7 examples of extreme transparency of GitLab
GitLab is known as an Open Source company. But its openness goes far beyond just the code. I decided to collect some examples of tremendous transparency of GitLab in one place:
- Code
- Issues
- Development plans
- Handbook
- Salaries
- Post mortems
- Functional group updates
GitLab’s code
Obviously, you can see the code of GitLab Community Edition in the open.
What is not that obvious, that Enterprise Edition is also available for anyone who is interested.
Of course, there’s much more in their group:
I personally love the ability to learn from GitLab how they use their own CI system:
And yeah, GitLab’s website is also open source: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com. It means you don’t have to way for a blog post to be released. You can just go to related merge request and read the draft :)
GitLab issues
Both feature requests and bug reports are open to anyone. I guess GitLab actually suffers from that. Managing ~7500 open issues should be somewhat a challenge.
For sure that wouldn’t be possible without all the powerful features like Labels, Milestones and Issue Boards.
And guess what GitLab Marketing department uses to discuss and plan stuff? Correct — GitLab issues, all in the open :)
GitLab’s development plans
This. Is. Huge: https://about.gitlab.com/direction
You can see what major features are planned for next releases here:
More stuff to check out: Product strategy, Vision, Why there are so many Enterprise versions, What does “integrated product” mean.
Everything is connected to the related issues. I guess this is why there’s so many of them.
Handbook
GitLab’s direction page is just a small part of a much bigger thing called Team Handbook. It is “the central repository for how GitLab runs the company”
It is something like next version of “wiki” with the only difference that collaboration process looks like collaboration in any other open source project — with merge requests and related discussions.
It is constantly in “work in progress” state. You can see VP of product updating his OKRs or Sales team discussing changes to their demo script. It is that transparent, right.
Noteworthy handbook pages:
- Auto-generated company structure. It breaks the layout of the page, but it is very interesting to explore.
- Engineering handbook, and engineering workflow
- Values. I illustrated some of them recently:
Salaries
Salaries is always a touchy topic, especially for a distributed company. GitLab has found an elegant solution: instead of making salaries public, they created compensation calculator. There are also sections in handbook describing compensation principles and the formula behind the salary calculator.
Experienced Senior Developer from Abu-Dhabi will make five times more than Junior Developer from Yerevan, but I guess it will be also harder to prove GitLab his or her value.
Daily team calls
Since April, GitLab publishes their daily functional group updates on Youtube. These are basically team calls where a leader of a group tells listeners about what was done, what is planned, and what is currently happening in their functional group.
If you’re too lazy to dig through the handbook, you can understand what’s currently happening in the company by watching to a couple of recordings. Btw, it is also a great way to get a subtle feeling of what it is like to be a GitLab employee :)
Post mortems
The January 31st GitLab Database incident have already become a classic. It is a perfect example of how not to do database backups, and how to handle production incident in public.
Thousands of devs/opses were able to learn a lot because of that publicity:
If you haven’t heard, the person responsible for that incident was not fired but promoted. Compare it to this recent story, where CTO fires junior developer for deleting production database on his first day.
If GitLab’s behaviour looks very counterintuitive for you, make sure to read more about GitLab values.
P.S. If you want to learn about GitLab CI/CD, make sure to check out my course campaign on IndieGoGo and make sure to subscribe to get early bird discounts:
