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He is complaining that someone who does many things won't be as good in front-end as someone who does only front end.
...ok?
Nobody expects full stack engineer to be all that great in front-end. That's why he is not a front end engineer.
Vice versa he won't probably be all that good in SQL or in administration and devops.
I am not even sure what is this guy complaining about exactly
I wonder how many people honestly believe that they are doing good "social proof" work for their career when they publish pieces like this.
However, many of these read as insecure, pedantic, and a decent lack of self-awareness on the authors part. Tone deaf. Pretentious SV "influencer word salad". When reviewing resumes, I always do a ton of Googling. This would have given me a bunch of soft data points that would potentially outrank his/her resume
"Full-Stack Engineering" as defined by Robin Rendle - would have been a more honest title, but no one would have clicked.
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.
You should do everyone a solid and name-and-shame the frontend/MySQL company because dear God that's horrifying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Though to be fair it probably does, because having your entire professional community believe you don't exist creates ridiculous amounts of frustration, anxiety and imposter syndrome.
I do (with skill levels ranging from competent to highly regarded):
* UI design
* Data architecture
* API design
* HTML/CSS/JS/React/GraphQL/etc
* Front-end accessibility (not the best, but I don't just do div/span soup and call it a day)
* Front-end performance (i'll spend weeks optimising the hell out of everything I see in browser devtools if given the chance)
* API performance (see previous).
I tend to draw the line at devops and sysadmin stuff, mainly because I don't find it interesting. But for everything listed, I do it because I enjoy it. And there plenty of aspects of engineering professionalism i'm not great at, which offsets the fact that I apparently have an impossible unicorn set of skills.
Honestly, I wish I didn't and was happy doing just a subset. But if I'm spending my time doing just design, I get frustrated that i'm not coding, and if I'm just coding i'll be dreaming of design. Also, the context-switching is hell. I wish my interests would let me specialise, but they don't.
Ha! Referencing your own tweet, from earlier this month. Awesome! I disagree mostly. I’m pretty full stack from UI down to circuit design, but that’s after almost 20y in the business.
To fully prove my point, here is a quote... also written by me. Huh?
Is that supposed to be convincing? Odd assumptions here. Like that guy on FB that always likes his own links.
For example, a front-end specialist would be better off optimising the slow page response times of the product's news feed or implementing a new application page altogether than, say, adjusting css that break on a few view ports. In a big team, you can push the CSS fixing job to a junior; but in a lean team, it's better if this goes to a generalist in your team.
If your backend dev is busy on implementing OAuth, he can off-load fixing a bug that has a small fix but is hard to test like a minor refactor. You compound this "minor" jobs and you will need a lot of junior staff to help on the load, or you could hire a full-stack developer to help with the whole team.
Eventually this generalist gains a good understanding of the full stack, as his title implies, and can contribute good ideas that affect all parts of the system. They also make good tech leads because they can interact and empathise with all members, and can call out decisions that may seem good on one part of the stack but could have horrible implications on the other end. Some progress to Architects simply because they have the bird's eye-view of the whole system.
Lastly, if you are a fledgling web startup, it would work against your business interests to hire an expensive specialist right away.
What 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…
Junior - Needs close supervision. Can't reliably develop something more than 1k lines.
Mid level - Has learned to follow a design consistently. Doesn't keep an eye on the bigger picture. Likely to fall apart around 10k lines.
Senior - Can work in the weeds and keep an eye on the business as a whole at the same time. In my experience is likely to be able to design something that can scale to 100+k lines.