The interview process started off well enough. I applied for the role through their website, and was in contact with a recruiter with two weeks.
It took some back and forth to get aligned schedules, and they rescheduled on two occasions. I guess it's understandable considering I had 6 different interviews, including the initial screening with the recruiter. That feels like a lot, but not entirely unusual for a job in tech.
Honestly, the entire process felt like it was going really well. I not only understood the requirements of the position very well after years working for a competitor, but I asked genuine questions and hit it off with each of the interviewers.
Then came the final interview, which was with an engineer who may or may not have been directly on the team for which I was applying. He asked technical questions that were outside of the scope of the role, like my capability in automation... for a Technical Writer role. And it's not even that I can't automate mundane tasks that take a lot of my time, but that's not the job, and the requirements weren't laid out to suggest that you'd need to know how to create automation scripts in the first place. It was unfortunate, especially because every other aspect of the interview went really well, and the recruiter told me as such along the way.
When the recruiter emailed me to inquire about my experience during the process I told them, specifically, where their process was broken, and how disappointing it was to be such a good fit, to have hit it off so well with the hiring manager, and potential teammates, for my candidacy to be dismissed because I didn't meet requirements that weren't even listed left a sour taste in my mouth.
I very much admired GitLab, but I'm kind of glad I didn't get the job. I don't know how I could deal with a culture that lets technical staff control so much of the conversation. I've worked on teams that ignore the non-technical team members, and I've got no times for immaturity at work; I'm a grown up, and can handle it if I don't know something, but I don't have time for people undermining me by only giving me part of the story and then penalizing me for not meeting requirements I didn't know existed.
Their official response (which I'm grateful for getting at all, but totally disagree with):
"To justify bringing someone on at your level, we'd need someone who possesses a greater variety of markup languages, demonstrates an ability to understand code and investigate/debug issues, and shows us they can spin up automation tools."
I did not have many expectations going into the interview process with GitLab, I was mostly curious about how things work at a competitor, and fascinated with the "remote-only" culture you're building there. And while I'm very appreciative of the feedback about my application and interview, I'm quite baffled at the reasoning for not being made an offer. I cannot think of any other reasons for not being selected that I'd be more surprised at than the ones currently listed, if only because there little to no emphasis on those things except from a single interviewer. It's just disappointing, as I expected differently after reading GitLab's values.