Three years ago, GitLab was considered a leading company. However, since then, it has increased its pricing by 600% and shifted its product focus from SCM and CI/CD solutions to a single platform solution. Despite leadership claiming that this aligns with industry trends, many customers are resistant to consolidating their tools into one platform, especially with a vendor known for frequent price increases.
The company's sales environment is very toxic and favours agreeable people who do not challenged the weak leadership and management. This leads to a culture of favouritism where the most celebrated account executives are normally the least experienced so you’ll learn nothing here.
The majority of account executives achieve less than 50% of their sales targets, and even when sales are made, commissions are often lost if customers leave, a frequent occurrence due to the mentioned issues. Last year GitLab broke records for customer churn due to failed leadership and strategy of which the account executives paid the price.
Despite these challenges, GitLab reports record profits, although this success is not reflected in the performance of most sales staff, with a significant turnover among new hires and a general atmosphere of underachievement. This strategy may serve to facilitate staffing adjustments without the need for layoffs, as evidenced by the entire SMB team being dismissed with minimal compensation along with account executives who challenge management on these problems.
Presidents Club attendees includes mostly people who have not even hit 100% speaking to this toxic culture of underperformance. Management's reluctance to engage in constructive dialogue about these issues is attributed to their lack of experience in solution selling and reliance on the company's previous success. This has led to a culture where underperformance is the norm, and critical voices are silenced or encouraged to leave, further exacerbating the toxic work environment.
Avoid joining GitLab. Doing so may hinder your career growth, result in underachievement and insufficient compensation, and place you under the direction of inexperienced leaders. These leaders are likely to focus on their past achievements at other companies, often in a self-aggrandizing manner, without offering meaningful guidance or support.
Management are externally scared to have a two way conversation about the failures
The successful account executives are the youngest and least experienced but as they don’t challenge management they are rewards through a system of favouritism to get the most fruitig account patches. If you want to succeed here I would suggest stroking managements ego and hopefully they will make you successful through assigning you the most adventagiihs accounts.
Most account executives are hitting less than 50% attainment and even when they do sell something the commision is normally taken away as at GL if a customer leaves (lots do for reasons mentioned) then the revenue you lost counts against your target,
