Fabrik | Fullstack Engineer | Remote (US or EU hours) | Full-time | Salary: $100-$120k
Fabrik is a CMS for medium to large publishers. Full Stack Engineers at Fabrik are responsible for the core product platform, from frontend UI and testing, to APIs, low-level services, and database operations. Full Stack Engineers work in close partnership with designers, product thinkers, and writers directly to build out new product offerings and tooling across the platform.
Responsibilities:
Develop the core Fabrik CMS for writers, and sites for publishers. Be willing to jump into any part of the stack: API, Front end CMS, Sites templates, CDN, etc.
Scale the platform by tuning postgres queries, developing caching solutions, and building tooling for monitoring.
We work with JavaScript, including Node/Express and React, and Postgres. It is not necessary to know Node and React already, but expertise in web architecture is absolutely necessary.
Requirements:
At least 5 years of software engineering experience.
Can contribute across the full stack.
Independent and autonomous. We are a small team split across several timezones. We don't micromanage, and expect that everybody holds their own.
Clear and consistent communication. Again, we're a remote team split across several timezones. Your colleagues need to understand where you are with your work, and be informed on how to carry on from where you've left off.
Apply:
Reach out directly to me: jomar at kargopublishing dot com
SEEKING FREELANCER | Distributed US/EU | Remote Only
Looking for a full stack React/Node.js developer with a few years of experience. You should be comfortable building features end to end, and communicating clearly. Experience with CDNs, server side rendering of react templates, and postgres are a plus.
We are a publishing company running a custom CMS built for speed. As we acquire new sites, we need help scaling our infrastructure and building out new features and templates.
You'd be joining a small team of 3 engineers working fully remote and asynchronously.
He applied to two positions, and the only rejection came days after no response from the manager who advertised his desire for BIPOC to apply and his DMs being open.
That hardly warrants a blanket statement like "Remote hiring at tech companies is racist." A more accurate title would be "The hiring manager for Webflow appears to be racist".
SEEKING FREELANCER | Distributed US/EU | Remote Only
Looking for a full stack React/Node.js developer with a few years of experience. You should be comfortable building features end to end, and communicating clearly. Experience with CDNs, server side rendering of react templates, and postgres are a plus.
We are a small publishing company running a custom CMS built for speed. As we acquire new sites, we need help scaling our infrastructure and building out new features and templates.
You'd be joining a small team of 3 engineers working fully remote and asynchronously.
Your rate: $40-$50 / hour depending on experience. We need someone working full time (40hr/week) for at least the rest of the year, and likely longer.
Yes. The "feed" concept makes sense for my email workflow. I get a few (2-5) important emails that I need to respond to every day, and tens of newsletters that I may read if they pique my interest.
Gmail has "tabs" or whatever they are called which automatically aggregate your emails into different panes. The automatic part didn't work well for me. I'd often find important emails in my "Social" tab, which led to me checking all tabs to make sure the machine learning didn't incorrectly categorize an email.
Hey gives me control over that, and it has been fantastic for the 11 days that I've had an account.
There are other features I love, but the feed has made the biggest impact so far.
Getting 2-5 important messages a day seems categorically not a good use case for feeds at all. That seems like you need to create 5 filters and gradually expand the rules if they occasionally miss things.
Anecdata here. I just rented out my house in Austin last week. We had 14 people vying to sign a lease, and several wanted to bid above the price we are renting for. The real sticker - 10/14 were moving from SF/LA/NY because they can now work from home. Our rent is above market in Austin, but way below what they are used to paying.
All that to say, you may see the opposite of a slowdown.
It's a matter of perspective. Coming from Boston or Copenhagen, SF feels like an extremely dirty and grimy city. So does Berlin.
Parks in Berlin are littered with beer bottles and cigarette butts because smoking and drinking in public are acceptable there. In many US cities you are not allowed to smoke in a public park where children are playing. Some cities banned smoking in all public parks. Drinking outdoors is banned so you don't see many beer bottles.
