I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Gusto (Denver, CO) in Oct 2023
Interview
The recruiter was great. She guided me through the LONG process and told me exactly how each round of interviews would happen. I went through SIX rounds of interviews. In my opinion that’s way too excessive. they won’t reject you during a mid round. They ask you to go through all rounds of interviews before they get back to you. I had to take a PTO from my normal job in order to do 3 interviews from Gusto almost back-to-back. All the interviewers — with the exception of one guy who did a skills assessment session — were great. They were helpful, open, and willing to pair together. I didn’t feel an adversarial relationship. The skills assessment guy — he unfortunately had an aura of “I’m very smart and I l like to flaunt it”. He didn’t provide much info about the problem at hand. The interview felt adversarial and uncomfortable. I wouldn’t want to work with that dude on the same team. After the last interview, I got a response 1 week later. The response was a standard nicely written rejection. Overall — the people were nice. The company seems pretty cool and I was a bit bummed about going through SIX rounds of interviews and then being rejected. Gusto — do you really need SIX rounds?
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first skills-based interview was about manipulating payouts in a hash. People are owed some amount of money. Gusto is their payroll. Gusto has to pay these people out evenly. Go ahead and code that. Show your work, talk through it. I didn’t get to the end but I still passed this round according to the recruiter. The interviewer was a really great guy — very empathetic. The behavior interviews were standard. Read other glass door reviews for Gusto. They were fairly easy. Have 5 stories you’re prepared to talk about from your past experiences as your current / former company. I highly recommend using ChatGPT as your behavior interview trainer. The second skills assessment question — with the “know it all” interviewer — was complicated. It dealt with tax deductions from payroll. The problem was that it had a lot of domain knowledge associated with it. I don’t know how payroll works and not knowing that hurt me in the interview. I recall needing to use Time functions (practice those) and also be comfortable working with hashes and arrays. The third skills assessment was about building a key-value store. This was not system design of a key-value store — just building a simple key-value store program. Kind of like Redis. You’ll need to build a getter and a getter function. The assessment was good and pretty straightforward. Practice your hashes for this one and also Time functions. The system design interview was really good. It was about building a restaurant management application where there are tens of restaurants with each one having their own manager. The restaurant has waiters, chefs, etc… You need a way for them to set their time availability but also for a manager to set what kind of workers they need on a specific week. Think calendars. The interviewer was a really great dude that truly paired with me. No need to scale things. Just build out what a database schema would look like and talk through how you might implement things on the backend. I liked this interview a lot. This is not your typical FAANG system design — AKA I know a lot of complicated terms to impress you.
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?
Senior Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Gusto with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 21% positive. To compare, the company-average is 50.4% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Senior Software Engineer roles take an average of 16 days to get hired, when considering 28 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Gusto overall takes an average of 24 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Gusto as a Senior Software Engineer according to 28 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 33%
One on one interview: 25%
Skills test: 23%
Personality test: 7%
Group panel interview: 5%
Presentation: 3%
Background check: 2%
IQ intelligence test: 2%
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