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...

Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry it took so long to schedule the interview with me. This was because of our company summit in Austin, but we should have made this clear to you up front.

1. Currently we ask for compensation information early in the process (during the screening call https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/#screening-call ) and the person asking will note the information in our applicant tracking system. We don't give feedback at that time. We're working towards a global compensation structure where we can tell candidates the compensation earlier in the process. Due to having people in 26 countries this will take quite some time.

2. I'm very sorry for this. I was not aware that an offer was made to you when I talked with you. The cause of the offer being made prematurely was that we wanted to inform you that we couldn't match your floor. Due to a misunderstanding between me and the person that made you the offer this was communicated to you as an offer instead of a heads up about the maximum compensation.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience being interviewed by me. Your private feedback about this was great and I'll follow up with you about the changes we made to made future interviews better.

I hope you're OK with me responding to your post. I assume it is OK since you're also posting in public.

Thanks for the follow-up. I appreciate it and I'm glad that my feedback might help improve your hiring process.

I don't mind your comment, and I hope you understand that there are no hard feelings at all. I hope you understand that my goal is not to damage Gitlab or yourself in any way.

I would like to say, I've been impressed by the openness and transparency at Gitlab, and I think this goes hand-in-hand with a desire to do the "right thing" in every way.

It is with that in mind that I posted my experience, because I think there are problems with the way our industry approaches hiring (as seen in our poor diversity numbers, age discrimination, etc) and more openness can only help. I wish more people shared their experiences, and I wish more companies were open to refining their hiring processes.