I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Gusto (Denver, CO) in Jul 2022
Interview
Had an initial call with a recruiter who honestly was not very efficient at keeping things to one call. Okay no big deal.
Next, did a take home test that was supposed to be 4 hours but because I wanted to make sure I could compete with people who would work on it longer than 4 hours, I did as well.
Once I was told I would be moving on to the next steps I was excited. It was 4 different interviewers with people on the team. The first two were on a Friday....My first interviewer was at a friends house and not really engaged in the interview. Think she just wanted to start her weekend. Second interview went fine. It was a Behavior and Values interview.
On Monday I had two more interviews set up. The first one went well with the interviewer trying to explain as much as possible. Final interviewer never showed up.
I emailed the recruiting coordinator 10 min into the call and no response. I again followed up after the interview was supposed to be over and asked for next steps. It has been 72 hours and no response other than the original recruiter saying he would see what is going on.
Definitely was not expecting a company of this size to be this unprofessional.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Take home test was to create a react component with different levels of requirements based on your skill level and time.
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?