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      Software Engineer Interview

      Mar 12, 2018
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at GitLab in Nov 2016

      Interview

      The interview process started out pretty normal. - Resume application - Technical questions via email (~2.5hr, by the time proofing etc is complete) - Recruiter conversation (0.5hr) - Team lead 1:1 (1.5hr) - Open Source work done to their (for profit) product (30+ terrible hours) Lets just get right to the technical session: I was informed that the interview would be: 1hr pairing session, with 1-2 hours after to wrap it up in a nice reviewable commit. In the 1hr pairing session, I barely got an introduction to their app. The feature requirement was poorly spec'd and the interviewer decided to make some judgement calls on what it actually entailed. After a 2 week period I had submitted a diff of: 77 changed files with 514 additions and 94 deletions This involved, learning everything about their app. Custom features, setup, fixing their terribly slow spec suite. And writing my new feature to work appropriately with every edge case, and all other possible features. This also involved them having to bring in additional code reviewers to handle questions the original interviewer did not have answers for. It involved writing documentation for unspec'd requirements- of which I was marked poorly for not having guessed the correct assumptions about unspec'd requirements. It involved managing backwards compatibility on all their API endpoints to manage this new feature. The interviewer informed me after the fact that there was a 3 review cut-off. Of which two of my reviews were done after I had pushed un-finished code (because commit early, and commit often), but had not asked for a review. So the reviewer reviewed unfinished broken code, and of course I received bad marks for that. The whole process was a complete and utter disaster. To the point I was just waiting to tell them I was pulling out of the interview process entirely. I don't believe anyone on their current team, could have done this issue in 3 hours, let alone someone who had to learn the codebase starting with no context, and sporadic support. As a matter of fact, being open source, it did actually take one of their employees an additional month+ to complete the feature as required. Do not do free work for them. In Canada this type of interview is actually illegal. Any work a company actively uses after an interview, is required to be paid for.

      Interview questions [2]

      Question 1

      Being a pretty standard Rails application, GitLab is built using the MVC design pattern. Please describe in as much detail as you think is appropriate what the responsibilities of the Model, View and Controller are, both in general and in Rails specifically, and what the benefits of this separation are. Also touch on how the Concern and Service patterns fit into this.
      Answer question

      Question 2

      How would you determine whether some kind of logic belongs in the controller, the model, or a concern or service?
      Answer question
      19

      Other Software Engineer interview reviews for GitLab

      Software Developer Interview

      Jan 23, 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at GitLab

      Interview

      The process started fine but after making the homework they've told me that the position was moved to another country, After the position apeared agian in my area I've recent my CV wanting to finish the process but they've never got back to me.
      1

      Software Engineer Interview

      Nov 3, 2025
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at GitLab

      Interview

      Pretty straight forward interview which is on their handbook. Initial screening then reviewing a merge request. Technical was with hiring manager which is a mic of technical and behavioural. Practise more STAR format questions for this stage

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      About a time you had conflict with team member
      Answer question
      1

      Software Developer Interview

      Jan 26, 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at GitLab in Nov 2025

      Interview

      The frontend and backend interviews were great. The interviewers were calm and level-headed and allowed me to showcase my technical strengths. The hiring manager interviews were not as great. Different hiring managers have different ways of interviewing and you're guessing what it is they want to hear. I think GitLab needs to work on standardizing this process and training interviewers how to interview. In the first interview, the example story I gave was clearly not a fit for the interviewing. Perhaps they could have mentioned that and pivoted, or initially mentioned what they were looking for. In the second interview, I was given feedback for not mentioning things that the interviewer did not even ask. You can't have a candidate who was given incredible feedback on the technical stages (as mentioned by the recruiters and the hiring managers) and barely passing HM rounds. There's a clear mismatch here. Interviewing is a hard thing in general in the software engineering field, and it's something every IC & EM need to work on.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Vue & Rails based code review
      Answer question

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