I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by cam-stitt » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

jfz wrote: post #30

cam-stitt wrote: post #22

The article is titled "I Don't Believe in Full-Stack Engineering", yet states "If you’re only hiring full-stack engineers" as though they are something the author believes exist. It seems that the real approach of this article should have been to outline why hiring ONLY full-stack engineers may not be a good idea.

The author probably meant that they don't believe that full-stack engineering is beneficial compared to hiring primarily specialists.

Potentially. Which is why I believe that it is more of a click-bait title than a meaningful discussion point.

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

#102

Post by robertAngst » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:12 AM UTC

DanHulton wrote: post #41

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-understo…

I barely understand why you would have more than a few full stack engineers ever.

The guy talked about having beautiful SCSS. At some point, you are talking about design and less about engineering.

Full stack is a job to be taken on by a small team. Having a large team with lots of full stack makes 0 sense.

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

#103

Post by robertAngst » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:13 AM UTC

gridspy wrote: post #40

jchw wrote: post #12

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…

> What makes you a "senior" engineer? You've spent enough time designing software that you can take a vague spec, design a solution avoiding common pitfalls and following a very easy path. Then you hand back a prototype followed by a complete and maintainable solution to a happy client. At that point, your services should no longer be _required_ to keep the product working.

"But can you just change this?"

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

#104

Post by JamesBarney » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:14 AM UTC

mmt wrote: post #88

nickpeterson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I laughed a bit when I read that you use Oracle and don't have the budget for more people. Why? Because you believe the former causes the latter? There are many valid criticisms to be levied against Oracle the company, enteprise software in general, and especially its pricing. However, it's important to remember that, for many businesses, it's either impractical or downright impossible to hire enough engineers to m…

I think the idea though is most companies that have such small development team usually don't have the need or expertise to take advantage of those features.

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

#105

Post by the_narrator » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:15 AM UTC

This really comes off as a rant by a front-end developer complaining about full-stack devs not being as good as them.

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

#106

Post by yelloweyes » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:20 AM UTC

andrewingram wrote: post #66

Hmm. Maybe full-stack engineering doesn't need you to believe in it? 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 accessibil…

So basically you're a front-end guy who can do some basic back-end stuff. If that's full-stack then 80% of developers out there are full-stack.

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

#107

Post by gridspy » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

robertAngst wrote: post #103

gridspy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes you a "senior" engineer? You've spent enough time designing software that you can take a vague spec, design a solution avoiding common pitfalls and following a very easy path. Then you hand back a prototype followed by a complete and maintainable solution to a happy client. At that point, your services should no longer be _required_ to keep the product working.

"But can you just change this?"

;)

Of course, it's software. We can change anything!

Even better, I'm not busy trying to keep your current software working - so I can get right on it.

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

#108

Post by iblaine » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:23 AM UTC

Full stack engineer means knowing CS fundamentals. With that you can do most anything, except good UI/UX development. Leave that to the web developers.

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

#109

Post by gridspy » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:30 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #80

shp0ngle wrote: post #61

This is a weird rant. 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

Disagree. I expect full-stack developers to be _great_ at frontend, and _capable enough_ to build the backend. When resources are constrained you want the customer-facing side of the product to be a priority.

That's a dangerous attitude. Both are important.

Back-end is where the state of the application is. Where all the users are served, not just a single user. The back-end is where things are going to melt down with scale.

If you make bad decisions in your backend you might find it hard not to lose customer data. They might also create user-visible latency or reliability issues.

Front-end by contrast tends to keep working as well on day 100 as it did on day 1.

If your point is that stable and boring back-end with shiny front-end is good, then yes, I agree with you.

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

#110

Post by jugg1es » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 2:34 AM UTC

inestyne wrote: post #83

Full stack to me is more about ownership and responsibility than pure expertise. He's the guy that can literally carry the entire thing on his back if he has to. Technically speaking, usually because he's the one that created it, by himself, made it work, made it scale, and made it make money without any help. In my case he becomes the guy in charge trying to figure out how to hire people to just little parts of his…

This is probably the most accurate description of a full stack engineer in this comment section.