Live data from Hacker News

What is a Full Stack developer? (2012)

laurencegellert.com

121–124 of 124 posts

Re: What is a Full Stack developer? (2012)

#121
post #75
post #10

So a Full Stack developer is just someone who likes to work in various fields of Software Engineering and has a quick and broad understanding of all kinds of protocols, technologies and design methodologies, plus some amount of creativity ? I don't understand why any Engineer would want their job to be any other way. Moreover, it's not like you can't be full stack anymore after you become an expert in some technology…

Would you believe I was once chewed out by a co-worker for studying design instead of focusing 100% on back-end development? The full-stack label is important to me because too many developers are eager to pigeonhole themselves, and non-tech people want to apply descriptives to the people around them. People are constantly surprised to learn I can do CSS and Javascript because someone told them I was a "PHP developer…

My thoughts exactly since I've began working, I have now decided that whoever tries to put labels on me such as "Back End developer" is being problematic.

Re: What is a Full Stack developer? (2012)

#122
post #24
post #10

So a Full Stack developer is just someone who likes to work in various fields of Software Engineering and has a quick and broad understanding of all kinds of protocols, technologies and design methodologies, plus some amount of creativity ? I don't understand why any Engineer would want their job to be any other way. Moreover, it's not like you can't be full stack anymore after you become an expert in some technology…

Some people have problems keeping the conceptual differences between different fields apart. So if they become experts in one domain, it hurts their expertise in other domains as the newly acquired knowledge "swaps over" and "pollutes" the others. This is contrary to my own experience but if that's how they feel ...

Exactly, it's like saying you'll be bad at calculus if you learn linear algebra.

Re: What is a Full Stack developer? (2012)

#123
post #32

Somebody who knows everything, but not really ;)

Interesting, seems that many a ready to imply that it is not really possible to know more than one field well. Why is it so? Maybe I'd agree if we were considering totally unrelated fields, but that's not the case. I consider myself full-stack+ developer, meaning that I can design and implement backend (RoR, PHP), deploy it, make a frontend (including mobile/responsive, whatever) and make an iOS app using that said b…

You will never have enough time to be really good on every part... except you have no private life. I can develop "everything" too, from Assembler, many Basic dialects, VisualBasic, C, C++, PHP, JavaScript, CakePHP, Typo3, Node, Java, Android, MySQL, MongoDB, Apache, Nginx, to different CloudServies (S3, Rackspace) and many things i forgot in my 25 years programmers life. I can use them all, but i not assume that i can use them all like somebody who is specialised and thats the difference.

Yes, full-stack developer are needed, because they have an overview of many things, but in detail a specialised programmer is meaningful.

And your are right, 85% is for most customers more than enough, but the really good payed jobs are not from 85% of this customers ;-)

Post reply on HN