Specialization is for insects.
One of my favorite Robert Heinlein quotes.
I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
111–120 of 199 posts
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#112Never says never. You'll be amazed how good some engineers are.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#113I'm the only competent developer in our company. So believe it or not, but I'm doing it all, from tinkering in disassembled Oracle 9i JDBC driver, to planning Oracle migration to writing SQL queries, reverse-engineering stored procedures, modifying Delphi sources, writing Java code, writing Kotlin code, writing HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Objective C, rolling out some tiny PHP website, writing brute-forcer to crack P12 pr…
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.
Oracle Express is free. It's close to full feature as the Standard one, except some limitation on number of connections and some enterprise feature.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#114As evidenced by the first dozen top-level responses (largely written in defensive tones from self-proclaimed "full stack developers") it becomes clear that everyone has a different definition for the term.
Thus, I find this entire conversation to be mostly useless, except as a survey of what the term "full stack" means to different people, particularly those who brandish it.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's a common idiom. Someone who says "I don't believe in psychics" means "people who call themselves psychics don't have the abilities that implies", not that nobody claims to be one.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#116I understand OP's views don't represent his employer's, but it's still funny to see Gusto (OP's employer) recruiting for full stack engineers on the front page at the same time!
Quite. I'd be curious to hear what conversations if any he's had w/ them on the topic.
OP, feel free to chime in!
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#117So I when write complete applications myself, native/web frontend, backend system, stored procedure at the DB layer, talk with all parties, architecture blueprints, what I should call myself then?
I know, consultant with expertise delivering delightful experiences.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That idea just doesn't stand to reason, though, to be fair, if you say "most companies that" you're expressing a stereotype, which can easily fail, as it does here, when applied to a specific case.
I personally know a "such a small development team" (i.e. a single person) who certainly has the expertise, by virtue of having trained to become an Oracle DBA after a fairly extensive career as a software engineer.
As for need, I'm no expert on Oracle's unique features, but the GP specifically mentioned "reverse-engineering stored procedures", which implies at least previous developers thought there was a need to use an arguably advanced database feature.
In fact, even just having a substantial quantity of stored procedures written in PL/SQL, perhaps at a time when that company had (or contracted out to) a larger development team may make it prohibitive to switch to any other language. Reliably implementing business logic as-is is a pretty big feature.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#119In my view this is off base because it's a bit intentionally obtuse.
I think the real maxim is more along the lines of "if you need actual full stack engineering, you don't want a full stack engineer."
Because full stack engineers are not there for large, highly engineered, Amazon/Google scale sites.
They are there for the MVPs, the startups, the moderate scale internal line of business tools, your local city government, or one-off moderate projects.
A full stack engineer is not there to have expert knowledge of every single micro detail of front-end, back-end, databases, site performance, SEO and such.
They're there to have a general knowledge of them, produce something reasonable, and know enough of all the ends to ship in a timely manner, hopefully with design decisions that can be easily tweaked, meet requirements, and don't have boatloads of technical debt, until 'till it justifies a larger, more specialized, engineering investment, or just putters on with light support 'till end EoL because it's good enough for the scale of operation.
Re: I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
#120What 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…
As far as I can tell you can use the title if you've worked for about 8 years in the field. (Not that I really agree with the definition. But basically from what I see they do the same work as non-senior engineers but the job listings want more years of experiences.)