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 PTO from my normal job in order to do three 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, unfortunately, had an aura of “I’m very smart and I 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 one 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?

The first skills-based interview was about manipulating payouts in a hash. People are owed some amount of money, and Gusto is their payroll. Gusto has to pay these people out evenly. The task was to code that, show your work, and talk through it. I didn't get to the end but still passed this round, according to the recruiter. The interviewer was a really great guy—very empathetic.

The behavioral interviews were standard. Read other Glassdoor reviews for Gusto. They were fairly easy. Have five stories you're prepared to talk about from your past experiences at your current/former company. I highly recommend using ChatGPT as your behavioral interview trainer.

The second skills assessment question, with the "know-it-all" interviewer, was complicated. It dealt with tax deductions from payroll, a topic with a lot of domain knowledge. 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 simple key-value store program, not a system design of one, similar to Redis. You'll need to build a getter and a setter 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, each with its own manager. The restaurant has waiters, chefs, etc. You need a way for them to set their time availability and for a manager to set what kind of workers they need on a specific week, thinking about calendars. The interviewer was a really great dude that truly paired with me. There was 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, where the goal is to impress with complicated terms.