Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What “full stack” really means to the job market

chrismm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 58 posts

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#11

Post by at-fates-hands »

>>> Whenever you have to google some error message or problem, read all the answers. Get as much context as possible on your problem, and do not be satisfied just with having come across a solution.

This is a fatal flaw.

Considering a TON of JS frameworks are so new, there just isn't a whole body of data on issues people are experiencing.

I don't how many times when React started getting traction, I'd google an issue I was having and there was one Stack Overflow question about, and one answer and neither had been upvoted. No tutorials available and posting something on the Google group was about as effective as lighting my hair on fire.

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#12

Post by cableshaft »

mschuster91 wrote: post #9
anthonybsd wrote: post #4

>I have met many programmers that don’t like to code in their spare time, and that has reliably revealed them to be sub-par developers. Whatever little credibility you had up to this point you've just lost.

Not exactly, because someone who explores other technologies unrelated to his/her "work" field will inevitably pick up experience and knowledge - which the employer can grab for free without sending the employee to expensive courses or having to hire highly specialized freelancers. I have done a lot of weird things as "hobby" projects with even weirder technologies, including interfacing with smartcards in PHP (don't…

You're not wrong. But some people don't like to stare at a computer and program for 8 hours a day and then go home and keep doing it. They may have other responsibilities or other hobbies, or just a highly active social life.

There was a time when I was younger where I spent a lot of time outside of work programming, but I also didn't have any other hobbies (well, playing video games doesn't really count), no responsibilities, and almost no social life. Now that I'm older and have all three, programming at home is a luxury I often choose not to do. But that doesn't make me a bad programmer.

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#13

Post by Benjammer »

mschuster91 wrote: post #9
anthonybsd wrote: post #4

>I have met many programmers that don’t like to code in their spare time, and that has reliably revealed them to be sub-par developers. Whatever little credibility you had up to this point you've just lost.

Not exactly, because someone who explores other technologies unrelated to his/her "work" field will inevitably pick up experience and knowledge - which the employer can grab for free without sending the employee to expensive courses or having to hire highly specialized freelancers. I have done a lot of weird things as "hobby" projects with even weirder technologies, including interfacing with smartcards in PHP (don't…

But the point is that it totally depends on the person and it's not this hard and fast rule.

It's also vague to the point of meaninglessness considering all the various kinds of technologies and depths within those technologies one might be toying with in their spare time.

I would argue that the general intuition that many programmers have about people who code in their spare time is simply a too-narrow view of the picture. It's more about people who are really good at LEARNING, and people who code in their spare time tend to become very good at self-teaching new things and figuring out how different systems work and interact.

A developer can be good at learning as long as he or she is practicing learning something in their spare time, but I don't think it has to be a side project (or even technology-related at all) to see a benefit in professional productivity.

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#14

Post by huehehue »

cableshaft wrote: post #12
mschuster91 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly, because someone who explores other technologies unrelated to his/her "work" field will inevitably pick up experience and knowledge - which the employer can grab for free without sending the employee to expensive courses or having to hire highly specialized freelancers. I have done a lot of weird things as "hobby" projects with even weirder technologies, including interfacing with smartcards in PHP (don't…

You're not wrong. But some people don't like to stare at a computer and program for 8 hours a day and then go home and keep doing it. They may have other responsibilities or other hobbies, or just a highly active social life. There was a time when I was younger where I spent a lot of time outside of work programming, but I also didn't have any other hobbies (well, playing video games doesn't really count), no respons…

One could just as easily argue that you're not a "bad programmer" specifically because you used to spend so much of your free time programming.

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#15

Post by vonmoltke »

mschuster91 wrote: post #9
anthonybsd wrote: post #4

>I have met many programmers that don’t like to code in their spare time, and that has reliably revealed them to be sub-par developers. Whatever little credibility you had up to this point you've just lost.

Not exactly, because someone who explores other technologies unrelated to his/her "work" field will inevitably pick up experience and knowledge - which the employer can grab for free without sending the employee to expensive courses or having to hire highly specialized freelancers. I have done a lot of weird things as "hobby" projects with even weirder technologies, including interfacing with smartcards in PHP (don't…

> Not exactly, because someone who explores other technologies unrelated to his/her "work" field will inevitably pick up experience and knowledge - which the employer can grab for free without sending the employee to expensive courses or having to hire highly specialized freelancers.

I don't think there is any debate that, in general, someone who tinkers, explores, and codes outside of work will be relatively better than someone who doesn't. That is not the same as saying the former is above some absolute line while the latter is below it. This is the characterization that people here, including me, take issue with. You can easily be competent and effective while not spending time outside of work writing code.

