Ask HN: What companies have publicly available handbooks?

123 points by LewisVerstappen ↗ HN
I know of

- Gitlab - PostHog

Are there any others with publicly available handbooks?

47 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread
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.
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!
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

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.
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.

> 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.
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Are you looking for curiosity's sake, or for models for drafting your own?
One of the better ones around for sure.
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)
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.