Initial phone screen by a recruiter was followed up by an introductory interview with a manager. On site interview was with 5 people in the team. Interview process was OK, but their team seemed unorganized and out of sync with each other. Interviewers were friendly and nice people, but not technically sound and working as a team.
Overall office environment is very casual and very relaxed. Give them a try if you want relaxed work environment.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One manager mentioned that they were exploring Jenkins, TeamCity and Bamboo for CI. Then next interviewer said they are going ahead with TeamCity. After that another engineer said they are using Jenkins and in house custom CI systems which will continue to be in use as well. So this caused some confusion on what they have in place and want to have in future.
Same manager said that they are still exploring configuration management tools. Then another engineer said they are setting up Ansible - "Right now our systems are manually configured so we take snapshots (really!!) before making any system changes. But we are going towards Ansible now".
In addition, their small team of 7-8 people had 3 managers. They didn't have good idea about DevOps and technical knowledge. From their perspective developer support and supporting process productivity tools like Atlassian Suite, Rational, Rally, QualityCenter was DevOps.
One engineer claimed that they were using Docker and AWS, but it was hard to believe it based on their answers. My impression was that they wanted to do fancy things without getting basics right.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Guidewire (San Diego, CA) in May 2021
Interview
The interview process was quick and straight forward. I was initially interview by the in-house recruiter and then the hiring manager a couple days later. The next interview was a round of 3 45 minutes interviews in a row. I was contacted by the recruiter about 1 hour after the last interview and was told that they would be extending an offer. I received the written offer the next day and accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
General Linux, AWS, GCP, Terraform, Puppet, and K8s questions.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Guidewire (San Mateo, CA) in Feb 2017
Interview
1) Applied for the job on their corporate website (managed by Jobvite)
2) One week later, I received an email from HR generalist indicating that HR representative would like to schedule a phone call
3) Received phone call from HR representative explaining the company and the role and that the hiring manager picked out my profile personally for an interview
4) Scheduled a phone interview with hiring manager for later that week
5) Phone interview with hiring manager went great
6) Received an email from the HR rep with "good news" that the team would like to have an on-site interview that would last 4 hours
7) Attended interview on-site and met with an awesome group of people. I think the process could have been shortened if they chose to do a panel/group style interview because the questions asked by each individual were identical.
8) I left with the impression that everything was positive and I had a positive impression of them
9) I receive a rushed one-liner email from the HR rep the next day (not even proof-read from what I could tell with the spelling mistakes) saying they won't be moving forward without further explanation
10) I kindly request more information as I'd like a plausible explanation for the result.
11) HR representative asks if I have time to take a phone call the next day. I do.
12) No call.
Dear Guidewire,
You've got a great company from what I can see on your Glassdoor profile. Almost a 5-star rating from nearly 500-ish respondents. I'm sure that your culture internally is great -- as I was able to witness firsthand through the on-site interviews with your staff. But I would like to suggest an improvement in the hiring flow -- especially for candidates who don't make the cut.
1) Be honest and open with them -- tell them the reason why you won't be moving forward with them. If they're asking too much money, if they aren't going to be a good fit for the team or the manager, if they're under-experienced, if they're over-experienced, tell them. We're always looking to improve myself, and any feedback is greatly appreciated.
2) Honor your commitments. If you say you're going to call someone the next day, call them.
3) Treat every interviewee as a potential "ambassador" for the job. There have been times in the past where I've interviewed with companies, been passed-over, but was left with an understanding of why I wasn't chosen in an honest and positive way. And you know what? I actually recommended that company to a former colleague and former coworker... because if they treated me, someone they wouldn't hire, with respect then I imagine they'd treat someone they'd hire even better.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
As a team lead, explain how you'd deal with a co-worker who wasn't pulling their weight on the team.