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As far as I know, "Full Stack" is a misused term for developers who are able to do everything from devops to front-end development/ui/ux design.
He could create a (good enough) [software] product alone.
What about running and maintaining it?
There's no fixed definition and I've found that people use it when they're asking for 'broad' skills -- where broad is defined by their own experience (cf. most of the other comments here). For example, most web developers would consider front-end and back-end as 'full-stack', whereas an OS/systems person might consider knowledge of hardware up through kernels into the application layer as 'full-stack'. It's about as…
2. Keep learning about lower layers until you get tired or things just don't make sense any more.
3. Define that as "full stack" and ignore anything still below.
For most people the process seems to terminate somewhere around the kernel/user boundary, much like someone in a boat who's aware of the vast shapes moving below but never gets a clear sighting. IMX a typical "full stack" engineer can manage things like routing tables and logical volumes, understands that context switches and page faults matter, but becomes increasingly unable to explain what they really are to others. By the time you get e.g. to different kinds of cache misses or database/compiler internals (even those are still out in user space) forget it.
TBH I think most "full stack" engineers are half-stack at best. So am I. Twenty years ago the upper parts of a modern stack didn't exist and I could explain pretty much everything in the lower parts from tty to network to disk plus VM/schedulers/etc. Maybe back then I could have called myself a full stack engineer. With today's deeper stack (and my own career progression) I'm down to about half, somewhere in the middle. I don't actually know anyone who's truly full stack any more.
But in the 80's and 90's, it used to refer to someone who could handle development at any level of a stack of OS/Framework/API's - from either building their own new API/Framework, to using it, to using others, and so on. A Full-Stack Linux developer wouldn't have any problems busting out the kernel sources to add features/fix/debug, compiling libraries (add/fix/debug), building user-space apps (dev/fix/debug), etc.
But these days you mostly only hear it in relation with web technologies.
In my opinion "full stack" is what all developers actually should be. 15 years ago, it was normal that, as a developer, you know how to administer a server, know how Unix works, know how to setup/debug the database. Maybe know a bit of C. Fast forward to 2015. Lots of developers are purely frontend developers and don't know how to setup a server, or don't know how to administer the database. This is now the norm. The…
You do realize that not all developers work with the web, right? A lot of us actually don't even touch the web all day long, not even for fun.
As far as I know, "Full Stack" is a misused term for developers who are able to do everything from devops to front-end development/ui/ux design.
> are able to/or pretend to be able Why would you say this? It's incredibly offensive, and adds nothing to your argument. A full stack dev might not be as good as a specialized dev in any of backend / devops / frontend, but that's just the price you pay for being a generalist. That doesn't mean they 'pretend to be able' to do things.
An old school example of "full stack" is LAMP: Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)