GitLab Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Pros

On the cultivation of values and an intelligent atmosphere, sort of a rising tide lifts all boats situation. I've learned a lot in a short while from peers and the massive handbook that records many scenarios for future teaching. Benefits are terrific, work/life balance is more than lip service, and people are happy to help. Interesting, cutting edge.

Cons

One could get lost in the bog of slack channels, issues, DMs and other communication tools. There at once seems to be a right way to present ideas and send messages, and yet there still seems to be a divide in what's sanctioned and what's practiced. People will happily teach you things, but the culture of self-learning sometimes makes it a last resort. Transparency and everyone can contribute should have boundaries.

Pros

- Lots of push to learn and grow your skills - Plenty of fun people to work with - Interesting challenges to solve, you're never bored - Good work life balance (on the support team at least) - The unlimited PTO is real, at least on the support team - Lots of people that you can lean on for help when you need it, I've never felt silly and was never talked down to for asking an honest question.

Cons

- Your experience working here is highly dependent on your individual manager and team - Upper management seems kind of out of touch with individual contributors - Pay is well below market, raises are meh, benefits are meh - Very little career growth potential - High turnover, hiring too slow to backfill so a lot of teams seem to have more work than available team members can handle - Diversity and Inclusion efforts need to improve at the upper management level

Pros

For most companies, values are just buzz words with very little meaning or relevance. This is not true at GitLab. The pros of working at GitLab almost all tie directly back to the values that GitLab takes very seriously: Collaboration: people here are kind, there are all sorts of resources and helpful tips to welcome newcomers and collaborate with the greatest community in the kindest way. Folks share their opinions, say thanks, and give feedback. For challenging collaborative problems, GitLab provides a variety of resources to educate folks on how to navigate the tough bits. Results: one of the sub values of "results" is "Measure results not hours" - and it shows. People are not tracking how often you're "active" on slack, how many meetings you make, how many things you say in meetings. Being handbook and async first in an all remote company means that the value of your contributions speaks volumes more than how you "appear". Efficiency: people for the most part write things down. This is the core of being handbook first. And let me tell you: I can't imagine working any other way. It's a lot of information to parse out. But imagine working somewhere where your coworkers don't interrupt you every 15 minutes to ask the same question someone else asked. Or where you don't feel bad having to interrupt your coworkers with the same thing. You can literally Google internal company processes and get an answer. Not sure how to write a good code review? Google "GitLab code review process" and you'll find the handbook page. Want to know how to submit an expense report? Type "expense reporting GitLab" in your navigation bar and you've got the answer. It's amazing, and I think it's extremely understated as a benefit here. It gets overshadowed by being all remote. But if you're an information-savvy knowledge worker, this is the way you must demand to get work done. Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: this is where asynchronous communication comes in. And there's explicit instructions about having uncomfortable conversations. The company explicitly talks about what this value means, instead of being an overarching idea that's too broad to be useful. I've never believed a company ever cared about this value until I interviewed at GitLab. The interviewing process is as equitable as it can be (there is still a power differential, of course. And human systems are imperfect, and I have many privileges so I can't necessarily evaluate this objectively). But again, you can google all the hiring details and know what to expect. You can see the statistics in terms of hiring length, hiring metrics, etc. There are some confidential pieces of information here, of course, but the transparency builds to this diversity value. Iteration: this value can be challenging, but it can also be freeing. I feel empowered to make small, reversible changes all the time. To pitch ideas, deliver on promises, and come back later to clean things up. I'm never blocked because I'm waiting for approval three levels up. Transparency: this is another value that lends to the handbook first pro. Other pros: Remote work is awesome. It's clear how you add value to the company. The company is clearly growing, and the opportunity is there. The brand name is super cool - I am so proud and excited to have it on my resume. People are welcoming, excited, and always thinking of cool new ideas Lots of opportunity to work on new projects, but also a healthy focus on making sure existing solutions are appropriately leveraged and maintained. All levels of management are very accessible. The compensation is transparent, and more than fair.

Cons

There is a lot of information out there. It can be very challenging to parse through and find signal versus noise, especially as a newcomer. Being remote is great, but sometimes you miss the in-person relationships and collaboration style. The company is moving at a fast pace. They talk a lot about work/life balance, and they clearly take steps to enforce it. But I personally find myself being highly engaged and thoughtful about work outside of working hours because of all the activity going on. It's exciting, but it can be hard to turn off when your "office" is just inside your laptop, and the company is abuzz with activity at all hours of the day. This is a personal problem, not necessarily a systemic one. But I think many people share this. The onboarding process itself is very structured and easy to follow, with plenty of information. But I have spoken with many colleagues who feel like they were thrown into the deep end early on. I think a start up at this phase has a lot of that - the company needs to move quickly, and employees need to be ready for that. Be ready to feel a little lost for the first few months with information overload and a fast pace of work. I think most folks adjust, and GitLab has plenty of resources and systems to help. But it can be a lot, for sure. Because everything is handbook first, everyone is empowered to make decisions, etc., there are plenty of conflicting information sources out there. I think this is true of any company. The challenge at GitLab is that having all the documentation public means that any person in the company might stumble upon two conflicting pieces of information - rather than a different company where those conflicting points of view are siloed to teams. In that specific case, being siloed can actually be useful for individuals.

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.

Pros

Remote Work Asynchronous workstyle work/life balance room for growth

Cons

Some people are tired, have been here for a while and maybe have a jaded view of things (as with any startup/new company)

Pros

Work-life balance is awesome If you are willing to put in the time to contribute to success it is rewarded Organized, efficient, and open

Cons

None this company is doing everything right in my opinion