San Francisco interns having fun at an intern event.

The following are my contributions to the Gusto Engineering Blog article From Interns to Engineers: Class of 2023’s Transition to Full-Time Roles at Gusto, originally published on January 29, 2024.

Why Gusto? A Personal Journey Back to Familiar Grounds

One of the things that helped bring me back to Gusto was my familiarity with my team and the work that I would be doing as a full-time engineer. During my internship, my team gave me the chance to work outside of my original intern project by contributing to several ongoing initiatives that the whole team was working on. This gave me a better taste of what it would be like to work at Gusto full-time, working on multiple projects rather than just the prescribed intern project.

The Significance of Mentorship and Diverse Experience at Gusto

Something that stuck out to me about Gusto was how much my team, people empowerer (manager), and mentors at Gusto supported me, both during and after the internship process. Not only were they constant advocates for me, they also were willing to support me more broadly as well. Even though I ended up returning to Gusto, my former teammates also did not hesitate to write me recommendations and offer referrals through their networks for other opportunities as well. During my time here, I’ve had the opportunity to really connect with people I consider mentors - some of the best mentorship conversations that I’ve had have been on the train going home after work with my coworkers taking the same train.

Choosing Projects and Crafting a Career Path

I came into Gusto thinking that I wanted to work on infrastructure and site reliability engineering, even as an intern. Entry-level opportunities for site reliability engineering are exceedingly rare, so I’m really grateful that my team took a chance on an intern (and later new grad) like me. They gave me the opportunity to dive deep into that specialty, working with industry standard tools like Terraform, Kubernetes, and Helm. I appreciate that Gusto straddles the gap between a large and small company, being large enough to support specializations like site reliability engineering, while being small enough to not have things get lost in bureaucracy.

The Importance of Continuous Learning and User Engagement

Every day I learn something new working here, whether it’s just reading through Slack, learning about what our other engineers are doing, or mastering the ins and outs of new tools and paradigms that I didn’t have the opportunity to work with in school to solve fascinating new problems. Even while working on an internal-facing team like infrastructure, our goals are still focused on the customer and end user - for example our incident responses always include what the customer impact was, just to make sure we keep that perspective in mind. Our infrastructure alerts are always focused on the end user as well - when something goes down, it can usually be quantified in terms of the number of errors that end users experienced.

Reflections and Advice: The Path to Gusto

While the saying “anyone can become an engineer” sounds trite, it rings true, especially when looking at my team. My people empowerer majored in psychology before becoming an engineer, while my mentor majored in linguistics at first. A few of my other teammates took bootcamp courses as well before becoming engineers. This diversity of experiences is one of my favorite things about Gusto - if you can dream it, you can do it.

With that, our series on intern experiences at Gusto comes to a close. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our stories, and we’re excited to see your story unfold. Hope to see you as a Gustie!