What is a Full Stack developer? (2012)

tl;dr: I've seen so much quibbling about what a full stack engineer really is, and it often seems to conclude with the idea that a "true" full stack engineer doesn't exist. It's not that we don't exist. It's that the actual market for us is tiny.

In terms of layers of abstraction I've worked professionally from one step above the silicon (digital/analog circuit design and FPGAs) to domanin-specific language design. I refer to myself as a "seriously full stack" software developer.

As an example I once wrote a device management framework which would allow you, in a short single line of C, to expose a REST interface to a getter function and a setter function for an arbitrary value to a device's management page. The management page would query the device's embedded HTTP server for its configuration schema (generated with the help of type info and "hint" flags from that single line of C), and render a very pretty, very usable hierarchy of AJAX forms to administer the device.

This was written to serve as a configuration mechanism for a computer vision sensor (networked or individual units) for which I helped design the circuit (both logic and power), ported uBoot, ported the Linux kernel, ported the Angström distribution userspace (not as much effort as it sounds thanks to OpenEmbedded), wrote and/or debugged a myriad of drivers (camera, NAND flash, filesystem), designed the application-level architecture, helped with vision algorithm optimization, integrated MPEG4 video streaming, and built all of the (surprisingly snazzy) user interfaces.

I did this work over the course of a year as a member of a core 4-person team with additional help from 8-10 other people who served in various shared support roles. As teammates we all had our unique preferences, talents, and thought processes, but only our Electrical Engineer was somewhat specialized.

The problem for people like me is that it's exceedingly rare that I get to actually flex my true generalist muscle. I'd bet anything that the team on which I worked was faster and far cheaper than any larger, more specialized team competing in the same space. But how many companies are actually willing to take the risk on a team like this? Of those companies, how hard is it for them to put together this kind of team? How many really have the leadership talent necessary to do so?

Edits:

Restructured so I'm making my overall point in the first paragraph rather than the last

So now there's full-stack and non-full-stack backend developers too? And a non-full-stack BE developer doesn't know how to deal with HTTP headers and ORM?

My main point was that the separation into these buckets is strained already.

Good, well-rounded developers should know the full ecosystem they're operating in. Some will always be better at and more interested in something, other in other things, that's no surprise, but we don't need to invent a stream of vague titles.

To me that is the definition of an "application support" person, not a developer.

If the stack, LAMP in this case, is Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python? Why shouldn't you need to know about running servers, configuring databases, or other stuff to be a full stack developer?

Linux is the operating system of your server, you should know how to use it. Apache is your web server, you should know how to set it up and configure it. The same for your database MySQL. Obviously you had better know PHP(Python if that's what your P stands for) to develop any software.

I think you're mixing up Full Stack developer with Application developer. The application developer would take PHP and connect to a database to make the application and that's normally that. The full stack developer would set up the servers, configure them, create the application, deploy it, and all that jazz.

I'm not saying one is better than the other. You get more flexibility with a full stack developer but you can get more expertise with an application developer. It all boils down to the opportunity cost of having someone who can do everything well or 2-3 people should all be experts at their part of the puzzle.

And for a majority of the startups represented on HN, I'm willing to bet they don't have dedicated network guys, heavily-loaded production servers, let alone a dedicated DBA. As a company grows, the responsibility (and hopefully expertise) of a single employee narrows.

To me, "full-stack" means: You can do everything because we're a small startup.