Many people seem to love working at GitLab, and the engineering culture seems great. However, my experience on a sales adjacent team with high turnover and higher expectations couldn’t have been more contrary to GitLab’s stated values. GitLab’s commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging is very superficial. Sure Slackbot is programmed to nag users about their language and DIB is promoted for PR purposes, but actual team composition and dynamics often don’t reflect those values. At the time I left I was the only “underrepresented” team member in my functional group. I personally experienced blatant sexism when a sales rep failed to provide the context for a customer presentation and then complained about the content of my presentation in multiple conversations to everyone involved with that customer but me (unsurprisingly all men). I had to point out the sexist undercurrent in that situation to my inexperienced manager and was chastised for labeling it as sexist because the sales rep “probably didn’t intend it that way”, as though the intent is relevant to the outcome. Throughout my time at GitLab many team members, particularly those in the sales organization, treated me as though I were very junior despite the reality that I’m a mid-career professional who consistently exceeded expectations and had more DevOps, management, and customer success skills than were required for my role. When my manager abruptly left the functional group due to poor work-life balance and unreasonable expectations, leadership refused to even consider me despite that management role being the position that GitLab’s sourcing team had initially contacted me to interview for. I left for a broader leadership role in the same functional area at a Fortune 200 company several times larger than GitLab, so objectively I was more than qualified. The functional group that I left has been undermined with high turnover since its inception, but recent changes have only raised expectations on an already stressed, low morale team. Rather than an inclusive, asynch, great work-balance culture, I experienced sexism, daily internal meetings, and having to cover multiple workloads (due to turnover) for no additional compensation. Leaving GitLab is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
