I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Gusto (Denver, CO) in Aug 2023
Interview
I had a former coworker who is an employee refer me in early August. I got a request for interview availability 1 week later. 1st interview: It was a quick conversation with the recruiter about the overall process, the engineering team and culture at Gusto, etc. - 30 minutes 2nd Interview: I then had a "Technical Phone Assessment" that was 1:1 with an engineer. - 60 minutes After this step, I heard nothing for about another week and when the recruiter finally emailed back, she ignored the question asking about next steps. I had to have my friend that worked there ping internally to get a response. They eventually swapped recruiting coordinators on me to someone who would respond. After this step is the "final round" Day 1 3rd Interview: Engineering Manager Interview - 60 minutes 4th Interview: Architectural Design Interview - 75 minutes 5th Interview: Work Session - 90 minutes Day 2 6th Interview: Values based interview - 30 minutes 7th Interview: Coding Skills Assessment - 60 minutes Interviews 4 and 5 were supposed to be 2 people, but 1 did not show up in each of them. The values based interview was a one on one, but that person just no-showed. I guess punctuality or attendance are not values at Gusto? 🤷🏻♂️ I got #6 rescheduled for the day after Day 2 finished after hounding the original unresponsive recruiting coordinator to get it rescheduled so I could finalize the interview process. I read a lot of reviews here about getting ghosted or having things drag on until they felt stale, so I pushed to have it completed. The following Monday, the technical recruiter sent an email asking if I had time for a call to go over the results of the interview. I'm mostly writing this review because I scoured every interview review here to see if anyone had gotten rejected by phone or video call. All of the reviews that had rejections in them were by email or did not specify. I was rejected by phone. You can be rejected by phone. If Gusto is reading this, I would much rather have been rejected by email with the option to schedule a call for feedback. I spent 6 hours and 45 minutes interviewing with them. Can we just shorten that by maybe 1 hour and 45 minutes? Do you NEED 3 technicals and an architectural design?
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Build an in-memory key: value store that can retrieve values by key or a value of a key at a specific time. Q: given a string "asdfxyz" and substrings ["sd", "xy"], it can return the substrings wrapped in bold tags: => "asdfxyz"
7 interviews, too long process. Unfair evaluation with biased interviewers. On one of the interviews, interviewer made a mistake but insisted heavily on it. Might be a loss of time since the salary offered was also average.
Overall I would give this a 'meh' in terms or interview. And I have done a number over my 10+ years of industry exp (and have worked at few places of this size). The process is long and you will get 'strung along' for sure. I will preface this with 'everybody I spoke with was nice'. The HR person was quite nice and accommodating. The hiring manager was also nice, but spoke very fast and kind of danced around the 'what would I do in this role' or the 'what would my day to day be like'. The whole process has a lot of rounds. To the point where I think they think they are a faang or some AI hype type company. I had multiple pre-onsite rounds. Then an onsite that I think was 4 to 5 rounds (I forget, it has been a few months...). The 'tech' questions and the 'system design' questions was quite generic and easy actually. To the point where we did not dig into anything 'meaty' at all. It was almost like the questions were meant to be more to a junior level person. I guess studying for leet code and tons of practical stuff was not ideal. I think I did fine on all the questions. They ended up not giving me an offer, but it took them a long time (I think 2.5 weeks) to give me a no, after a number of 'everybody loved you' type messages. I felt very strung along.
They also have some 'values' interview. Honestly I think this is where I failed. It seems like it is more like 'does the hr person like you'.
I had some 'red flags' for sure. Any message I had sent to the potential hiring manager or HR was ignored. There was not 1 part of the interview that actually determined how I would fit into this role. There was no direct questions on the domain itself for the role. There was no SQL or performance/scaling questions. There was no trouble shooting questions. I could not get a single answer of what I would do in this role. At all.
I did get the vibe that engineering was kind of a second class citizen in the org. Which makes sense. But it also seems like the org moves very very slow and this was apparently in each interviewer telling me as such.
I get the feel they are looking for 'bigger company' type people who are more interested in planning vs doing.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The tech questions are fairly generic. Nothing that would not be seen in other reviews. I would make sure you have knowledge of hash maps/nested hash maps and some leet code easy problems. The questions are actually so easy you might trip yourself up.
It’s a long process that can be shortened to four, or at most five, interviews by combining some steps. However, they’re flexible with scheduling, so I was able to complete all interviews within 15 days. All the interviewers were kind and supportive throughout
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Did you have any impact on codebase that effects not your team but whole company?
