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The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

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Re: The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

#11

Post by tudorw »

purple-again wrote: post #7

This again. Is a doctor in his first year of being a full fledged doctor any less of a doctor than one with 20 years of experience? The more experienced doctor is almost assuredly better and preferable, but both of them are doctors. This assumption that you have to be a master of the front end and a master of the back end to be a full stack developer is flawed from the start. Have you created economic value with a co…

Depends on your illness, and quality of the doctor, often I've met younger doctors whose up to date knowledge out bests that of experienced doctors who have not kept abreast of their field, more likely through resource challenges than malice!

Re: The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

#12

Post by jnordwick »

Why do you only ever hear about full stack developers in web developer context?

I work in FinTech and trading systems - very high performance and low latency systems. I deal with databases and huge amounts of data too. And I've (as well as coworkers) have hacked together trading GUIs and simple CGI to throw together data visualizations. But none of us would ever call ourselves full-stack and we'd never hire a front-end person who thought they were going to go mucking around the infrastructure. They just aren't good enough. This goes equally to small startup like firms I've been a part of as well as banks.

From what I've seen "full stack" seems to be entirely a web notion. Is it just that the backends are simpler - requiring little more than glueing together some Spring components for CRUD operations?

It seems to be a very new concept.

Re: The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

#13

Post by mmjaa »

I've come to the conclusion that the only 'real' "Full Stack Developer" is one who, indeed, knows what the stack is, and how to use it.

Also, the heap.

Think about it - those who don't know these things, and don't care - usually gravitate around a singular technology that lets them ignore the details. Those who do know these things, and how to use them properly, usually don't have any particular focal gravity, and are prone to be more flexible, in terms of tooling and methodology.

To me, the "Full Stack" developer is simply someone who cares about whats happening under the hood. The "millennial developers" simply don't.

We had this same issue in the 70's, 80's and 90's, but of course the tools were moderately different. Where once you had Visual Basic guys who just drag and drop things around to get things done, now you have 'npm monkeys' who, for the most part, manage dependencies and the interconnections between.

If you don't know what a stack/heap/allocator is, there is no better time to learn! The world is so rich because of these things - and if you do get an understanding of your runtime environment, well .. there's always another execution environment for your pleasure. Have at it, hacker!

(Also, its been 40 years: do you know where in the OSI model your application lives?)

Re: The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

#14

Post by thiagooffm »

Didn't really like the article. There's no myth, there's full stack developers and of course, they are no masters in anything, but who is?

Even the person who got a DBA job title and has been working with DBs for decades won't have the knowledge about everything in DBs.

I do pretty well in web development in general: backend(ruby/clojure/go) and react/ember.js in the FE. Can optmize queries well, know a lot about computer architecture, OS etc. And I work with people who are pretty much the same. There's a lot of people who can do the same.

Also I find it funny when he tries to put some figures of years, when it generally doesn't take more than an year to know inside-out a framework(let it be a BE or FE framework) given that you work with it full-time given that you know well another one and has enough experience in software development.

One might say that "ah, but then if you do FE and BE it will always be sort of half-assed". Not really, you can test well, write very organised code and even manage the infrastructure using containers. Nowadays it's very easy to pretty much do everything given that you work in a programming language with an extensive amount of libraries, in the end, nowadays web-development is mostly about glueing stuff while writing good code, everything well-tested and perhaps split-up in different services.

But in the end...

Does it matter? No. What matters is if you enjoy working in the whole stack(or not) and if the company has a role available for you given what you want to do.

Re: The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

#16

Post by _joel »

jrimbault wrote: post #4

What's your definition of a "Full Stack Developer", I'd like to have the opinions of people here ? Reading on Wikipedia, it seems, for someone living on Linux, knowing a full LAMP is... trivial. Configuring a debian box is like riding a bicycle. Once you have some good apache confs in your personal library, configuring apache is a breeze. Configuring MySQL (|mariadb) might need some googling if you want to do it righ…

I'd include automation of all above too

Re: The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

#17

Post by ropman76 »

I recently moved into a full stack developer role. Not because I am a rock star ninja coder, but because I am the only developer employee in the entire company. The only difference now from some of my more specialist dev roles is that I spend a lot more time researching things on Google/Stackoverflow etc. So when I hear full stack developer I can help but thinking "So you spend a lot of time on Google as well?" :)

Re: The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

#19

Post by zitterbewegung »

A "Full stack developer" is either one of two people.

1. A person starting a startup and they are the tech lead on their website.

2. A person who liaisons with other departments but is still the owner of the project. They know enough to perform the business duties and may ask for help or the system is simple enough.

If your web app becomes big enough it will be extremely difficult to have engineers that know the whole stack but they could have enough to fix most problems and figure out to escalate.

Re: The Myth of the Full Stack Developer

#20

Post by cheez »

tudorw wrote: post #11
purple-again wrote: post #7

This again. Is a doctor in his first year of being a full fledged doctor any less of a doctor than one with 20 years of experience? The more experienced doctor is almost assuredly better and preferable, but both of them are doctors. This assumption that you have to be a master of the front end and a master of the back end to be a full stack developer is flawed from the start. Have you created economic value with a co…

Depends on your illness, and quality of the doctor, often I've met younger doctors whose up to date knowledge out bests that of experienced doctors who have not kept abreast of their field, more likely through resource challenges than malice!

Correct. This is the way of life. Fortunately, as our jobs aren't protected by legislation, we are forced to keep up or die out.

I love keeping up.

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