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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

#51

Post by evincarofautumn »

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.

Yup, it differs considerably depending on the job—the point I guess is that your breadth of experience spans the software in question from end to end.

I consider myself a “full-stack” programming language engineer because I’m equally comfortable with type theory, user experience design, practical implementation, and instruction-level optimisation. Am I a full-stack web developer because I’m equally comfortable with front-end design & development, server-side infrastructure, and networking protocols?

Some would say yes, some no—but I can readily develop, maintain, and optimise a whole application by myself if I need to. I may not do as good a job in any particular narrow area as a specialist in that area, of course.

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

#52

Post by toomuchtodo »

irrational wrote: post #44
orax wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You’re probably underpaid for the amount of work you’re doing and should test the waters for another role that pays more.

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

#53

Post by dmritard96 »

meh. I consider myself pretty fullstack - plastic forming to css and most things in between. Am I your guy to write the best ISR on some rando chipset - no. Am I your guy to write the most optimized query and tuning with a deep dive in the query planner - no. But I know enough about each respective domain to go deep when needed (google makes this more doable today than ever before) and I can get an MVP far faster than a specialist. I don't mean to knock specialists but rather to say there are roles for both and believing in one or another is the wrong place to focus.

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

#55

Post by smadge »

flashgordon wrote: post #5

Oh thank god! Finally glad to see this koolaid getting dispersed. I hope some of the glory gets reimbursed to embedded and systems level engineers too :)

Shouldn't a "full stack" engineer also be fully versed in hardware engineering, microprocessor architecture, kernel and driver programming, operating systems, programming language and compiler design, etc?

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

#56

Post by danieka »

devereaux wrote: post #26
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…

Tradeoffs matter a whole lot. I recently had to replace some beautiful SVGs by PNGs for various reasons centered around the business requirement that a page be below some size, and loads in less than some time. A purist would cringe. I cringed a bit too. But the end result matters the most.

That’s interesting, I was under the impression that SVGs where smaller for logos and, well, vector graphics. Would you mind sharing what kind of graphics you were working with?

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

#58

Post by devereaux »

danieka wrote: post #56
devereaux wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tradeoffs matter a whole lot. I recently had to replace some beautiful SVGs by PNGs for various reasons centered around the business requirement that a page be below some size, and loads in less than some time. A purist would cringe. I cringed a bit too. But the end result matters the most.

That’s interesting, I was under the impression that SVGs where smaller for logos and, well, vector graphics. Would you mind sharing what kind of graphics you were working with?

Graph, like a graphic calculator showing f(x).

Like you, I would have thought SVGs would be smaller, but experimentation proved that they weren't. It hadn't be checked before, but new options had to be found around the whole stack!

So instead of the crispy SVG that scaled so well, now there are some custom-sized PNG instead - served by geographically close VPS. It seems very dirty on paper, but in practice it works much better than the previous solution that as I purist I found very cute and clever. Unfortunately, it didn't achieve the goals and had to be discarded.

I find that a funny example that illustrates how full-stack engineering is very real.

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

#60

Post by nickpeterson »

vbezhenar wrote: post #35

I'm the only competent developer in our company. So believe it or not, but I'm doing it all, from tinkering in disassembled Oracle 9i JDBC driver, to planning Oracle migration to writing SQL queries, reverse-engineering stored procedures, modifying Delphi sources, writing Java code, writing Kotlin code, writing HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Objective C, rolling out some tiny PHP website, writing brute-forcer to crack P12 pr…

I'm sure your reasons are valid, but I laughed a bit when I read that you use Oracle and don't have the budget for more people.
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