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Trial

If you're doing a writing trial with us, this is the process we use.

  • We'll create a channel in slack #<your-name>-ritza. In general all communication about the trial should be in there. If you need to discuss your contract, money, or anything else you think might be sensitive, feel free to DM Gareth directly, but for questions about the trial, scope of work, or anything else, please use the channel.
  • In the channel, we'll share a brief with you that explains what the goal is and anything else you need.

Overall trial goals

The goal of the trial is for us to evaluate your technical skills and writing skills, and for you to see how we work.

We also want to see how you can effectively and efficiently use a specific number of hours, so please don't do spend more hours than agreed on the project you're given.

A common mistake is for writers to spend too much time on the technical/coding part of the trial and not have enough time to give us a polished piece of writing.

We value writing skills and technical skills equally at Ritza, so you should make sure time box any technical work to ensure you have time to show us your best writing work too.

If you don't have time to complete the project, we much prefer to see a half-finished technical project with half of a polished draft than only a technical project, or a full-length draft that's rushed and incomplete.

Evaluation

We evaluate engineering writers at Ritza on three pillars:

  • Technical - you can build
  • Writing - you can write
  • Professional - you work well with our team

You can read more about this at our career ladder.

For the first two, we'll mainly look at what you produce in the scope of the trial. For the last one, we'll look at how you communicate with us throughout the trial. In general, we value over-communication, so you should ask questions, share progress updates, and keep us in the loop as much as possible as you progress.

Writing a draft

Please carefully read our page on writing a draft which links to our style guide and gives some guidance on how to add screenshots.

Also make sure you're familiar with our policies around LLMs and generative AI.

Submitting your trial project

The brief might have specific instructions on how to submit, but if not our standard process is

  • You create a private GitHub repository called '`
  • Invite sixhobbits to that repository
  • Structure your project as described in writing a draft
  • Send the link to the article (e.g. github.com/<your-username>/<your-name>-trial/my-article.md) to the channel and tag Gareth when you're done

Getting paid

Once you've done the agreed hours, please invoice us to get paid.