u/Smolfrog888

Hello!

I'm currently buying a house and selling a house at the same time, and I think my solicitors might be rinsing me. They were recommended by a colleague for being really good and on the ball, so I asked them for a quote and it seemed relatively okay. I didn't get quotes from other places, as everyone else I asked could only tell me what solicitors to avoid at all costs, so I sort of just gave it a google / asked Claude (lol) to see how it stacked up against the averages for the area. It seemed alright and inline ish with what others paid, maybe a touch high. Can't say not getting other quotes was my brightest idea.

Fast forward to being half way through the process, and the additional fees are absolutely astronomical! I'm getting charged £395 for a Gifted Deposit AML check, and possibly a £325 per person charge for source of funds verifications which sound an awful lot like what my £45pp AML checks are doing.. We've not even got a complex process, just savings and this one gift which we were given about 8 months ago.

So far, they've added potentially £1,800 on to our estimate in additional fees. Some of which we knew and were just in the small print at the bottom of the estimate like acting for mortgage lender and so on.. but some of them are completely out of the blue, ie "Oh here's some forms to sign and some money to pay for us to crack on with it.. oh and here's a list of additional fees just so you know".. We're sitting at about £7.5K for selling a £425K house, and buying an £800K house.

TLDR: What have your solicitors been charging you guys for selling and buying.. and did it balloon up with additional expenses?

I can't imagine there's much I can do now, we're half way through with contracts signed and such and I'd rather not start the whole process again with anyone cheaper as the amount these lot will probably charge me will likely make the whole ordeal the same price as if I stuck with them.

Thanks in advance! :)

I feel this question is a bit of a cheeky one, as I guess it's the whole point of the tech test is to be able to know, but how far do you guys usually go for a tech test submission?

I'm currently doing the Monzo web crawler tech test and i've not got much practice doing tech tests as I've been at my current place for a good number of years now. They say spend no more than 4 hours on it, but they want it as if it's a production piece of code. They say they don't want something fancy, but they want to see how you design your code. The whole thing feels like a trap.

A year or so ago I did a tech test for Kraken (Octopus) and severely fucked it up. I took the time limit very literally, thinking they'd see right through it if I went over, so had a minimal design with a couple of tests and a long list in my readme of what I'd do if I had more time. They essentially sent back my list as reasons I wasn't successful. Lesson learned, never pay attention to the time limits again.

This time round, I'm trying my hand at using AI to help. I'm not allowed to use AI at work at all so this is all very new to me. For the moment I'm just trying to use Gemini to help me plan out what I need to do, and as expected I'm getting wildly different answers depending on the day. A fat chunk of this is through me being inexperienced with AI and probably not having the right set up, but I'm just using Gemini as I have it to hand at the moment.

I've got two routes which I can take this web crawler test in Python.

The first is the full shebang using something like Celery workers to asynchronously pick up tasks from a queue, crawl them and report back the links it finds, adding new links to the queue as items to crawl, saving it all in a postgres db so that you can query the results and such. This option is a lot more scalable and using something like async processing is a design pattern I'd be using in production. It's sure as hell not 4 hours though.

The second is a way more simplistic approach, using asyncio in a python script to go through the links. Admittedly I need to do way more research on how this would work as the first approach has been my main plan of how I'd do this before I even applied for the job, but this is the rabbit hole that Gemini decided to take me down last night. It's more appropriate for the task at hand, and not over engineering but It's single threaded so only scalable vertically, though definitely a 4 hour job.

When looking through other people's public github repo submissions for this test, they all seem to use the single thread approach, no one else is using such a heavy hammer to hit such a small nail which makes me think perhaps my original approach is complete overkill (it is). At the same time however, I can fully imagine that if I submit a single threaded approach I'm going to get grilled like fuck over the fact it's not scalable. I feel quite confident that I could argue what I'd do differently if It had to handle scraping a massive site, and I could design the code in a way that I could swap a few bits and pieces out to make it async in future, but a lot of other people have commented on not being successful in interviews cause Monzo were looking for a particular type of design pattern which is exactly what they use and anything different is unfathomable. Considering they're such heavy users of Kafka and event driven architecture, I feel like the first approach is way more up their street.

I'm cautious of the mistake I made with the Kraken test, and this Monzo application is the only one I have going on right now. I can afford to spend the time on the fancier solution but I have no idea which approach is best to go with given the context. I don't want to over engineer a solution to a pretty small task, especially when this is only supposed to take 4 hours, but at the same time I don't want them to think that this is how I'd design production level code.

If anyone has any advice they're happy to give, I'll be incredibly grateful! TIA 😄

Hello!

I'm just about to kick off the process of interviewing at Monzo for Senior Backend Engineer. I've got the initial call with developers that I need to schedule.

Has anyone got any advice, opinions, or reviews of working at Monzo as a Senior Dev? I'd love to hear it all! This question has been asked before but the answers are about a year old now so anything a bit more current would be grand.

I guess points I'm specifically looking for are:

- Work life balance

- Likelihood of being made redundant or being pip'ed out

- Remote working vs working in the office

- How they handle people learning on the job (I don't know Go, I'm also far from being a perfect dev)

- Any advice for the interview process!

Thanks :)