Went through several interviews with them, including their technical interview and had a blast. Met some nice folks and was having a lot of fun interviewing with them.
Was told, "I am confident that you would be a great addition to the team."
Then I hit a wall when Sid (sytse here on HN) was unavailable to perform the next interview for an indeterminate amount of time. Ended up waiting 2 weeks between interviews.
During that time I received an offer from another company and, asked if they could move things along or, perhaps, provide some timeline. At that time they made an informal offer via email.
Then, there were two problems as I see it:
1. The offer was significantly less than the floor I had given during the screening interview when asked about salary expectations. During that interview, the interviewer gave no indication that my expectations were out of line with Gitlab's salaries. [1]
2. When I finally interviewed with Sid, there was no mention or acknowledgement that an offer had been made.
My interview with Sid was tough, and definitely not what I was expecting after my earlier success interviewing with the company. Ultimately, he decided not to continue with my candidacy. I don't want to get into a "he said, she said" thing here, so I'll leave it at that.
I hope this post does not come off as "sour grapes". My objective is not to trash anyone at Gitlab, there are a lot of great folks over there. I think there were some surprises in their process and I would have liked to have known these things upfront before I contacted them.
[1] While I was still interviewing they edited their handbook to indicate that "Many of our team members who have joined have taken a decrease in compensation." https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/#compens...