I went through two interviews for the SRE position.

The first time I applied, I never received a response from anyone. At the time, the handbook stated that you would hear back after five days. On day six, I emailed someone I knew there. He did something, and I received an email from a recruiter with some questions to answer.

I answered them and sent them off.

I received a rejection email after 1.5 months of waiting (and bugging). I feel that this rejection was fair; I rushed my answers to the questions and didn’t represent myself well.

I do believe that GitLab didn’t get back to me soon enough, and I feel that their interview process needs work.

The second time I applied, I really gave it my all. I restructured my CV and sent it off. After some time, I had a call with a recruiter, followed by a call with a hiring manager.

Both of these people were very new to the company and, I believe, didn’t follow the process as outlined in the handbook. I did ask that they not consider my previous application, as I had rushed it and it did not represent me correctly.

I soon received a rejection email. When I asked for details, it turns out that I was rejected based on my previous application and a lack of experience at scale (even though we didn’t discuss scale at all in any of the interviews).

Personally, I do believe that I wasn’t given a fair chance. I was also led to believe that GitLab prefers to hire people involved with their community.

I have been part of the GitLab community for a while. I have:

• Organized a meetup for them
• Contributed code to gitlab-ce
• Contributed to their handbook and various other pieces of documentation
• Blogged about features
• Used their product for quite some time.

But none of this seems to have counted in my favor, nor was it considered at all.

I do fear that the company is growing quickly and the new people aren’t living up to what I would expect from a GitLab employee.

I hope I’m completely wrong and do wish them the best for the future.

I was mostly asked cultural questions.