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.
