Why collect stories?

There are so many different ways that folks reach Staff, Principal and Distinguished Engineer roles. As such, we often find that the best career advice for folks pursuing these roles isn't advice at all, but rather the stories of folks who've already done it. StaffEng collects folks' stories of reaching Staff-plus roles and succeeding once they're there.

Sharing your story

If you've reached a Staff-plus Engineer role, then we'd love to include your story in the collection. To share your story, please create a copy of this template and follow it's instructions.

Before doing so, a few things to consider:

1. Read some of the existing list of stories to get a sense of what we're looking for.
2. Review the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. By submitting a story to StaffEng, you are agreeing to have it published under this license. If this isn't a license you're comfortable with, that's totally ok, but unfortunately we won't be including it on StaffEng.
3. Your pull request should only include your story and any images you want to include in your story. It should not include any code changes to the site itself.
4. After you submit your pull request, we'll review your story. If we believe your story would publish well as it stands, then we'll merge it. Otherwise we'll iterate together on the draft within the pull request.
5. There is a small chance that we'll decline to add your story, primarily if it doesn't meet our requirements (Staff-plus title and five-plus years of experience), an overwhelmingly similar story already exists on StaffEng, or if it is in some way offensive.
6. Once your story goes out, it will be sent to our mailing list the following morning, as well as shared on our RSS feed.

This is all early. If you have suggestions for different questions, how the approach of the project can be improved, or what not, please send a note.