How would you explain Monito to your friend in 3 sentences?
When we were kids, my brother François and I, along with our cousins, founded a small organization to support a village in Cameroon where our aunt was working at the time. Fifteen years later, we were still sending money to Cameroon every few months, but we started to get really frustrated by the high fees and bad exchange rates. By then, François had developed his entrepreneurial spirit together with Laurent, a friend from HEC Lausanne. The three of us realized that millions of migrants where facing the same issue each month, and were unable to find cheaper alternatives. We soon understood that the issue was the lack of transparency because most of the cost of a money transfer is hidden in the exchange rate. This is why we are building a transparent comparison website, which has now been used by millions of users around the world to find a cheaper provider for their transfers. We estimate that if everyone sending money abroad was using Monito, 28 billion US dollars could be saved each year, a worthy mission don’t you think?
Monito - current job openings and Transparent Company Profile
🛠️ Tech stack & Development process at Monito
Technologies that we use
Can I choose the hardware? What is your coding setup (IDE, OS, Build server, Cloud provider)?
Of course, you can pick your own hardware. Most of us work on MacBook Pros, some of us on ThinkPads from Lenovo. You’ll also get all the accessories you need and the premium noise-canceling headphones of your choice. We work on VS Code, use Docker, CircleCI and AWS.
Our software development process
How can I grow as a developer at your company (career paths and learning opportunities)?
First it is important to say that we are a product-focus company, where developers play a central role. Working as a developer at Monito means that you have a direct impact on thousands of users each week. Combine that with the short release cycles (we push to production several times a week on average) and it’s easy for everyone in the team to see the impact of his work. The first way you’ll grow as a developer is by learning new technologies and approaches, through discussions with your colleagues, research sessions on your own or code reviews. We don’t have a dogmatic approach and our tech-stack is the result of pragmatic choices and our desire to use the best tool in every situation. We are also not afraid to take risks, we were for example among the first to start using Vue.js in production on a large-scale website. Because we keep a “small-team” culture, you will also be involved in the whole lifecycle of a development task, starting with sharing your feedback on the conception of a feature up until the deployment in production of what you worked on. You have the ownership of what you work on - this means you also take care about testing, deploying and monitoring that everything works once it is in the hands of our users. Your “career path” as a developer at Monito is to grow with the company. We are a rapidly-growing ambitious team, and we recently raised 2.5 Million CHF to accelerate this growth and help more people save on their transfers.
Do you prefer always writing your own software for everything or use frameworks if they fit?
We’ll try to use an existing solution first, but if it doesn’t really fit our requirements or if the downsides of using it (performance, dependencies, etc.) are too important - which is often the case - we would then decide to write our own stuff.
🔍 Check out the active job openings at Monito
👩💻 Company culture
What are your key values and what are some daily work examples of them?
Our four key values are to be focused on impact, to make sense of data, to transcend frontiers, and to earn trust every day. You can find more about what we mean by that and how they impact our daily work in our public company handbook.
How diverse are your teams? What is the typical team size and structure?
We are currently (summer 2020) a company of 20 people. We doubled the size of our team in the last 12 months and intend to double it again in the next 12. We have 11 nationalities represented at Monito and are actively working to improve our gender balance (currently 25% female / 75% male).
Do you offer any helpful initiatives for parents with young children?
We have a 10 days paternity leave (the days off can be used any time during the first year after the birth of your child). We are also super flexible with working hours and remote working which many of the young parents among us find to be the most important perk.
What is your remote work policy?
You can work from home or from abroad a few hours a day, a few days a week, and a few weeks per year. We have people coming into the office only once a week, and we starting to consider having 100% remote employees as well.
If you do Agile - how is your agile process & release cycle? How much coding vs meetings/planning?
We’re definitely agile, but we don’t “do agile”. We currently organized our work across to tracks, the “fast tasks track” and the “strategic project” track. A fast task is a task that take one engineer less than a week to push to production, and on this track, we work with a big kanban board and optimize for flow efficiency. Strategic projects require more research and planning, and we’re careful to prioritize the projects that really move the needles. We split projects into two parts, the kick-off phase (where we work on the most uncertain aspects of the projects) and the building phase (when we switch into implementation mode with a clear target release in sight).