The problem in SF is different. You can stare into a park in Berlin and see litter. In SF, a park may seem clean but if you stumble upon one hypodermic needle or human faeces, you may not feel like it's so clean anymore.
My neighborhood in Berlin (Mitte) has homeless people hanging around parks and subways stations, but they don't seem to suffer from mental illness at the same rate as the homeless in SF. As far as number of homeless, Mitte vs the Moscone area are comparable.
I live in a very suburban part of Tempelhof (on the border to Mariendorf, near the Teltow canal & the U6 line) & even here you occasionally find spent needles along the riverside.
Coming from Boston or Copenhagen, SF feels like
an extremely dirty and grimy city. So does Berlin.
I can see that...But man - visit New Delhi, Cairo, or hell even Tel Aviv or LA. Berlin is not that dirty - a relative judgment, sure - but I find comparing to Copenhagen (I haven't been to Boston since I was 14 so I don't really remember much) ingenuine.
It reminds of when I lived in Vienna & had a Swiss coworker telling me how bad the transit is in Austria (if you're unfamiliar - transit is amazing in Austria, to the point where you can live in a small alpine village and not need a car. Switzerland just happens to be one of the handful of countries with even better transit).
That's my point. It's a matter of perspective whether or not you find SF dirty. If you come from a cleaner place, you're going to feel like it's dirty. Berlin isn't much cleaner, and there is a homeless problem too (though likely different in cause), so you're not likely to go to SF and feel like the criticism others are passing is as bad as it sounds.
Yeah but how many people are coming from Copenhagen vs e.g. LA or Miami[1]? Let alone any large Latin American or Asian city. But maybe that's just the HN demographics.
[1] I haven't visited Miami in a long time but last I went it was far seedier and grimier than SF, despite lots of rain.
It's less about the safety net and more about re-entering your career at a similar level. In Germany you'd be hard pressed to explain why you took two years off of your career and now want to come back.
Re Europeans traveling around Asia - Europeans tend to graduate university later than Americans and then embark on one or more internships before diving into their work contracts. It's not uncommon to take a break between those transitional periods to travel for a bit. But it is uncommon to leave your permanent contract to travel Asia for two years.
tldr; he moved to SF because salaries are much, much higher than in France, even considering the social benefits that you get in France.
Other threads on HN have French engineers saying that they love living in France while working remotely for American companies.
I've lived in Paris, Berlin, NYC and California. I'll never understand how European founders can keep saying that 40k euro salaries for engineers is a benefit while they watch so many great engineers leave to American companies.
>I've lived in Paris, Berlin, NYC and California. I'll never understand how European founders can keep saying that 40k euro salaries for engineers is a benefit while they watch so many great engineers leave to American companies.
This. I have tasted the fruit and I'm never going back. The social benefits feel largely like gimmicks compared to the standard of living + social recognition you get working as an engineer in the US or even Canada.
What do you mean by "standard of living" though? I know plenty of Europeans who have access to things even rich Americans barely have access to. Once you want to, or have, kids many benefits that are hard to come by becomes less gimmicky. The main problem in Europe, and in most countries, these days is the housing market. Your position in the housing market has really come to determine your position in society.
For example it is pretty common in the Nordic countries to have a vacation home where you spend summers and holidays with friends and family. And between saved parental leave, standardized vacation periods and public holidays there is time available to do so. There are certainly people who do have that in the US, but once you or your family relocates it gets a lot more tricky.
In general I just think it is a lot easier in, at least some, European countries to set yourself up for a good life. Day to day, year to year, to not endure a long commute or stressful work environment. Having time to spend with your kids while they are young, your parents before they get too old and your friends so you don't lose touch. Not having to worry about the future, managing your kids lives, the financial losses of getting sick or your career.
Once you start wanting to do things that aren't universal or the default in any country, and especially with other people in your life, you can end up paying a large premium to do so.
> For example it is pretty common in the Nordic countries to have a vacation home where you spend summers and holidays with friends and family. And between saved parental leave, standardized vacation periods and public holidays there is time available to do so. There are certainly people who do have that in the US, but once you or your family relocates it gets a lot more tricky.
