I applied for a position (Backend Engineer in Search) that I felt I was a great fit for. I was rejected without even a phone screen.
I am very early in my career, so I’d bet whoever handles the leftmost phase of the hiring pipeline saw that and basically immediately binned my resume.
But I was still pretty bummed. Since Gitlab’s development is out in the open I could see the tickets in the team’s backlog and knew that I would be able to work them. In my cover letter, I said that I wanted to help them architect and scale global code search for the gitlab.com instance.
Anyway, that’s a reality of applying for a job without a referral and so I’m not bitter about it. But man, I was so impressed with the notions espoused in Gitlab’s handbook. Principles like being a global optimizer and prioritizing unblocking others fit my natural working style very well. In fact, I’d used that exact terminology (global optimizer) to describe myself to my manager at my previous job.
Anyway, it would have been a great opportunity. And the position I’d applied for had been open for so long that I’d hoped they really wanted to fill the position. Since I didn’t even make it to the screen, I didn’t expect any feedback, and naturally didn’t receive any.
What I find very weird is the fact that almost every job has a hard requirement for Ruby (or now it seems Go, last time I checked their job adverts it was almost exclusively Ruby).
Which is not what most successful companies do, nor what makes sense to me.
I mean, if I have a developer applying with 8 years of experience and a successful career who has adapted to new languages 4 or 5 times, why would I have reservations about them being able to adapt to Ruby (supposedly a very user friendly language)?
I think I'll apply for that position at some point and see what happens. I've worked on search systems pretty extensively (query parsing, relevance tuning including learning to rank, performance monitoring and tuning) and I'd like to get a remote position working on search again but I'm fully expecting this not to matter compared to having no professional experience with Ruby.
I've read they don't hire junior people, which might explain why you haven't heard anything. As somebody that has written a search engine, I would suggest you implement one and make it accessible to overcome the junior title...if that is the case in your situation.
Blanket rejection of juniors is pretty short sighted. Not offering any rejection at all is even worse. If you're not hiring juniors, say so. If you're not hiring juniors and one applies, send a polite response to say "Oh hey, thanks but we're after more senior people, but please try again in a year or so!". There's no good reason for a non-response, and when it's in their handbook and they still don't do it, a big red flag for other candidates.
Agreed, but isn't the point of labelling an open position 'junior' or 'senior' so that candidates will know whether it's appropriate to apply? Everybody surely knows what these terms mean, right? And if it isn't in the job title, then why can't they put it in the job description so they don't get junior experience people applying for senior jobs?
> As somebody that has written a search engine, I would suggest you implement one and make it accessible to overcome the junior title
Their search infrastructure is built upon Elasticsearch, which I have direct experience scaling / putting out fires in my previous job.
So, I did have experience that was extremely relevant to their position (granted, not at the scale that they operate at, but that's always to be expected).
That being said, your point about "I've read they don't hire junior people" is precisely why I think I didn't make it past stage zero. So I totally agree with you there. I had a total of ~1.5 years of experience at my previous company, as an intern and then full-time, but since I was finishing up school during the tail end of my internship, I was only working full-time for ~7-8 months. So I'd bet it was certainly that.
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Back on your idea about writing a search engine, perhaps I could see if there's some contributions I could make to Apache Lucene, which is the "kernel" that powers Elasticsearch.
Honestly the post for https://grep.app that was posted a few days ago is a perfect example of demonstrating what you can do. He had the CTO of GitHub reach out to him publicly.
I'm pretty sure if you can demonstrate how you can orchestrate a cluster of Elasticsearch nodes, it will go a long way. And if you can contribute to the many discussions they have about Elasticsearch in their issues, it will go a long way to demonstrate your domain knowledge.
As for Lucene, I wouldn't invest any time in contributing to it, as it has been iterated on for over a decade by very smart people. Just build something with Lucene or build something like https://grep.app
It doesn't seem like it. I have applied twice and I have 4+ years rails experience. The feedback I got was that I wasn't ready and to come back in a year or 2.
I am very early in my career, so I’d bet whoever handles the leftmost phase of the hiring pipeline saw that and basically immediately binned my resume.
But I was still pretty bummed. Since Gitlab’s development is out in the open I could see the tickets in the team’s backlog and knew that I would be able to work them. In my cover letter, I said that I wanted to help them architect and scale global code search for the gitlab.com instance.
Anyway, that’s a reality of applying for a job without a referral and so I’m not bitter about it. But man, I was so impressed with the notions espoused in Gitlab’s handbook. Principles like being a global optimizer and prioritizing unblocking others fit my natural working style very well. In fact, I’d used that exact terminology (global optimizer) to describe myself to my manager at my previous job.
Anyway, it would have been a great opportunity. And the position I’d applied for had been open for so long that I’d hoped they really wanted to fill the position. Since I didn’t even make it to the screen, I didn’t expect any feedback, and naturally didn’t receive any.