Monzonaut AMA - Dan Hughes

[danhughes]

@AlanDoe

TODAY IS THE DAY!

Dan will be with us between 2pm - 3pm to answer these lovely questions and any more that come in

Right, I think I’ve answered everything that came in before 2pm!

I enjoyed this a lot - thank you all so much for your questions.

Thank you so much for having me, y’all. Speak soon!

[SouthseaOne (Michael)]

Thanks for all the answers @danhughes

Much appreciated by me and (I hope!) the community

Looking forward to more AMAs now!

[davidwalton (Award Winning Hot Coral Analyst)]

That was a great read - thanks @danhughes!

[BritishLibrary]

The only important question left to answer…

@danhughes

If you were in a fight for the Battle of the Dans with @Dan5 who would win?
You can each bring one weapon but it has to be related to your role at Monzo.

Can I bring my new mechanical keyboard ? I’m sure I could do some serious damage with this thing.

Otherwise my weapon is software, which might not make a dent…

@Dan5, what do you reckon to this?

[Dan5 (Dan)]

Oh @danhughes beats me every time!

[AlanDoe (Alan)]

HUGE shoutout for @danhughes knocking it out of the park today dedicating his time to respond to the questions you lovely lot have come up with

This is the start of our AMA series and I’m happy to say we’ve got a pretty extensive list of Monzonauts who will be joining us each week (schedules permitting) to give a little further insight into their corner of Monzo.

They’ve got a lot to live up to after Dan’s today

I’ll keep the Topic open over the weekend to make sure everyone gets a chance to catch up

[o99]

@danhughes

We know it’s not perfect, and we’re still working on getting the right balance! We certainly don’t want anyone to give up out of frustration If there’s a help article that you think should have a Chat button, or a missing help article, please do let us know and we’ll look into it!

Why not a chat button at the end of every single help article? (this definitely does not exist)

If the help article didn’t resolve the issue isn’t that the point at which it makes sense to offer chat support?

[o99]

@danhughes

We let callers hold for 20 minutes, before we ask them to try again later or suggest other routes of contact. Ideally, no-one would need to wait 20 minutes for us to answer, and so this system would be of no note. But, when we are really busy, it can be an inconvenience and we know that. We do keep a close eye on how many people are waiting the full 20 minutes too, and we are looking at alternatives right now.

Good to know you are looking at alternatives.

For the time being, if I have a really pressing issue I’d personally prefer to stay on hold than get cut off after 20 mins.

[danhughes]

@Remi

Got some numbers for you - we end up making an offer to 3.5% of engineering candidates who apply to Monzo. We received 2,380 applications just for our backend role since we opened it on the 8th of June 2020.

[gt94sss2]

@danhughes

Right, I think I’ve answered everything that came in before 2pm!

I think you might have missed mine

Monzonaut AMA - Dan Hughes

Can you give some examples of tasks that you think legacy banks would use spreadsheets for that Monzo don’t?

[Remi]

Thanks a lot for the professional answers

Lucky me I am not a software developer/engineer

[jzw95]

This was a great read, thanks so much @danhughes, and thank you @AlanDoe fir organising.

[Jays6]

Really good read @danhughes

[o99]

One of the things I liked about the AMA was that it gave the sense that certain issues which are often discussed on the community are being worked on internally or have been acknowledged.

The sense that feedback has an impact is often missing from the feedback and ideas threads. I wonder if any improvement can be made here. Perhaps once a feedback/idea generates a certain number of votes it could trigger an expectation of response from Monzo or a status tag (not right now, under consideration, being worked on, etc).

Obviously often that response might be nothing more than saying the feedback has been acknowledged, but it would be better than radio silence.

[AlanDoe (Alan)]

@danhughes recently got a promotion to Tech Lead - not saying taking part in this AMA sealed the deal but…

(Congrats Dan! )

[SouthseaOne (Michael)]

That’s (re)upped the ante on the Dan vs Dan vs Dan vs Dan vs Minnie with a fish fight

Well done @danhughes

[Peter_G]

Congratulations to @danhughes

(Did you clinch it by promising a more performative continuous integration pipeline?)