That's also common in the United States or at least in the Upper Midwest. Just here in Minnesota there are around 124,000 seasonal properties and the average household income for the owners of these properties is $58,000 which is not rich in the United States. It's also a similar story in Wisconsin next door and other Upper Midwest states like Michigan.
I don't think being able to a own vacation home in the Midwest is relevant in this context: the increase in income going from France to the Midwest is almost certainly going to be much lower than the increase going from France to the Bay Area, while the loss of social benefits would still be the same (or worse.)
Why? I make almost twice the average salary of a Software Engineer in Paris here in Minneapolis. I could move to the bay area and make an extra $20-$30K but my rent and cost of living would sky rocket. I pay about $680 a month for rent in an excellent neighborhood of Minneapolis. Getting rent that cheap in the bay area would be impossible. Plus my friends working in Chicago have salaries equivalent to the bay area but their cost of living is almost half of the bay. Even though I make less in the Upper Midwest, the cost of living is so low that I can save more than if I lived in the bay.
Shh don't tell them. ;) In Kansas City I rent a _house_ with a large back yard within walking distance from a lot of neat things. I've built a metal working shop in my basement and a forge out back. My rent is 700$ a month. Work the first day of the month pays that if I take a long lunch.
Every SF salary range I see is significantly below what I made last year. I'm not even taking cost of living into consideration here. Just absolute terms. I interviewed at Amazon a few years ago when they were doing some game design stuff and didn't make the cut. I learned that I'm not ambitious enough to make less.
Because midwest tech, I have no debt. In fact, I can crunch for a month, take the money and go buy a few acres to shoot my .50 caliber anti material rifle. Few SF residents will know how expensive it is to buy match 750 grain ammo, or know the pain and suffering of putting a clean hole through an engine block you tore out of a mercury tracer from 1000m away on a tuesday at 11am. It's terrible.
The central limit theorem corroborates the fact that the 500,000 people in KC basically don't exist and it's just one big cornfield. The 800,000 people in San Francisco are burdened with the knowledge that everything east of them til' the coast is flyover country. I feel for them.
> I've built a metal working shop in my basement and a forge out back. My rent is 700$ a month.
Making major capital investments in the property is actually something I would consider a reason to purchase rather than renting. Can you say more about your thought process there?
Why do you assume that? I spent almost a month camping this year and I'm planning a 2 week snowboarding trip in the Rockies. As well as a climbing slash canoeing trip in the boundary waters area in the spring.
And yet me an American is on track for 40 days of paid vacation time this year, also a coworker of mine just got back from 13 weeks paid paternity leave.
> Not having to worry about the future, managing your kids lives, the financial losses of getting sick or your career.
How does this encourage anything but complacency? Who wants to start anything when everything is a utopia with no consequences? I’m not even being facetious because that is basically what you’re describing. This is why Europe barely innovates: extreme comfort and security. These aren’t bad things. But it’s odd to me that people look for more complicated answers when this is plain as day.
Get back to us the first time you have a medical emergency putting you on the hook for 5 or 6 figures (after insurance); at least you're lucky enough to be able to flee the jurisdiction back to a home country.
> Get back to us the first time you have a medical emergency putting you on the hook for 5 or 6 figures (after insurance)
Is that a thing? Obviously there are lots of people in the USA who don't have any good health insurance options. But as an engineer in San Francisco all the companies I've worked at or interviewed with have had gold-plated health insurance plans with maximum out-of-pocket expenses in the low 4 figures. And of course, most people won't hit those maximums most years, that's just an upper bound.
This is of course limited to my personal experience, but my impression is that good health insurance is table stakes for highly-paid engineering roles.
That's a very unfortunate story. As I mentioned, I recognize that many people in the US don't have any good healthcare options, which is something that we as a society ought to fix.
However, I don't think we can learn much about the health insurance typically provided to engineers in San Francisco from the poor insurance plan available to a teacher in Houston. Those jobs have very different compensation profiles.
