Should You Become a Full Stack Developer?

There are some weird items in the 'need to know lists':

Frontend:

* CSS, CSS3, and SASD # I assume that is supposed to be SASS?

* Go # Why for a front end engineer? It's not even on the backend list.

* Python # Why? It's a nice to have for general scripting but not required for frontend work

Backend:

* C and C++ # Not generally important for full stack web dev

* Ruby on Rails # Why is Rails in the middle of a list of languages? The language is Ruby

* Perl # Why? may be useful but not a must know

* MySQL and NoSQL # Why is MySQL contrasted with NoSQL?

And no ops or deploy tooling listed at all...

As a working full stack developer, I can definitely say that to my employer, that is what makes the difference between me being a full stack developer and a web developer.

The article is horrible, don't bother clicking through.

But the 'full-stack developer' is an interesting beast. Web development is obscenely complex, that inherent complexity is compounded by developers that don't take the domain seriously and designers that should probably just stick to Photoshop.

My feet-first introduction to 'real' front-end was fixing a designer's awful HTML / CSS over the objections of the client who wanted me to just let him do his job. I had to redo the layout and re-style the whole project, because it wouldn't work at all with IE's box model. Took a whole day and at the end of it the client admitted I was right and we were able to move on. There was no way the designer was ever going to fix his broken code.

I feel like "full-stack" is this year's "rockstar", "ninja", "10x" programmer. Weasel words that employers use in the sole aim of short-staffing their departments.

I don't know about Go, but Django is relatively popular. It's a stretch, but I could see it being useful there. But we might as well include any language that has a Web framework then.

Software as Service Dog.

Million-dollar idea.