Gusto Senior Software Engineer interview questions

I had a former coworker who is an employee refer me in early August. I got a request for interview availability 1 week later. 1st interview: It was a quick conversation with the recruiter about the overall process, the engineering team and culture at Gusto, etc. - 30 minutes 2nd Interview: I then had a "Technical Phone Assessment" that was 1:1 with an engineer. - 60 minutes After this step, I heard nothing for about another week and when the recruiter finally emailed back, she ignored the question asking about next steps. I had to have my friend that worked there ping internally to get a response. They eventually swapped recruiting coordinators on me to someone who would respond. After this step is the "final round" Day 1 3rd Interview: Engineering Manager Interview - 60 minutes 4th Interview: Architectural Design Interview - 75 minutes 5th Interview: Work Session - 90 minutes Day 2 6th Interview: Values based interview - 30 minutes 7th Interview: Coding Skills Assessment - 60 minutes Interviews 4 and 5 were supposed to be 2 people, but 1 did not show up in each of them. The values based interview was a one on one, but that person just no-showed. I guess punctuality or attendance are not values at Gusto? 🤷🏻‍♂️ I got #6 rescheduled for the day after Day 2 finished after hounding the original unresponsive recruiting coordinator to get it rescheduled so I could finalize the interview process. I read a lot of reviews here about getting ghosted or having things drag on until they felt stale, so I pushed to have it completed. The following Monday, the technical recruiter sent an email asking if I had time for a call to go over the results of the interview. I'm mostly writing this review because I scoured every interview review here to see if anyone had gotten rejected by phone or video call. All of the reviews that had rejections in them were by email or did not specify. I was rejected by phone. You can be rejected by phone. If Gusto is reading this, I would much rather have been rejected by email with the option to schedule a call for feedback. I spent 6 hours and 45 minutes interviewing with them. Can we just shorten that by maybe 1 hour and 45 minutes? Do you NEED 3 technicals and an architectural design?