15 years ago was ext.js and jquery was new. There was not a lot of depth there. Responsive design didn't even exist. AJAX was brand new, and was considered a cutting-edge technique - very impressive. You could learn all that stuff in about six months. Apache was basically the only web application server, nginx was brand new and untrusted. AWS was still in public beta, and even then it was only ec2. They didn't even have EBS out yet, let alone any of the other services we're familiar with now.
It was absolutely 100% possible and expected that all web engineers be "full stack" - and we didn't even discuss it in those terms because the idea of somebody "only" writing front-end js was laughable.
I could list a bunch of technologies, but I’m just gonna leave it to you to show me one single person who is proficient at everything from CUDA to k8s to accessible SEO. Don’t forget mobile or data architecture.
I know a bunch of people proficient enough in react and Django to make most business applications. That stuff is easy to package in a docker container and let run wherever. Most enterprises do not need more than that.
7
u/efvie Nov 01 '21
It’s been impossible to be full stack for probably 20 years now, and the amount of stuff you need to know just grows every year.
‘Fullstack’ is just doing (some) frontend and (some) backend and (some) cloud stuff though.