GutCheck

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at GutCheck (Denver, CO) in March 2018.

Interview

Started with an intro call with the recruiter (great guy). They gave me a run down of the company, the position they were hiring for, and answered any questions that I had. They were super thorough at this stage for being the first call - I had a solid understanding of the business and what they were trying to accomplish. The call lasted about 30 minutes.

A few days later, I had a call with the Director of Engineering. This was a discussion about my current job and previous roles. Pretty typical conversation which was very low stress. I think there is a real focus put on communication skills. This call lasted about 30 minutes as well.

Finally, there was an onsite interview at the downtown Denver office. This was shortly after the previous call. They didn't waste much time getting me through the process, which was great. When I arrived at the office, I was given a tour and introduced to a few people.

The first part was a technical screening. I was brought into a room with 4 developers: the director of engineering, team lead, and 2 senior engineers. They all sat down on one side of the room with laptops in their laps. At first this was a bit intimidating - having multiple people evaluating you and potentially taking notes on their laptop was overwhelming. We pretty quickly settled in and they started asking me questions. Everyone was super nice and made me feel comfortable, which made the stress disappear. They each went through their set of questions until we ran out of time. It was a lot of "what does x do?", "how do you do y?", "can you design z on the whiteboard?". Questions covered a lot of the front end (JS and React knowledge), some backend, and a bit of DB design.

The second part was the "couch interview". Basically the non-technical portion of the process. We moved to a new room where I was interviewed by 3 people: the team lead from the previous interview, the QA lead, and the scrum master. At this point I was pretty comfortable with the people interviewing me and had a good sense of the office vibe (as good as one could get from 1+ hours there). I was relaxed, so this part just felt like a conversation. This section felt a little archaic, though - they ran through literally every single job on my resume and asked the same set of questions for each role. Some of the questions didn't apply for me in particular, but we did our best to get through them. I didn't sense any pressure to answer a certain way - we just chatted, which was nice.

The interview concluded and I was sent on my way. I believe I interviewed on a Thursday and received an offer early the following week. Again, they made a real effort to get me through quickly. I had 2 other companies that I was in the final stages with that they wanted to beat, which they ultimately did!

Interview Questions