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I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

robinrendle.com

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Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#41

Post by DanHulton »

The misunderstanding the author makes is that a Full Stack Engineer is a specialist in all roles. They're not. They're simply Intermediate to Senior in most.

I'd defer to a specialist in essentially every field, but if you require a broad range of work to be done without hiring a half-dozen people, I'm who you're looking for. The best title we have got that kind of experience is Full Stack.

(It's also a well-understood recruiting buzzword you can use to quickly indicate the work you want and the salary you expect.)

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#42

Post by nicoburns »

aphextron wrote: post #14
thebooglebooski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++.

There are also people who do both. I started out with JavaScript and PHP and do a lot of React/Angular/Laravel stuff. But I have also worked on complex performance-sensitive business systems written in a mixture of C++ and Rust.

My boss at my last job had done the opposite. Coming from a tradtional compsci C/C++ background (many moons ago), he learnt Angular 2 for a frontend project that required it. Both his C++ and frontend code were among the best at our company.

Saying there aren't good fullstack engineers is like saying multi-instrumentalists aren't good musicians. Sure, the very very best violinists probably don't play other instruments at a high level. But the average multi-instrumentalist (who plays the violin) is a lot better than the average violinist.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#43

Post by jsutton »

aphextron wrote: post #14
thebooglebooski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++.

Building complex systems is far from limited to the backend.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#44

Post by irrational »

orax wrote: post #16
chrisabrams wrote: post #6

I 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 mean…

I wish. My recent task has been writing scripts to set up Postgres on a bare-bones linux server (including all security, software, users, nfs, hot backup servers, etc) and port an Oracle database over to the postgres database and update 1000s of oracle queries to work on postgres.

In my spare time I also had to create some new admin screens and do a bunch of back end work. I also created a bunch of new svg images for the admin screens.

Basically I'm expected to do everything from setting up and managing linux servers, security, install and configure software, set up oracle and postgres databases, do DDL and DML work, write server-side code, write web services, create images and do layout work, write test cases, write html, js, css, and know a bunch of JS libraries like vue, vuex, vue-router, webpack, jest, bluebird, lodash, async, tailwind, scss, etc. ad naseum.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#46

Post by strken »

I don't tell people I'm a full-stack engineer because I'm equally good with every random piece of technology at use in a product, but because it signals willingness to apply the imperfect human skills that I do have to different parts of a system.

The front end of a single-page React application is a lot more complicated than just HTML templates and CSS, and you can get all sorts of productivity and developer happiness gains from being able to jump between front end and backend - consider implementing the network layer in Redux, breaking out validation logic into a shared library, or fixing a bug that can only be understood by looking at both a front-end request and the endpoint that handles it.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#47

Post by mygo »

paulie_a wrote: post #29
tylerjwilk00 wrote: post #20

I 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…

That 6 week deadline is always going to be 18-20 in reality

not always. Just finished up a 7 week deadline in 12. 2x in my experience has been a fairly reliable estimate. A 3-4x project has either gone completely out of scope or was poorly estimated. And it’s not always the development team’s fault. Sometimes the client is not timely, or even habitually late with deliverables. Unless you’ve worked with them before and know what to expect, give the client a timeline of X but quote for 2X just in case.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#48

Post by everdev »

ohmatt wrote: post #37
warent wrote: post #23

This article is conflating junior developers with full-stack engineering. I work on the entire stack. Can I work with databases and write queries? Sure. Can I do it as well as a data architect? No. That's not what's expected of a full stack engineer. We can have meaningful, productive discussions with everyone on all parts of the stack. We'll talk with the data architect, write/tweak a query if we need to, we'll talk…

Completely agreed. I find it much easier to communicate with specialists like our DBA, or DevOps team, having at least some mid-level experience or knowledge in each different domain.

Exactly. At small companies you need developers with multiple skill sets so you can keep overhead low during your infancy and growth stages.

As you grow, companies can and do hire specialists who do one thing and one thing well which is great. But those things still need to be communicated and coordinated with other teams which is why having someone with multiple skill sets to bridge that communication gap is so important even in larger organizations.

Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering

#49

Post by redleggedfrog »

"Front-end development is important today and it will be important in twenty years’ time, it’s not going away anytime soon."

That I don't think will be true unless it's pertaining the eventual abandonment of the web browser as the run-time.

The awful tangled spaghetti that is the current code for a web site UI is not tractable going forward. It takes way too much effort to make a usable interface for the value in return. It's also too limiting. And too difficult to maintain. These are all problems caused by using a run-time originally developed for document browsing that has been pressed into service as an application platform.

As a full-stack developer, the front end is the most annoying to work on because it's the most deficient and under-powered. Consequently, we don't put as much effort into it.

Eventually it has to come to something more sane. Maybe web assembly running in a virtual machine - in don't know. What I do know is the advancement of computing is being hindered by the lack of a competent UI system.

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