I applied online through their website careers page. A few weeks later, I got an email to schedule a screening call with a recruiter, but I missed that email (it got lost in my inbox). About six weeks later, I got another follow-up screening email request from the same recruiter and I caught that one. Scheduling was all done online and asynchronous, like most of Gitlab's operations.

After the screening, I got invited to participate in a technical interview. I was assigned a faux merge request on Gitlab.com and was asked to make comments on the code on my own time before the actual meeting. Then I did live corrections to the code when the meeting came around.

After that interview, I was then invited to a behavioral interview, where things got a bit dicey.

My expectation, based on what I had read in the Gitlab handbook as well as from participating as an interviewer and interviewee in other interviews, led me to believe this was going to be a conversation. A conversation about my experiences, the problems or situations I've encountered in my career and how I approached them, the typical STAR story-telling.

Instead, I was asked technical questions with specific technical answers that the interviewer was looking for. This threw me off and did not make for a good experience for me. I ended up asking more and more clarifying questions because I didn't understand the direction that this was going. I didn't know I was expected to form pros and cons between two programming languages or answer how two different frontend frameworks render elements on a DOM. It didn't make sense and left me feeling inept, and I didn't get to talk about what I prepared for. Obviously, the interview didn't go too well for me.

The next day, I got the dreaded rejection email. I was thinking, "Well, maybe there is something specific they were looking for that they will give feedback on."

And hey, that's what they said they would do in their handbook and one of their core values: collaboration and transparency.

Nope, the feedback I got looked like a botched copy-paste job with grammar mistakes and left me with more questions than answers. This stuff is important. If there is no actionable feedback for people to grow on, then how are people to learn what companies are looking for and make direct changes in their skills?

The interview process was great up until the last interview I took with Gitlab. Oh, I didn't even get a chance to chat with a hiring technical manager in the behavioral for a technical role. Maybe I'm a special case. YMMV.

Can you tell me about a time where there was a problem that everyone was focused on, but there was no progress being made?