I am one of the recruiting managers here at GitLab. I would agree with @sytse that contributing to GitLab would be the strongest signal.
While we do keep the bar quite high from a technical perspective, we also do so as it relates to our values. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ With us going through this current hyper-growth phase we have to make sure that everyone who comes into GitLab aligns with these.
For Engineering hires in the month of June we averaged ~65 days to move someone all the way through the interview process.
I am more than willing to set up some time to chat with you 1:1 if you have any more questions.
Hey andymoe. I am one of the recruiting managers here at GitLab. Candidate experience is important to us and we want to make sure our process reflects that. If you would be open to it, I would like to schedule some time to chat with you. I want to understand what may have happened as I am not aware of any part of our recruiting process that resembles what you have mentioned.
Hey There! I lead the Engineering Recruiting Team at GitLab. In addition to emilycook's reply, which I think summed up your question, I would say that we require aptitude in certain programming languages, which we measure with coding challenges, not years of experience. Many of us here are self-taught programmers (including the VPE of Engineering). You are welcome to apply and take the code challenge, or also start contributing to the open source project.
While we do keep the bar quite high from a technical perspective, we also do so as it relates to our values. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ With us going through this current hyper-growth phase we have to make sure that everyone who comes into GitLab aligns with these.
For Engineering hires in the month of June we averaged ~65 days to move someone all the way through the interview process.
I am more than willing to set up some time to chat with you 1:1 if you have any more questions.