PartsCloud | Backend Engineer | REMOTE (Europe) | Full-time

We’re looking for a Backend Engineer with data science experience to join our small team of experienced developers. You’ll work on core platform features including APIs, data pipelines, and our planning engine using Python, Django, the modern data stack, and related tools. The role is hands-on and collaborative, with opportunities to contribute across the stack and own projects end-to-end. We’re remote-first within the EU, offer a competitive salary around €75k (depending on experience), equity (VSOP), and support for personal development. Bonus points for startup experience or a background in logistics, e-commerce, or finance platforms.

At PartsCloud, we’re on a mission to modernize the spare parts industry with our cloud-based platform, PartsOS. Our software helps industrial service teams better manage inventory, forecasting, and fulfillment in a sector long underserved by digital tools. We’re building a scalable solution that empowers businesses to reduce excess stock, improve availability, and stay resilient in the face of supply chain disruptions.

Apply directly or reach out to me for questions. Please mention you found the job on HN when talking to us.

https://join.com/companies/partscloud/14075781-back-end-engi...

For example, you can get a kit around $32: https://a.aliexpress.com/_Eya0rSM

You're spot on. Thanks for drawing this out and making it clear that, no matter what might be going on in the industry, the original poster's issue obtaining (and probably keeping) a job is about their contrarian attitude and lack of social skills.

What a goofy thing to say. I have excellent social skills and I do not have a contrarian attitude. The original post isn't even about my personal experiences. I've asked others what their experiences have been. Would you mind pointing to something outside of this post that would make you claim that I have a contrarian attitude and lack of social skills? Would you mind pointing to a specific job in which these alleged defects affected me negatively?

I recall holding down many jobs for many consecutive years and being let go of only one. I related why I was let go: the owner was able to hire cheaper foriegn labor - were you aware of this? The president said in 2016 that hiring h1b just to save a buck is something he would permanently end.

Here is a link to his statements. Were you aware of this as well?

https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/1873172920396382490

I fail to see a contrarian attitude in this thread, but I do see internet trolls who smell blood and are attempting to bait me into a fight that won't happen. Good luck.

Mandatory plug for Redbean[0], a standalone Lua webserver (a single-file that runs natively on six OSes!), and Fullmoon[1], a web framework built on top of it.

Not exactly mainstream, but so simple and elegant.

[0] https://redbean.dev/

[1] https://github.com/pkulchenko/fullmoon

There is no canned way to do it in one shot, but using regular Django session authentication together with a PWA frontend hosted separately is not that difficult.

The actual authentication remains on the Django app, using the standard way of POSTing to a login form and receiving a session cookie -- only instead of a server-generated page serving a HTML form, you have the PWA lipstick sending data directly. This approach is so much simpler than dealing with id/access/refresh tokens, encryption keys, black lists, and all of the OIDC dance.

So we should stop the coding challenges, stop LeetCode, stop whiteboarding, stop profiling candidates, stop asking for their GitHub page. How is hiring supposed to work then? Just post the contract online and the first one to mail it back gets the job?

I like live coding challenges, something like a ~2 hour pair programming session, ideally modifying an existing project. I invest as much time as each candidate, while we are both exploring whether we want to work together.

I personally hire people I’ve worked with before and I know what they can do.

If I can’t do that, I ask to see their prior work.

Good programmers have usually written a lot of code. Having them walk through and explain it usually gives a good idea of what they can do and how they think.

Sometimes you meet a programmer who only works on proprietary code and can’t share it.

In that case I ask them to explain the design of something similar, and write a modestly sized example of a component of that system. Watching them in their own dev environment for 30 minutes usually tells you all you need to know.

You could also, you know, talk to people, like we did before Google and the Silicon Valley bro-wanna-bes decided that coding interviews was the only solution.

I've hired plenty of people without having coding challenges or any form of live coding. I've been happy with all of those hires. A former co-worker did some take-home coding tasks, which they'd then talk to the candidate about during the interview. I feel like those hires where worse in may ways, they certainly didn't stay around as long. That may very well be completely unrelated obviously.

For years people have been complaining that exams aren't realistic, that some talented people just don't do well in an exam situation and we've mostly come to the consensus that this is correct and mistakenly filter out highly talented people. So why wouldn't we apply the same logic to hiring?

If you're hiring for a specialist position some coding exercise can absolutely be in order, but I can't think of any reason to have them for a junior position. So I wouldn't recommend dropping coding tasks completely, but I'd apply them more selectively, otherwise you risk missing a number of really good hires.

Part of it may also be that so many companies and interviewers are absolutely terrible at doing coding challenges, but do them anyway, because Google and Facebook do them.

I admit I've been hired once from just a friendly chit-chat, but I can't see how this could be reliable. There are so many bullshitters in the industry, who, during character creation put all their skill points into Charisma. They are smooth talking, good looking, and have all those charming Ivy League mannerisms of an Investment Banker or Enterprise Sales person. And while they might not be able to be technically deep enough to fool an engineer interviewer, they will absolutely fool the director or VP who does the final screen and has the final say. These kinds of people flock to companies who don't do robust technical screens.

I can see your point about the bullshitters being able to fool a VP, but in that case they wouldn't be doing the coding interview anyway.

On the other side we're also seeing bullshitters that can ace any leetcode challenge, but not actually design anything of value or work well with others.

There's probably not a one-size fits all, but if you're going to do coding interview do them well and understand many don't do well in these types of interviews because they don't see the value, or feel that their other skills are being ignored.

What is left is networking and referrals, which I suspect people also object to.

Yes, this is seriously flawed for other reasons but is the best way when you can.

i had also good experiences with live coding. both as an interviewer and a candidate. you not only see a candidates skill, but also their way of communicating, and as a candidate if you are lucky to be interviewed by a future teammate or superior, you see how they will treat you when you need help working on something.

i had this approach work even in china where people tend to be very submissive and afraid to speak up. i expected them to have trouble in the interview, but most candidates told me they felt very at ease even though they had never worked with a foreigner before.

It looks like you just reinvented CGI/PHP.

Yeah you guessed it, smallweb is basically CGI meets Deno sandboxing + https imports.

For a simple use case (simple site with a simple blog), I started off with Hugo and found it too complicated, then switched to Zola and had it done in a few days. The documentation was simple and to the point, the templates were easier to work with (for me). The community is infinitely smaller though, if it's not in the docs you're basically on your own.

Can you imagine riding a horse or walking to your destination? Because that's the alternative if cheap oil isn't readily available anymore.

Or maybe you'd rather imagine having to migrate because your city is under water and there is no more food, due to changing climate?

Your convenience is beside the point, society will adapt.

Take a look at full-duplex multifunctional printers, many times they are cheaper than standalone scanners. Just as an example, a black and white laser like the Brother MFC-L2820DW should last you a long time.

Well, at least it'd be "good enough" to get your feet wet, so to speak - and also give you the ability to test if you're going to stick to it.

I got a Brother ADS-4300N to use with p-ngx, works very well and also is way faster than the usual document scanners on MF printers (duplex is done in one pass, for example)...