Dec 31, 2020
GitLab reviews
3.5
54% would recommend to a friend
Bill Staples
39% approve of CEO
38% positive business outlook
GitLab has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 738 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The GitLab employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).
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Reviews by job title
738 reviews
5.0
Dec 21, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook
Pros
Transparency - It's a value that is lived out in a very unique fashion at GitLab with things such as their compensation calculator (you can look up the range for your and others' positions within the company) and the openness of discussions that take place on a daily basis in Slack and GitLab Issues. While it is rare for people to always agree on an approach or change occurring, the openness in which people can share their feelings is a breath of fresh air compared to the backroom and private chats that people normally resort to to discuss their grievances. Flexibility - Being all remote is something that more and more company's are moving to or at least a hybrid model but the difference with GitLab is that they are taking it a step further with remote locations AND remote time arrangements. With a company spread out around the world it's inevitable that it's daytime for someone and nighttime for another so there is no expectation of people working the typical hours of their own time zone. It's not uncommon to get messages in various channels throughout the day letting you know that someone is stepping out for a few hours or working a different than usual schedule for a while and the expectation is rarely that you'll be able to immediately get a response on something from a specific person via chat, so everyone builds their work and there days around themselves making for better documentation and greater work/life balance. People - The people of GitLab are phenomenal. While I haven't worked with everyone and everyone certainly has different backgrounds and approaches to work, people are open to collaboration and even being remote are genuinely caring about each others' lives. Remote - Similar (but different) to flexibility, the all remote arrangement of GitLab makes for very cool work arrangements. Want to work from your local coffee shops each day? Great. Want to beat the holiday travel rush home and work there for a week on either side of the holiday to avoid crazy plane tickets? Great. Want to be a digital nomad and hop around country to country in a new place every other week? Awesome. GitLab encourages and enables people to find what works for them and provides the resources to be successful (they'll even buy you a portable monitor so you can travel with it if that's your thing). Startup - GitLab is still a startup and while there are companies that are younger and smaller, GitLab is scaling well and is still a startup with how they approach work and through their transparency is doing a good job of avoiding the usual shift from startup to successful business that pushes all the people that made it a great place to work, out. It's also cool to work on a product that feels like it'll change things for a lot of companies, and to watch that happen.
Cons
Not many but things that can be a challenge: Lack of availability - since you can't count on people to be online at the same time as you, especially starting out it can be difficult to adjust to a world where you just push everything as far as you can and then set it down compared to a typical environment where you'd have a desk to walk over to or a person to IM that was on the same hours as you and you could message them for an answer so you could keep going on something. As a whole the asynchronous work style is awesome but takes a little adjusting to at first. Easy to be always on - With full time remote it becomes very important to set boundaries between work and life but also, with people spread around the world it's inevitable that you'll have some early morning or late night meetings that pop up that you need to attend. While it is rare and often avoided via recording meetings and sharing a collaborative notes doc, there are times when flexing your schedule for some late nights or early mornings is the simplest way to handle a problem and can lead to burnout if you let those type situations trickle over into never truly turning off from work. Change - being a startup things are constantly changing and it can be difficult at times to keep up with all the changes and there are adjustments that seem to happen on a far more frequent basis than other more established companies. While not necessarily always a con, there is the potential that some of the things you may hold most dear about the company upon hire quickly adjust to something else and that may be difficult to handle for some. That being said, the core foundations of GitLab don't seem to be changing and this is a risk at any company, it's just more realized at GitLab due to the size/current nature of the company.
4.0
Dec 12, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook
Pros
The team at GitLab is genuinely the most talented group I've ever worked with. More importantly though, they're kind, thoughtful, and invested in making the company better. I genuinely enjoyed working with the people at GitLab, and met a lot of people I still consider friends after leaving. As far as the job itself, I learned a ton and was never bored. There are a lot of great internal resources and in-house tools that are really helpful in being able to solve problems. And just to be clear, customers bring some really interesting problems. It was really cool to see all the different ways people used (and broke) their installations. Working at GitLab was basically a neverending crash course in how to manage and maintain software, and I mean that in the best way possible. The benefits were probably the best of any company I've worked at. Health insurance was incredibly good, and they covered the majority of my family's costs. They allow people to expense training materials and are pretty liberal with what they will pay for - I've worked at places that have a similar policy but will then fight you on every little thing, and that was never the case at GitLab. Same with their unlimited PTO policy. They trust people to behave like adults, and I can't understand how nice that is. GitLab's dedication to process and operations is also a big selling point. I've worked in so many places where no one bothered to document anything, and the fact that GitLab spends so much time and energy on this is great. Their handbook is one of the most thoroughly impressive documents I've ever seen, and for the most part, its actual contents are extremely fair and thoughtful.
Cons
One major con that I noticed toward the end of my time at GitLab is that it's starting to feel like a big company, which wasn't the case when I started there. It was awesome to see such rapid growth, but in my opinion, they scaled the product and operations without quite getting things like communication right. There were a few instances of really big decisions being made behind closed doors, then being met with a lot of pushback when they were announced. It felt to me like these decisions were made non-transparently because leadership knew they would be unpopular, but it's also likely I don't have the full context. Running a company is hard, and so is communication, and to be clear, GitLab's leadership did things the right way more often than not. There are just a few specific instances that left a really bad taste in my mouth, so that's why I mention it. The biggest problem that I have is pay discrepancy via the "location factor." I live in an area with a decent factor, and I felt I was paid fairly for my work - but my coworkers in Latin America, for example, work just as hard as I did for about half as much money in some cases. My main gripe here is that pay difference is explicitly not based on cost of living, but "market rate." This might have made sense when remote-first work wasn't the norm, but it turns out there is a whole "market" of companies for me to choose from that don't penalize people for living in the wrong place. So even ignoring my moral judgment on this, it doesn't make sense anymore from a hiring perspective. I won't get into the effects this has on diversity and inclusion, but there's an obvious impact here as well.
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