A recruiter reached out to me and we scheduled a call to learn about the team/openings/interview loop. Then there is a technical screening interview where you solve a Leetcode-style medium level problem. If you pass this, you advance to the Onsite. Onsite consists of 3 more technical interviews -- 2 coding, 1 system design -- and 2 behavioral (hiring manager and values). The problems were challenging but every single interviewer I worked with was kind, fun to work with, and genuinely supportive of me as I worked through each topic. In fact, the kindness was so striking -- in all the interviewers AND recruiting staff -- that when the opportunity came to consider an offer, I already knew the answer was going to be yes. Easily one of the best (albeit, challenging) interview experiences I've ever had.

I scheduled a call with the recruiter but when the time for it came, no one called and I instead received an email from the recruiter 10 minutes after the scheduled time saying he had been "pulled into an urgent meeting just now." We rescheduled for Friday afternoon of the following week, but again when the time came no one called. About fifteen minutes after the agreed upon time, I received an email from the recruiter saying he had the flu. He requested my availability for Monday, and I provided a six hour window. The interview confirmation I received was for a time outside of the availability window I had given, but at least this time around the recruiter actually called. It was a pretty standard recruiter screen and it seemed to go well. The recruiter told me he would be meeting with the hiring team within the next couple days and would get back to me with an update by the end of the week. I followed up early the next week when I hadn't received an update, and then again the following week when my first follow up didn't receive a response. I didn't directly receive a response to my second follow up, but the day after I did receive a boiler plate rejection email from a generic Gusto address. The recruiter's general incompetence made me wonder if my application had ever even made it to the right person, so I figured out who the hiring manager was and messaged him directly on LinkedIn. He confirmed that my resume had made it to his inbox but said that he had probably "screened it out quickly" because I hadn't listed the tech stack for each of my previous roles and thus it was not sufficiently clear to him that I had Rails experience. FWIW Ruby and Rails are both listed in the skills section at the end of my resume; no other languages or frameworks are listed. My cover letter also discussed both my familiarity with Gusto's engineering blog posts on Rails topics and a specific example of a project I had done involving deep knowledge of Rails, but doubtless the hiring manager didn't actually read the cover letter. Apparently he just expected "Ruby on Rails" to be plastered in all caps all over the resume. Anyway, the job seemed interesting but given that all my actual interactions with people at the company were negative, I'm not really disappointed about not getting the job.