Ask HN: What companies have publicly available handbooks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What companies have publicly available handbooks?

123 pointsLewisVerstappen46 comments

I know of

- Gitlab - PostHog

Are there any others with publicly available handbooks?

View on HN

I keep a list of public company handbooks here: https://publish.obsidian.md/davidgasquez/Company+Handbooks.

This whole site has a lot of fascinating links generally. Thanks for sharing this

It really does. I may have to start doing something like this myself, it's got a different feel than a blog.

Great link. Highly recommend adding Material UI's handbook - it's exceptionally well put together. https://mui-org.notion.site/Handbook-f086d47e10794d5e839aef9...

Thank you so much!

David, curiosity what is the link about? ( besides handbooks).

Is is just a collection of random stuff? Apologies, I did not dig around sufficiently.

p.s: I found this interesting: https://publish.obsidian.md/davidgasquez/Rationality . Somebody tried to explain what 'rationality' is, without tossing around the word loosely as most people do.

Not oc but this appears to be a reference to rationality as practiced by the "rationalist movement". You can read more about it at these places:

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationalist-movement https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/46qnWRSR7L2eyNbMA/the-lens-t...

I like the definition "rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph."

> Is is just a collection of random stuff?

Indeed. Is mostly a way for me to keep track of interesting things and have a quick way to re-learn something.

> I found this interesting: https://publish.obsidian.md/davidgasquez/Rationality . Somebody tried to explain what 'rationality' is, without tossing around the word loosely as most people do.

That note should be named "Thinking" to be honest. The goal is to collect a bunch of bullet points that I can read at any given time to remind me how to think better or common gotchas.

Wow thanks for sharing! What a well-organized note.

David, going into the rabbit hole of this today. And already discovered some cool nuggets. Thanks for sharing.

TTS at GSA: https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov (Yes, we got Vim listed on a government website: https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/tools/text-editors/)

I enjoyed going through the cal. com handbook [1]. It provides a very high overview of the code base as well if that's of interest to you. There entire company is being built in public so it provides a great level of visibility into their operations [2].

[1] https://handbook.cal.com/

[2] https://cal.com/open

Valve - https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewE...

Not really publicly available, but an ex employee leaked the LinusTechTips / Linus Media Group employee handbook https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/115ucm3/ltt_... (at the end of the post)

GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

https://basecamp.com/handbook

My favourite bit of that one is this: https://basecamp.com/handbook/09-how-we-work#in-self-suffici...

"a single project team should be able to go from idea to deploy as independently as possible"

Yep that's a really good one. Not being blocked helps a lot for getting things done.

US Army: https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/FM.aspx

https://handbook.sourcegraph.com/

Remote https://handbook.remote.com/

Has a whole section on DEI. Make what you want of it.

https://remotecom.notion.site/people-Belonging-Diversity-Equ...

Technically not a handbook, but recently I’m writing up a lot of the ideas we’ve been using to operate Workforce.com @ https://ghiculescu.substack.com. Hoping to turn it into a real book!

Trussworks https://guide.truss.works/

We're a remote-first consultancy, and that link includes our handbook, onboarding guide, and guidelines for open-sourcing our work.

I know Gitlab has publish their completely remote culture handbook.

airbyte! https://handbook.airbyte.com/

One of the better ones around for sure.

DEI statement are a big red flag for me:

https://handbook.airbyte.com/people/diversity-inclusion-and-...

DEI = virtue signalling

well then the handbook serves its purpose because we wouldn't want to waste any time interviewing someone triggered by a simple statement of how we do things

The feeling is mutual.

Student, tradesman, expert.

Some, many and very few, reach enlightenment, and invent stuff.

Many and very few corporations, get the opportunity to intercept the creation = legally, according to "corporate laws", opposite to "man laws", copyright those creations.

Many and very few of those inventions end up written in a book.

Many Books and very few are real.

This is why no company can have publicly available handbook - unless this company follows some of the creative commons laws.

Valve: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications

By far Valve's handbook is the best, it's original, intelligent and perhaps most importantly: non-clichéd. Most other companies have put out a bunch of platitudes in their mission/philosophy section, though I'm sure they put a lot of effort into it.

Huh, I work for a huge Fortune 500 company and TIL that we don't really have a unified handbook. If you want to look up something (like paid time off) you have to go find where the web page for that thing is, which is probably in an entirely different part of the intranet site from something else (like official holidays).

That’s likely because at a F500 you have a lot of variation between jurisdictions (states, or worse nations) on pretty fundamental things like PTO, overtime, etc. So each has its own set of rules and HR helps communicate them (via handbook or other means like a sharepoint site or slack channel)

Convictional: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQFFCUWlf-32D3mV...

https://posthog.com/handbook

Hotjar: https://hotjar.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/REC/pages/269942983...

HashiCorp: https://works.hashicorp.com (not exactly an "employee handbook" with HR policies + etc., but a decent look into the intentional culture)

Infinum - digital agency | https://infinum.com/handbook/

Every team (Android, iOS, Frontend, .NET, Design, Flutter, Rails, WordPress) has their own.

I think there were some internal docs too, but all Okta's HR stuff is on a public website: https://rewards.okta.com/

Valve: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications

Niteo: https://github.com/teamniteo/handbook

Basecamp: https://basecamp.com/handbook.

Are you looking for curiosity's sake, or for models for drafting your own?

highlight.io: https://github.com/highlight#our-values

Reply on news.ycombinator.com