I applied through an employee referral. The process took two months.

The interview process was rather slow in the initial stages, but that was probably my fault as I had other commitments that made it hard to schedule the interviews in quick succession. Looking back, this was a positive thing as I felt they were accommodating and understanding.

The first interview was a Hangouts call that probably took around 45 minutes, in which we discussed my experience and career so far. I was asked a couple of abstract, high-level questions regarding architecture, for example.

The next stage was a take-home test. I'm usually wary of such tests, as they end up consuming a lot of time whilst making it impossible to take out something positive from it. Unfortunately, this was such a test. I was given a codebase with a couple of bugs and some design specs that were missing quite a few things (this is intended), and asked to implement new features. I ended up spending six-plus hours on it.

As a follow-up to the test, I had another interview—a Hangouts call. This time an engineer went through some parts of my submission, asking questions about how I did things and why. The person interviewing me was friendly and made me feel at ease. Still, I find this step was not worth the many hours required to put in.

My final interviews were scheduled around two weeks after that. This final stage is composed of three distinct interviews, one hour each. I have to admit I felt uncomfortable with the setup, as it feels quite dated and intimidating. I was taken to a large meeting room in the basement and waited until the first couple of interviewers joined. They sat across the table from myself and asked me a bunch of questions regarding my software engineering expertise, which is Android, by the way.

They have a script they go through, which involves asking how to implement certain features they have in the app (I felt that the closer the answer you give is to their actual implementation, the better, but that's just a feeling) and showcasing bits of code and asking what's wrong in those. We didn't go through the whole thing as we ran out of time. They were open to me asking questions, which is good.

After this first hour, the first couple of engineers left and other two people came in—a product manager and a designer. This second interview was the product-focused interview. This interview felt jagged. I was asked questions such as ideas for the app, ideas for new features for the code test app, and things like how do I prefer to receive designs from designers. I had answers for these questions as Monzo is a product I'm fond of and came up with features for the test (and how to do things potentially different), but it seemed like it didn't amount to anything.

The whole hour was mostly "here's a question" and no real interesting discussion came off of any, which felt really underwhelming. I've been a user for quite some time now, and even though I had taken the time to go through their blog and public roadmap like they suggested, it didn't matter at all for this interview.

The final interview was next. The previous two interviewees were replaced by two engineers, one of whom was a backend engineer. This stage was focused on general software engineering. The way it was initially described to me made me think that it was going to be the hardest one, as I was told it would cover things like data structures, security, etc. In actuality, I found it the best one.

The engineers made me feel at ease and asked me interesting questions, and seemed to be trying to build more of a discussion around topics than just asking a series of questions. I could see that they probably had a list of questions and topics to cover, but they were good in making sure there was a flow to the interview. Honestly, this interview made me feel excited about working at Monzo, which is a good thing.

One thing I didn't like, though, was that the engineers were constantly writing on their laptops throughout the interview. I understand this was probably them noting down certain aspects of my answers, but it ends up being distracting.

After this, the whole thing was done. I went home and got an email the next day saying that I had failed to showcase the product knowledge that they're looking for and that I should look to improve this. A bit unspecific for me, especially after having put in many hours in this process. It was a rather generic message, and I'll eat my hat if it's not just a canned one.

I replied to the email asking if they could give me more details, but never got a reply. I've had my fair share of interviews in the industry, but none made me feel disappointed and disrespected as this one, given the time I was asked to put in, only to get a canned response.

I decided to write this review for a couple of reasons: to shine a bit more light on their process so that anyone who's interviewing there has an idea of what to expect, and to provide feedback for Monzo, even though I didn't get it myself.

How do you prefer to get design specs from designers?