Do you have some in-house tech workshops or hackathons? Is there an educational budget?
We learn from each other continuously, mostly via our systematic code reviews and through a bit of pair-programming. We don’t have formal workshops or hackathons yet, but we did start a Vue.js meetup in Lausanne.
Can I work on my projects or open source for a part of time?
You are obviously free to work on your open-source projects in your own time, but we don’t have a specific policy regarding open-source.
📖 The Book Question™
What do I need to do to buy a 50$ educational book on company expense?
You would start by sharing the link to the book you want to purchase on our slack channel #development-chat just in case someone already has it laying around or has a recommendation to make (maybe some of us will be interested by the same book). You would then be encouraged to purchase the book directly and to send the invoice to [email protected] and you’ll get reimbursed with your next paycheck. The last book we purchased was the second edition of Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, written by Martin Fowler.
💼 How does the interview process at Monito look like?
Our hiring process can vary a little bit from one position to the next, but it usually consists of the following steps: 1. Application form 2. Phone interview 3. Take-home hiring challenge 4. In-person interview 5. Reference calls 6. Offer The fastest we’ve gone from receiving an application to making an offer to a candidate was five days, but the process usually takes between 2–4 weeks. The first thing we want to hear from you is therefore what got you excited when you read the job description and how you can relate to the mission of the company. Try to be as specific as possible in explaining why you think Monito is just the opportunity you are looking for. Prepare the questions you need us to answer to determine whether Monito is the right move for you, this process is also about you interviewing us. We need to feel that you would thrive in our working environment. Read about our values and how we work (for example in our Employee Handbook) and tell us how you fit in, maybe by sharing past experiences. Of course, you’ll need to persuade us that you have the required skills for the position. We’ll look at your LinkedIn profile or CV to get a first idea, but it’s usually the hiring challenge and the following final interview that allows you to demonstrate how you could contribute to the success of the team. Our challenges are designed to mimic real tasks that you will accomplish when working at Monito and the follow-up discussions are the occasion to interact on the work you deliver, this means this challenge also gives you insights about whether the position is a right fit for you. These take-home exercises are position-specific. In general, candidates are given about one week to complete an exercise on which we expect them to spend 4–5 hours. We value your time and know that this represents a significant investment. On our side, we also invest time and resources to analyze your work and prepare for the discussion. For these reasons, we only suggest taking the challenge to candidates whom we genuinely believe might be a good fit for the position. If possible, we’ll organize the final interview in our offices so that we can meet face to face. We like to invite candidates for lunch in our offices before the interview to allow you to meet the team. If you succeed in convincing us that you are a great fit for the position, we’ll then ask for the contact details of 1–2 persons you worked with in the past for short reference calls to confirm our intuition. At this stage, we should hopefully be ready to extend an offer, which always falls within the salary range disclosed in the job description. We set salaries based on a grid to ensure fair and consistent compensation to everyone in the team.
Got any questions?
🕵️♂️ Extra - insider interview with Paul Ntawuruhunga
Paul Ntawuruhunga agreed to share a personal opinion about working at Monito. He is a Senior Software Engineer at Monito and works there since 2019
What are you currently working on at Monito?
Today I’m finishing the implementation of the new design of Monito’s results page and will launch an A/B test, which consists of presenting the new layout to only a subset of our users in order to validate that it has a positive impact on their experience. We'll continue to iterate on this new design until it performs better than the old one.
What do you like most about working at Monito?
I feel that we are growing together and learning from each other, even between different teams. This environment boosts my creativity as new ideas/experiments are encouraged and are often realized in no time. We know that mistakes lead to success, this is why I'm never been pointed out when I made a bad decision.
What are the things that are not perfect and you would like to change?
Change in priorities happens frequently, which sometimes requires difficult trade-offs to be made between well-written code / maintainable projects and delivering new features faster. It's often frustrating to see the codebase becoming so complex that adding a simple feature takes several days. On the positive side, responding to our users needs always comes first.