The People Group Engineering team aims to reduce as much manual work as possible. One of the areas we have done this, is everything related to the employment automation flow.
Note: this section only discusses items in the offboarding where People Engineering was involved. You can read more about offboarding at GitLab on this handbook page
When a team member voluntarily leaves GitLab, an email going over the offboarding interview and frequently asked questions is automatically sent to them.
The pipeline is scheduled to run every hour and scan the offboarding spreadsheet for new rows since the last run. For each row, an email is sent to the departing team member using different templates depending on the team member's country.
Every 15 minutes, a pipeline scans the offboarding spreadsheet for rows where the Garden Leave (Non-US) Start Date/Last Working Day (US only) Start Date occurred within the past 15 minutes. If neither are specified, Termination Effective Date is used as a fallback. For each row matching this criterion, it will perform the same actions as if a People Connect Team member ran manually initiated the offboarding. (see Manually initiated offboarding issue creation and Offboarding merge request sections).
The manual process is kept as a backup process should the automation fail or for exceptional cases where a team member offboarding cannot be added to the offboarding spreadsheet.
After a People Connect Team member runs the Slack command to open the issue, this will be automatically assigned to the People Connect Team member who ran the command and the outgoing team member's Manager.
The job then grabs various details of the outgoing team member, like country of residence, entity through which they are hired, division, department, job title etc. For each of these details, it checks for the existence of a task file in the offboarding_tasks folder of the employment project. These tasks files are of the format country_<country name>.md, entity_<entity name>.md, division_<division name>.md, department_<department name>.md, etc. If such a file is found, it includes contents of those files also in the offboarding issue.
This issue is added to the team member's epic.
The offboarding command will also create a merge request to the www-gitlab-com project. This MR
includes:
data/team_members/person directoryreports_to in case the offboarded team member had reportsIn the event that the merge request has become out of date and the /rebase quick action isn't working a People Connect Team member can follow these steps to regenerate the MR:
When a team member leaves GitLab they also need to be terminated on Guardian. We have a daily check for offboarded team members. Every day we check if there are any new offboarding issues created for the day before. For those, we check if the team member is located in the United States. If there are matches, we create a file with the following naming convention: 04_employee_termination_mmddyyhhmmss.csv and add the users employee id and their end date to the file. This is then uploaded to Guardian so they can process it.
You can read more about how team members are added to Guardian here.
When a team member is offboarded, there's a redirect rule that is setup on Google Workspace for the outgoing team member. After 5 days this redirect rule needs to be removed. To make sure this isn't forgotten, a scheduled pipeline is set up for the bot to leave a GitLab issue comment reminding the People Connect Team member to remove the rule.
Currently, the pipeline is scheduled to run everyday at 04:00 AM UTC. It will comment on all the offboarding issues created 5 days before the current date.