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#16

Post by vonmoltke »

Benjammer wrote: post #13
mschuster91 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly, because someone who explores other technologies unrelated to his/her "work" field will inevitably pick up experience and knowledge - which the employer can grab for free without sending the employee to expensive courses or having to hire highly specialized freelancers. I have done a lot of weird things as "hobby" projects with even weirder technologies, including interfacing with smartcards in PHP (don't…

But the point is that it totally depends on the person and it's not this hard and fast rule. It's also vague to the point of meaninglessness considering all the various kinds of technologies and depths within those technologies one might be toying with in their spare time. I would argue that the general intuition that many programmers have about people who code in their spare time is simply a too-narrow view of the p…

> A developer can be good at learning as long as he or she is practicing learning something in their spare time, but I don't think it has to be a side project (or even technology-related at all) to see a benefit in professional productivity.

This is an excellent point. I have lots of side projects outside of work. At the moment, none of them involve code but they all involve learning things; some of them are even fairly technical.

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#17

Post by hsod »

benologist wrote: post #10
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

A lot of it is bullshit. One of the most common recurring posts on HN is "it is impossible to estimate software projects" Well yes, if you refuse to use a stable stack you will need 300 hours to chase your tail when you could have solved your client's problem in 30. Writing the average bizapp as an SPA would be like your doctor cutting off your leg because your knee hurts. In any other field we'd call it malpractice,…

Medicine's been a work in progress for centuries, doctors have done and believed all kinds of stuff we can call crazy today to figure out what works. Your sore knee analogy... probably really did end in wholesale unnecessary amputation and death until we shot and hacked up enough people during wars to learn more accurate ways to treat a sore leg. We learned a lot from crude, violent and deadly experiments by Nazi doc…

> Your sore knee analogy... probably really did end in wholesale unnecessary amputation and death

Really? It doesn't seem likely to me that even a primitive medical person would amputate a leg because someone's knee hurts

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#18

Post by lojack »

I couldn't disagree more with this entire article.

> the self-taught web developer knows surprisingly little about the web’s underlying technology.

I know very few developers who aren't self-taught. In reality the opposite seems to be true. It's the developers who take a course and don't continue learning that stall. This is something technologists (even non-developers) absolutely _need_ to do -- self-teaching. The article even contradicts itself with the very next line.

> Language-oriented courses cannot cover the complete web stack, and students will end up clueless about what an htaccess file does, or how to restart a Unix daemon, or how the different types of POST encoding work.

Then, there's this...

> There was a time when looking things up on Stack Overflow whenever you had a problem just wasn’t an option, and many pieces of software had unreadable documentation, if they had any at all ... That is the environment where hackers thrived, and that’s what we are going back to, sooner or later.

It's almost as if he's nostalgic of the way things used to be. Like things were better when the documentation was terrible and you couldn't look things up. To all of that, I say good riddance.

> If every time you find yourself dealing with a complex issue that affects multiple technologies your first instinct is to search on Google, you should reconsider your working habits.

I'd actually argue the opposite. If you ever find yourself with a complex issue that affects multiple technologies, your first instinct _should_ always be to google it. Sure, you should understand the problem and all, but there's no need to make your life difficult just for the sake of "being a hacker".

> I have met many programmers that don’t like to code in their spare time, and that has reliably revealed them to be sub-par developers.

Disagree 100%. Some of the best developers I've met understand very well how to separate their work. The stereotypical hacker that works all through the night on obscure problems tend to pidgenhole themselves and lose sight of the purpose of programming. They also tend to be the ones that burn out to epic proportions. It's a very unhealthy mindset to have, and to be encouraging others to have.

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#19

Post by niftich »

The 'full-stack' trend is a reflection of rising, dare-I-say unrealistic expectations, one which the author supports by their recommendations in their blog post. By perpetuating the notion that the only 'true way' to be a good developer is to structure their lifestyle around understanding implementation details behind all the layers of a modern tech stack, they place an unnatural reverence on the mythos of hackerdom while ignoring that software development is not solely a creative pursuit.

As it stands now, 'full-stack developer' is a euphemism, which in hip new places means 'we want you to live and breathe code, because you will be given vague requirements and expected to deliver the entirety of the solution from the bits moving across the wire to the UI espousing the latest visual design language in less than a month', and in established places means 'we want an infusion of new blood to bring sanity to some legacy code and we're counting on you to debug and fix everything by yourself'.

Re: What “full stack” really means to the job market

#20

Post by Xyik »

Most full stack developers have breadth but not depth. It's incredibly time-consuming to have a complete understanding of the entire stack and no matter what you do, even if you live and drink code and do it all the time you will not be a complete engineer, there is just too much and you will never retain it all. Rather than try to be this ninja superstar that start-ups all look for these days its more realistic to be able to work full-stack but specialize in a particular field. Machine learning and a solid academic background in stats, math and understanding of concurrency will get you just as far as a guy who knows React, Sass, HTML5, Python, Ruby, Go, MongoDB, MySQL, AWS, Redis, Celery, Kafka and Hadoop.
Post reply on HN