"Those that say it can’t be done should get out of the way of those doing it"
I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
11–20 of 199 posts
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#12What makes you a "senior" engineer, anyway? I feel confident calling myself fullstack. I'm not going to list all of the things I have done and know how to do because honestly it would feel arrogant. But what lead to the thought process that backend and frontend developers should be separate anyways? Yes, it is complicated and time consuming to keep up with both backend and frontend development, but there's no way you're telling me some people believe it's actually impossible to do that. If you dismiss the frontend as unimportant, what the hell are you writing the backend for to begin with???
I like coding and I definitely find programming enjoyable. But, importantly, I don't write software for the hell of it. If you actually give a damn about software development, I don't understand how you could simply dismiss one side of software development due to where it gets executed in the stack.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#13I think that definition of "senior level of expertise" is a bit too much for full-stack engineers. I actually have worked with many engineers who are very comfortable working front to back end creating wholistic solutions. To me, full stack engineer is someone who can design and implement a wholistic solution. If you can build a todo app, you're pretty much a full-stack engineer (a junior one and also depending on the todo app implementation).
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#14Completely agreed. "Full-stack" developers fall into two camps; that is the "web developers" who know enough PHP/Node/Whatever to build a CRUD app with UI, and the serious software engineers who treat front-end as an "oh whatever" afterthought. Both end up with nothing but a huge mess at scale.
Web developers are not serious?
That's not my point. I'm saying that there's a difference between the full-stack generalist "web developers" who know HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/Ruby, and software engineers who build complex systems, typically in Java/C#/C++.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#15A full stack developer is what turns into an Architect. If you cannot build, operate, tune and debug the full stack, at scale, you are not an architect.
I wouldn't agree. A building architect isn't an expert at all the trades that are required to fulfill his design; he just has a strong understanding of how everything fits together and what is/isn't possible.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#16I once met a software engineer who said I was not full-stack because I didn't know how to add to the Linux Kernal. I once met a hiring manager who said I'm not front-end because I don't know how to vertically shard MySQL and "every front-end developer knows how to do that." Technology stacks differ per company and the definition of the title will also differ. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Agreed, though I don't feel like a Full-Stack Engineer should do the DevOps Engineer job as seems to be required by this hiring manager. I am not saying you should not know the underlying component you are using in your stack though, just what you need to work on it, not how to administrate a large scale database deployment.
It seems that the world clearly lacks a definition of what Full-Stack Engineering really means ...
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#17I didn't believe in full-stack engineering either, until I had a very hairy problem that required fighting with various interacting issues to obtain a specific level of "web performance".
And yes, I know about "font loading, images, SVGs, animations, auditing third party scripts". Still sometimes, you have to dig deeper in the stack to find the low hanging fruit that will make the difference between meeting requirements or not.
After throwing away the nice SVGs and replacing them by inline PNG (uglier, but you need that 15% size difference and the precious milliseconds), what do you do?
My current solution is a combination of various things - the last element being VPS close to the customers to provide resources with a very low latency.
(and by the way, if anyone happens to know reliable VPS companies in South America, Japan, South Africa, I would love some recommendations. I only know about Hetzner ZA and Linode JP. I would love to find some good host quality around Uruguay or Brasil)
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#18[deleted]
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#19A full stack developer is what turns into an Architect. If you cannot build, operate, tune and debug the full stack, at scale, you are not an architect.
>A full stack developer is what turns into an Architect. If you cannot build, operate, tune and debug the full stack, at scale, you are not an architect.
Ah yes, I love cleaning up the mess every "architect" I've ever worked under has left on the front-end. Front end development is an arcane art, full of a million gotchas that have nothing to do with intuition, intelligence, or programming skill. It's just years and years of running into stupid mistakes and API quirks to build that domain knowledge. Anyone who doesn't respect and accept that is sorely mistaken.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#20I disagree with the article. It's a 1,000 word false dichotomy between Full Stack vs. Insert Specialist Here.
Sure, if you're a Fortune 500 company, go ahead and hire a DBA, Cloud Architect, Backend Engineer, UI/UX Designer, Graphic Artist, Social Media Marketer, etc.
You'll have a few million $ in salary overhead. It may take longer to produce a final product.
BUT, it will probably be way better than a product that a full stack developer knocks out.
BUT, if you're a startup or SMB or lean department and have a 100k budget and a 6 week deadline a full stack developer is a huge asset to your company.
Obviously when you take the same project and give it to a highly specialized team of people with lots of time they produce superior results. Do we really need an article about it?
PS. Giving a 10 person team a 1,000 hour time budget would not be a huge deal. Try not laughing when a single Full Stack developer asks for 1,000 hours.