Writing for Ritza

Many software engineers hate writing, or think it's beneath them. Many good writers are technophobes and are scared of if statements.

If you're part of the small group of people who likes writing and building, we'd like to talk to you.

At Ritza, our Engineering Writers build proof-of-concept projects and write about how they did it, allowing other engineers to replicate the same in a fraction of the time. In day-to-day work, engineers often struggle with a problem for dozens or hundreds of hours, figure it out, and then move on to the next one, leaving others to follow the same path. If instead they wrote it down and made it public, they could save millions of future hours for others.

If you're a software engineer, you don't need to be told the value of good guides, tutorials, and documentation, as you've probably learned more from these than from any formal education. Come help us make all software engineers' lives better, while getting paid to do it.

What you need to be considered

For most of our roles, you need at least five years of experience doing professional software engineering. Often that means pushing production code, or running production cloud services.

Extra points if you have experience with writing, whether formal (writing a technical book) or informal (keeping notes in a technical blog).

But there are some exceptions to these rules, so please feel free to apply if you are interested even you do not meet these requirements.

How we work with writers

We are not a freelance marketplace, so nearly all of our writers work with us regularly, not on one-off projects. We think that writing 40h/week is a sure way to get burned out and we value the industry experience that our writers have too. A majority of our writers work with us on retainer agreements for a fixed number of hours per week. This is not in addition to a full time job - we don't believe that anyone should work for more than 40h/week, so most of our writers are part time or freelance engineers, or they have other priorities in life like spending more time with their families and therefore a part time arrangement works out well for them.

Our preferred method of hiring is:

• We look at your application (possibly including CV, writing samples, code portfolio, motivation letter though none are compulsory)
• If we like it, we arrange a short, informal call to get to know you a bit better
• If we like each other after that, we contract you to do a trial article (around 2000 words)
• If we like each other after that, we agree to a monthly retainer (you work 10-30 hours/week for us for a fixed monthly fee)

But again, there are exceptions. If any of those steps don't work for you for any reason, feel free to apply anyway and mention what structure you prefer and why.

How our writing process works

Our production pipeline is roughly

topic -> draft -> qa -> edit -> publish -> distribute

Sometimes our customers prefer to handle some of those steps on their side, but in many cases we at Ritza are responsible for all of them. This means that you, as a writer, will be given a topic. You'll usually first have some technical work (coding, configuring) to implement, and then you'll draft an article about how you did it.

Once this is done, a QA engineer will run through your work, as a reader would. You might need to give more inputs or make changes at this stage, but often the article will be passed directly from QA to editing.

Here an editor will read through your work, and improve the structure, flow, consistency, grammar, and anything else from our style guide. Again, your input might be needed. If not, you'll read over the edits to see if you disagree with any of the changes made and ideally integrate any general points into your future drafts.

We focus on quality over speed (we try to avoid 'rush work' or very short deadlines), but at the same time we work with a high velocity.

Articles do not sit around between rounds of editing waiting for feedback from different people. The technical and language editing rounds should often take no more than two days.

How much and how often do you need to write?

This depends a lot on complexity - a 2000 word post can take 2 days or 2 weeks, depending on things like research needed and technical complexity. We always mutually agree deadlines with our writers: usually they propose one that seems manageable to them first, instead of us assigning them arbitrarily.

The number of posts a writer can do also depends on their hourly agreement with us.

An 'average' article might be 2000-3000 words, and take 10 hours of technical/coding time and 10 hours of writing time.

How do authorship, copyright, and bylines work?

We think that writing is a team activity, with the author as a central role.

This means that Engeering Writers at Ritza are treated more like they might be used to from working with book publishers (many other roles support the author) rather than following the process used by content mills (where the author is pulled in different directions by different managers).

That said, most of our writing is for third-party customers who are doing this for their own brands, and therefore in most cases the neither the author's name nor Ritza's branding will not appear on the final version.

In your contract with Ritza, you will assign the IP for the article and the code to us, and we will then assign that to our customers. In some cases (e.g. for blog posts), this is 'ghost writing' and the customer will put the name and face from someone on their team on the article. In other cases, the guide will be included as part of a documentation site or similar, and not have any authors specified.

Authors are always welcome to include links to articles they have worked on in personal portfolio sites and similar, and we're always happy to confirm that a writer worked on a specific article if necessary.