The problem is you're not going to have a solid understanding of your engineering role plan until you're employed, and even then, even with "preapproval" from the insurer, it might turn out you don't have the coverage you think you do.
My firm is in financial services. Very nice plan. Even with my "nice plan", we've had the insurer renege on their coverage of services (thousands of dollars in services) after receiving approval and having it in writing prior to obtaining services. YMMV.
They are a benefit... if you pay people above market! That allows you to attract top talent that otherwise would be locked in at Google etc.
The whole point of low salaries, for smart companies, is to be the one increasing them! Obviously that makes it a temporary advantage, as salaries start to increase... But all great advantages are temporary.
The people you are talking to, who like low salaries because they want to enjoy lower costs in perpetuity... that’s just mediocre thinking by mediocre companies.
Exactly. France has extremely strong engineering schools, and almost no software industry. You wouldn’t believe the talent being wasted in banking IT desks and consulting conpanies... Not only can a well-funded startup pay them better, the work is 10x more interesting. And unlike Silicon Valley engineers, French employees won’t ditch you after a year. Once they’re on board, they tend to stick around (sometimes even too long for their own good...)
> French employees won’t ditch you after a year. Once they’re on board, they tend to stick around (sometimes even too long for their own good...)
You forgot to mention that you can‘t fire them at will either... It‘s such laws and excessive taxation that makes many european countries unattractive for startups.
An employee can be laid off if he agrees to it but that's not like firing because it needs an agreement. I am not sure if the OP is talking about that.
It's possible to fire people without justification and the company will be brought to court. There is a new law from Macron that caps the damages the employee can get to pretty much nothing when he only has a few years of tenure or less. You could provision for a few months of salary.
I can confirm that you can fire people in France at a reasonable cost if you know what you’re doing and are focused on paying good money for great people. If you’re looking to build a large-scale sweatshop of low-skill workers with low pay and high turnover... then sure, France is not the place to do that. But if you’re a typical tech company not afraid to pay above market for top talent... cost of severance will not be an issue.
(I’ve hired and run large engineering offices in France and in the US).
That. Definitely that. There is zero software industry in France. The best talents are incredibly easy to hire and retain because they have nowhere else to go.
Low salaries also mean it is hard for normal people(ie people not from rich or well connected families) to save up enough money to self-fund a startup.
I do agree that low salary is an issue, but it's improving. On the other hand, it's very hard to compare everything, when you're young, single and healthy, it's a no brainer that you should take your chance in the US. But if you have a family, suddenly are diagnosed with a costly disease of whatever kind, I bet you wish to be in Europe.
So articles that say "you should go west" just applies to their authors, everybody has their own set of parameters to evaluate, and the answer isn't so obvious. I personally have kids and a wife that earns a lot of money. I've done the maths, it's a no brainer for me financially to stay in Europe...
Fabrik is a CMS for medium to large publishers. Full Stack Engineers at Fabrik are responsible for the core product platform, from frontend UI and testing, to APIs, low-level services, and database operations. Full Stack Engineers work in close partnership with designers, product thinkers, and writers directly to build out new product offerings and tooling across the platform.
Responsibilities: Develop the core Fabrik CMS for writers, and sites for publishers. Be willing to jump into any part of the stack: API, Front end CMS, Sites templates, CDN, etc. Scale the platform by tuning postgres queries, developing caching solutions, and building tooling for monitoring. We work with JavaScript, including Node/Express and React, and Postgres. It is not necessary to know Node and React already, but expertise in web architecture is absolutely necessary.
Requirements: At least 5 years of software engineering experience. Can contribute across the full stack. Independent and autonomous. We are a small team split across several timezones. We don't micromanage, and expect that everybody holds their own. Clear and consistent communication. Again, we're a remote team split across several timezones. Your colleagues need to understand where you are with your work, and be informed on how to carry on from where you've left off.
Apply: Reach out directly to me: jomar at kargopublishing dot com