After four rounds of interviews with GitLab as well as a lengthy written set of questions, I received the old "radio silence" treatment. Not a "yes", not a "no", not even a "no thanks". I understand that this is common in many companies but is it so hard to treat candidates with a slight modicum of respect?
As far as the interviews I did have, the people were very nice and would likely be great co-workers. From what I was able to learn, you would enjoy working at GitLab if:
1. You like working long hours (it's a startup after all).
2. You don't mind being paid below market wages.
3. You don't mind working for a company whose employee philosophy is "hire fast, fire fast". For an entertaining read, you can find a post from a previous employee out there whose experiences working for GitLab caused him to blog about how much he dislikes the company and the way they treat people. One of the original software engineers there has a post on HackerNoon about how poorly he was treated--and he was one the original members of the team!
Another thing I learned from my interviews is that GitLab has aspirations to go public in 2020. Given that we're presently nine years into a bull market with tech being the most overheated sector, I'd give that about a 10% chance of happening. Even if they do pull it off, it's pretty obvious that, like so many other tech companies both public and private, the company loses money and is pretty far off from profitability. Heck, even GitHub had huge losses prior to their Microsoft acquisition and they are the public repo market leader. It's 1999 anymore and even highly visible, market-leading companies like DropBox are getting hammered due to lack of profitability.
As I said, the people I spoke to were very nice so there are probably some great things about working at GitLab. Many do seem to like working there. If they do make you an offer, just make sure to go into it with your eyes wide open.
