About GitLab and what they do
GitLab makes a product that helps teams more effectively build and deliver software. So we have what we call the single application for the DevOps lifecycle. And that helps to plan code, test release and security, your products all within one application.
Details on GitLab's engineering team
To a very large engineering team and GitLab, we're in that cover covers all of like application development, infrastructure, and all of those things. And we're globally distributed to which is, which is a pretty fun work environment, you have, you know, coworkers that are in all different time zones, and all different parts of the world. And not only do you get to kind of work, work with people in sort of different cultures, you get to learn from them and get to kind of see their view of the world too. And then it's the, the ship is constantly moving. So we're, we're constantly shipping stuff all day long, even when you're offline, like activity is happening. And that's, that's very exciting to see things constantly moving like that.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
Yeah, so I'm really excited about my team, we are a newer department called incubation engineering. And the way that we work is a pretty different model from a lot of companies, we have something we call a single engineering group, or an S eg. And what we do is actually look at an idea for a product area or a feature of GitLab. And, try to take to have one individual kind of work that idea and try to grow it from a seed into a larger area of the application. And so this is really an opportunity for someone to come in and make a huge impact on GitLab. Because we're going to be, you know, influencing the direction of this area for a long time, long time to come. And that role is really interesting, because you're not just an engineer, you're also doing the project, you're setting the vision, you're doing the product roadmap, you're doing some of the UX designs, you're talking to customers, you're doing all those things, as one individual. And in for the right person. That's a really, really fun, fun way to work.
Details on the tech stack
Yeah, so a lot of the lot of the work is done in our main GitLab application, which is just a Rails app. And we also have Vue js and go in there. And so we actually try to keep it fairly simple. Because that makes it as an open source product, it makes it a lot easier for people to contribute to. But it also helps us to kind of align our engineering focus around all of these, these technologies. Other things that I use, for my roles in SVG, are things like figma, for doing designs. And we can actually pull our design libraries and mock things up really quickly. Because we don't have to kind of invent it from scratch, we can pull from what the GitLab UX team has already done. And then we have other sorts of processes and supporting materials for doing other things like product roadmaps or customer interviews or things like that.
What to expect during the interview process
So our area's a little unique, but it isn't too far from a general engineering interview. So in interviewing process, GitLab is going to be a technical interview, meeting with the manager meeting with a product owner, and folks like that, for the SDGs. In incubation engineering, we're a little bit different. And we want to have a bit broader scope for folks. So we'll, we'll do a bit more of a deep dive on kind of a product interview. And folks will also do technical interviews, and meet with our CTO, Eric Johnson as well. So it's a pretty like high-level interview. It's a pretty interesting process. And you learn a lot about what we're going for with this role throughout that process, which I think is very helpful.
About GitLab's culture
I'm always happy to tell people about the culture aka lab because people will ask me, Is that really what it's like there? Because they'll see things online in the handbook or whatever. And it really is the history of GitLab as we started as a remote company, so all before COVID and all of these things of companies going remote. We had been doing this for years already. And so what that means is like we've got a lot more practice at it, we've learned a lot, a lot more along the way of how to do this and how to do this effectively. Our culture as it relates to like, how a person works day to day is very much focused on async communication, and focused on like written communication. So instead of spending a lot of time, in meetings, talking about things, we'll spend our time writing of issues and putting them out there for others to comment on and then have that discussion in online forum. And what this allows us to do is not only work effectively remotely because some of the people you're going to be working with are going to be on the other side of the planet and just not working and online when you are, but also allows you to structure your day however you want. So if you have commitments with your family at certain times during the day, it's easy to block that time off and just say like, I'm not available during that time, I'm going to shift my day to work around it, but it's just going to fit in with everything else and everyone else is a sync and so there's no expectation of fixed working hours which is just a great way to work and I think it's it fits way better with people's lifestyles then you know a structured kind of nine to five
Why now is the ideal time to join
Yeah, I am excited to have people come join incubation engineering because like I said, this is a newer departments. We're relatively small in the grand scheme of how large GitLab is. So it's an opportunity to build really cool things and really influence the product direction for the future. But it's also an opportunity to shape this department. Where we're still figuring out what incubation engineering means. And so everyone that comes in has a really a big impact on that. So excited to have more people come in and help us steer, steer this part of our ship
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