What is StaffPlus?

StaffPlus is a private membership organization for high-growth engineers with over 10+ years experience working in or towards Staff+ roles. We are an online and in-person community helping each other grow in an environment driven by collaboration and respect.

What is a Staff+ Role?

“They’re ambiguous and differ company to company.” - Everyone

Great. Let’s just start with these simple definitions of scope.

• Staff: Focused on output of single department.
• Principal: Focused on output of multiple departments.
• Architect: Focused on output of single organization.
• Distinguished: Focused on output of multiple organizations (entire company).

How do I become a member?

Click the Sign up link to reserve your place on the waitlist. Once your number is selected, we’ll email you with further details about joining the next cohort.

What is a cohort?

A cohort is a group of membership invites sent out once per month. Cohorts are fixed size. New members of the cohort will go through an introduction process amongst themselves prior to the larger community.

What does membership entail?

• Access to members-only conversations in Slack, email, phone, and Zoom.
• Access to archive of content curated specifically for Staff+ Engineers.
• Access to members in search of their next role.
• Access to posting on our exclusive job board.
• Access to virtual & in-person gatherings. (Coming soon)

Why is membership private?

StaffPlus strives to be inclusive to all Staff+ Engineers but firmly believes that rapid community growth is harmful during the formative stages. Problems stemming from:

• Misunderstood Guidelines
• Unenforced Code of Conduct
• Limited resources for moderation
• Limited moderation of low quality content (fluff, egregious self promotion, etc.)

We wish to provide a very tailored experience for our members so we plan to solidify the community best practices prior to more rapid expansion.

What is “No BAP”?

• No Bullshit
• No Assholes
• No Politics

“But StaffPlus, everything is political these days!” - Some pedant

No.

Read our Code of Conduct and Membership Guidelines.

If you don’t like them, we posit StaffPlus isn’t the membership for you.

If “Content is king” - what should we expect from StaffPlus?

You’ll find:

• “Understanding the ‘hidden’ work in Staff+ roles”
• “Time management - Coding vs. other”
• “When to say Yes and when to say No”
• “Building cross-team consensus”

You won’t find:

• “How do I v-center an image in CSS?” - stack overflow
• “Introduction to HTML5” - dev.to
• “TC or gtfo” - blind
• “We just launched a new widget factory library” - w/e

How does StaffPlus keep the lights on?

StaffPlus is currently bootstrapped by its founding team. In terms of monetization, we have a few ideas:

• We provide enough value to Staff+ Engineers for paid membership.
• We charge for job board postings/referrals.
• We keep the lights on with donations.
• We play clowns at kids birthday parties for extra cash until we’re wrongfully accused of bank robbery, break out of jail, kidnap the daughter of a business magnate, and flee down I-5 in a high speed chase towards Mexico.

What is a DR?

DR is a “Decision Record” that documents changes to the StaffPlus community. Check out the introductory blog post for more details.

What are some complements/alternatives to StaffPlus?

• StaffEngineer: Wonderful book from Will Larson.
• LeadDev: Some Staff+ content and open community but also covers technical people management.
• /r/ExperiencedDevs: Quality community that is well moderated. Much more broad focus on tech related problems ~5+ YoE.
• Rands Leadership Slack: As the name describes, leadership focused.