People Group Engineering

Overview

As GitLab continues to scale, our need for tools and automation to manage our growth expands along with it. To help the People Group, we have a People Group Engineering team, that consists out of People Group Fullstack Engineers to make our team more efficient and improve the effectiveness of our core People Group.

Responsibilities include (but are not limited to):

• Automation and API integrations in talent acquisition
• Employment issues automation
• Integrations to assure SSoT
• Manage the code that runs the Employment Bot

Quick Links

Quick navigation to some of our other pages.

Working with us

If you’d like to request engineering assistance with an issue, bug fixes, urgent requests related to People Group processes or tools (like Workday) or anything relating to People Group Engineering, please start by creating an issue in the People Group Engineering project. All issues are reviewed and prioritized to a specific team through our kanban board. If you require general support with MR’s, kindly collaborate with all of GitLab team members in #mr-buddies in slack.

If you are looking for help regarding general inquiries such as: payroll, paid time off, benefits, etc. Please reach out to our People Connect team via HelpLab.

If you are looking to bring the People Group Engineering team into a discussion/issue/merge request on GitLab, please utilize our group tag: @gl-people-engineering to ping the appropriate team members.

Report bugs

If you want to report bugs about existing integrations, you can use any of the following templates:

• Bug with a /pops command
• Bug with Nominations

Urgent attention

We have monitoring setup in case some of our applications are no longer accessible. This is the case for all of our integrations. This will trigger notifications to the People Group Engineer(s). If you need our immediate attention, feel free to use our #peopleops-eng Slack channel. Avoid pinging people directly unless there is a real urgency to the matter.

Our workflow

The People Group Engineering board serves as the single source of truth on the engineering team’s priorities. Issues follow a linear sequence, with a Workflow:: label indicating an issue’s current status:

1. Workflow::Triage: Issues start here. Issues in triage must be further defined before they’re able to be made ready for development. Once the problem and a proposal for solving it is defined to the point where an engineer can begin work, it can be moved to Workflow::Ready for Development.
2. Workflow::Ready for Development: Issues that are groomed and are ready for an engineer to begin work. They’re well defined in terms of the problem, and have a proposal that’s defined enough for us to begin work; not every detail needs to have been defined, but an engineer should be able to start work on this issue by reading the issue description alone.
3. Workflow::Next Up: These issues are determined as the next ones that we should work on. We try to keep this list to about 4 / engineer in the team.
4. Workflow::In Progress: Issues that are actively being worked on by a developer.
5. Workflow::Verification: Issues that have engineering work complete and ready for evaluation. At this point, the developed solution should be evaluated (by the issue reporter or another stakeholder) to verify that it solves the original problem.
6. Workflow::Complete: Once signed off, the issue should be closed and Workflow::Complete should be applied to signal the work is verified and complete.

There are three more states an issue can be placed in:

• Workflow::Waiting: Issues that are waiting from input from someone or are waiting on a dependency. These are issues that need input or progress from others before they can progress.
• Workflow::Blocked: These issues are either blocked by another issue or by missing API endpoints. The People Ops Engineer always adds the reason why an issue is moved to blocked.
• Workflow::On Hold: These issues are currently on hold and the requester has been informed about this. It is still an important idea but there may not be capacity or resources to move the request forward. When a change in capacity and/or resources happens, we will re-evaluate the status of the ticket.

Triaging new tickets

We have a performance indicator set to having new tickets being triaged within 7 working days. Everyone in the People Engineering team can triage new tickets. What we do when a new ticket comes in:

• check if everything in the template is filled in, if not ask the author to fill it in and add the label Workflow::Waiting
• check if we have any follow up questions for the creator, if we do, ping the author of the issue and ask them the questions, add the label Workflow::Waiting
• determine the project labels (for example ~p-compensation-calculator, ~p-employment-automation, etc)
• determine the priority label (see priorities)
• determine the team label PopsEng::Team::Tech, PopsEng::Team::Engineering, etc). You can also find a GitLab board, with the issues sorted by team here.
• determine if it is a new project ~PopsEng::New Project or a bug ~PopsEng::Bug or an addition to an existing project or integration ~PopsEng::Addition
• when we have all the information needed to start working on the ticket, label it with either Workflow::Ready for Development or Workflow::Next Up

Note: for bugs, we have another performance indicator that requires us to take action within one working day. This is because often a bug in any of the integrations would lead to inefficiences and manual work for the People Group.

Priorities

Before we state a ticket as fully triaged, we need to have the following information:

• is it compliance related?
• how often does the problem occur? Daily, weekly, monthly, annually?
• how many team members are affected by this?
• what is the manual effort (in time) currently required to accomplish this work today?

With that knowledge in mind we determine the priority of a ticket, with the following table:

Our issues will be labeled according to the priority level. Anything that falls outside of the table won’t be labeled with a priority and will be added to our backlog and worked after priority items are completed. As this is a first iteration, we will review those without labels to see if they should’ve been labeled differently and if we need to rework this table.

Kanban

Currently we moved away from monthly milestone and are trying out a Kanban approach for our work. The board can be found here. The column Workflow::Next Up is the one that determines our next work.

The People Engineering team, tries to keep that column at about 4 tickets / engineer, so it’s clear what our next priorities are. To determine what gets moved into that column, we use our priority labels. However there are two exceptions on the priority labels:

• issues labeled bug: these are tickets that often need to be fixed asap as this is usual an existing project or integration that is broken
• issues labeled code maintenance: these are tickets like library updates or refactors that we need to plan in to make sure our code stays up to standards and secure

Review process

1. Assign your merge request to anyone in the People Group Engineering team
2. They will review it. Once the review is done, they will assign it back to you.
3. If the merge request was not approved yet, address the feedback and assign it back to the reviewer.
4. Continue the previous two steps until the merge request is approved.
5. If you have merge rights, merge the merge request. If you don’t have merge rights, ask the reviewer to merge it.

Current projects

We’ve build several automations and tools to support our People Group. In the following pages, you can find more details about all the different projects or automations we’ve created:

Team member’s employment

• Onboarding Automations
• Career Mobility Automations
• Offboarding Automations

Supportive tools for People Group

• Nominator Bot
• Compensation Calculator
• Inclusive Language Check on Job Families
• People Ops Internal Handbook

Uncategorized

• Smaller syncs
• Slack Integrations

Data

Single Source of truth

For all automations we use 2 main sources:

• Workday: their database acts as the single source of truth for everything related to the team member. We make use of a custom middleware from the People Group Engineering Team’s Ruby gem, and interact with Workday using a bot user with limited access to employee details.
• Greenhouse: this is our single source of truth for everything related to candidates (so before they are hired). We make use of a fork from the Greenhouse Ruby gem, and interact with Greenhouse using a user with access to candidates details.

If any other sources are used for a specific integration or automation, it is mentioned on the section.

Confidentiality

When a project uses API tokens with a certain level of access, we mirror the public project to a private project on ops.gitlab.net. These projects are only used to execute the scheduled jobs. For all planning, coding and collaboration we use the public projects.

Access to ChatOps for PeopleOps Team

Before the PeopleOps team member can excute the chat commands mentioned on this page, they need to be invited to the employment-automation project. This can be done by the owners of the project.

Once you are a member of the project, you can run any /pops command. The PeopleOps bot will respond that you first have to connect your GitLab account. You can click the provided URL and authorize. Now you are able to run the /pops commands.

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