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Summary: The GitLab Handbook is a comprehensive, open-source guide that documents nearly every aspect of how GitLab operates—from team workflows to company values—offering a powerful blueprint for remote work and organizational transparency.
Employee handbooks from the good old days were exactly that – paper books you could hand to employees and which they could thumb through when necessary. New hires could find out more about the company and culture they’d just joined, and long-term employees could check for rules and policies they hadn’t encountered in a while. While the idea behind handbooks has stayed the same, their delivery methods have changed, and most employers now offer digital versions instead of paper.
The DevOps company GitLab, has gone even further by creating an open-source handbook available on the cloud for anyone anywhere to read. This handbook represents an important departure and one that many companies may want to imitate.
What is GitLab?
GitLab, Inc. is a development, security, and operations or DevSecOps company that has been described as a unicorn thanks to its explosive growth and potential value.
It’s comprised of over 2,300 employees working in more than 60 countries. This workforce also happens to be completely remote so the company has no offices, though it does own subsidiaries in several of the locations where its employees are concentrated.
GitLab, Inc. operates and builds the GitLab platform, an open-core software development package used for DevSecOps. This collaborative platform allows developers to share the latest versions of their work, track bugs, manage tasks, and document their changes. These features contributed directly to the creation of the GitLab Handbook.
What is the GitLab Handbook?
The GitLab Handbook is GitLab, Inc.’s employee handbook and main reference document. It includes information about all aspects of the company and its work. It also acts as a repository for documentation of the company’s sales, products, partners, finances, and more.
The whole handbook is over 1,000 pages long and is certainly not made of paper. It’s an online, cloud-based resource that all employees can access at any time. Since GitLab produces a platform for software development, it is also the tool used to create, build, and edit the GitLab Handbook.
The Handbook contains information related to the following topics:
- Engineering: details on how engineering works and how products are developed
- Finance: expenses, payroll, accounts receivable and payable, and more
- Human Resources: HR policies, learning and development resources, job postings, assessments, etc.
- Legal and Corporate Affairs: information on how the company is structured, run, and developed
- Marketing: how the product and company brand are marketed and corporate communications
- Product: data on product principles, development, releases, prices, and more
- Sales: the Handbook shares GitLab ads, sales strategies and partners, and successes
- Security: Information about threat management, security policies, and product security features
- The Company: core information about who and what the company is and its mission, values, culture, and strategy
- The Handbook itself: documentation on how to use, edit, and maintain the Handbook
Important Handbook Features
If your idea of a company handbook is a few pages about do’s and don’ts around the office and a list of company policies, the GitLab Handbook is certainly a significant departure from this concept.
Here’s how it stands out from most other employee handbooks, past and present:
Open-Source
Unlike almost all other employee handbooks out there, GitLab’s is open-source. Drawing on the principles of open-source software development, this document is driven by collaboration and the ability of all employees to edit and update the information it contains. In fact, all of the information in the Handbook is created by the GitLab community, and while it’s everyone in the company’s responsibility, people who work in different departments are generally tasked with keeping their related information updated.
It’s also free to redistribute. If you want to use the code or even some of the content of the Handbook for your organization, you can simply attribute GitLab to your use. This means that your organization can copy its structure freely to create its own handbook.
Public and Transparent
The GitLab Handbook is available as a public website that anyone can go to. In this sense, it’s similar to Wikipedia and the information in the handbook even turns up in online searches. This lets anyone who’s curious find out more about GitLab, Inc. including its policies, the processes it uses for development, and more.
This transparency is rare for companies. Normally, companies behave as though almost everything they do is a trade secret. However, a company’s break policies and sales collaborations are just a few of the things they don’t really need to hide. By making almost everything except for some personal and financial information private, the GitLab Handbook helps people understand this company better, and that’s considered a good thing.
Scalable
The GitLab Handbook is almost infinitely scalable. As long as there is more information and documentation to include in it, there is space available. It also helps to scale knowledge by being the main mechanism for information sharing within the GitLab company. One person makes a change, update, or addition, and the entire team, notwithstanding the entire public audience, gets to learn about it. Within the company, this helps to keep information on policies and practices unified.
Dynamic
The Handbook can and is edited and added to by employees and management daily. When processes or policies change, they must be recorded in the Handbook first.
According to GitLab co-founder Dmitry Zaporozhets, “If it’s not in the Handbook, it’s not real.” This means that the document is always a work in progress, a draft that’s never going to be fully completed.
This is important as the business world is increasingly fluid and organizations like GitLab need to be able to adapt to these changes to stay relevant and competitive.
Efficient
Centralizing information while simultaneously giving all stakeholders access to it is efficient. It reduces information loss and confusion and also means that everyone knows where to find and store important information. When changes or additions are made, all people in the organization can be made aware, which saves time and ensures everyone stays properly informed.
How to Create Your Own GitLab-Inspired Handbook
The GitLab Handbook is open-source and posted publicly online, including its source code, and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
This means that any person or organization is free to use this document as a starting point or framework for developing their own company or employee handbook. There’s no need to create such a large and detailed document, or at least not at first.
Instead, it’s possible to use the GitLab Handbook as a structure to base your own document upon to reflect the crucial aspects of your organization. You’ll want to change the organization and content to suit your needs but keeping the general idea the same will help you to build a transparent, efficient, scalable solution.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you want to read about GitLab or get an idea of how its handbook is structured, you can find it on this website.
The main reason for this is that GitLab values transparency and is open to sharing all of its corporate information. It feels that something that needs to be hidden is something it should not be doing. Another reason is that potential applicants can learn all about the company and decide whether they want to work there or not. This saves the company a lot of time and resources in talent sourcing and helps to reduce turnover as well.
The handbook includes so much information that it acts as a central repository which makes looking up information much easier. Also, by centralizing information about policies and practices, the Handbook helps to de-centralize HR services as employees can find the answers to many of their questions by themselves.
Charlotte is an Human Resources Information Systems and Martech expect, Charlotte has worked for major brands in the industry including FactorialHR and Tooltester. Originally from Manchester, UK, with a Bachelor's degree from the Manchester Metropolitan University, Charlotte currently lives in Barcelona, Spain.