for answers of things that I had already demonstrated. For example, I created a configurable timeout on my http client and they were asking questions basically hinting towards implementing a timeout. When I finally realised they had not noticed the timeout already implemented, I referred them back to it, and the penny would drop.

Eventually, they started getting into how I would reconfigure my laptop to make the service run even faster. I must have given an abundance of ways the service could be changed within a software approach (because this is a software development role, I am not going to be reconfiguring their servers in this role), and they took me down a path of freeing up CPU and memory. That's not my strengths; that's not my day-to-day role. And it felt like they were trying to steer conversation towards their strengths as it was not favourable when talking on the software.

I finished the interview and spoke to my wife and I said, I think from a software point of view I couldn't have done better, but I don't think they understood the software and the pros and cons of different approaches, and sometimes trying to be too clever is not good when you move on and your code is left for the next person to try and understand. There was a lot of lack of experience around software development principles.

And the next day I got my decline. I felt it was harsh as I think I performed well and timely, with great experience in the technologies used and the industry. I am clearly very bitter as I was excited by this role.

Questions

Develop a web crawler service.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 12 interview experiences for the Monzo Senior Software Engineer role in London, England.

Success Rate

0%
Pass Rate

Monzo's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles in London, England is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive33%
Neutral33%
Negative33%

Candidates reported having mixed feelings for Monzo's Senior Software Engineer interview process in London, England.

Monzo Work Experiences