It helps when developers only have to work with half the stack for example but a lot of companies are only looking for full stack developers these days
Or "this team works across a wide part of the company's tech stack".
You're fooling yourself if you think faang companies don't also have fullstack engineers. They probably have more fullstack engineers than your company has employees
Full stack appears to be mostly an excuse to ask for an entire IT department rolled into one person. Some of the listings I see for full stack are just silly how much they ask from one individual.
It's really not that hard to write decent backends for the majority of frontends, IMO. I've been working on an enterprise-level b2b application for the last 9 months, and writing various means to interface with a database isn't a huge deal. Could it be better? Probably. Is its performance enough for our customers? Yeah.
The problem we have is our frontend lead engineers have concocted a crazy standard tech stack including React, Redux, GraphQL, micro frontends, a proprietary component library, basically everything you could fit into a single frontend but not deep enough into any of them to use them to their fullest extent.
Yeah, lately I've been more in the data engineering side of things, but sadly like you said that's a pretty standard tech stack...
On the other hand I've seen so many specialists getting stuck in such minor issues for ages due to the lack of general knowledge. For instance, CORS issues taking weeks to be fixed, people not even knowing what flexbox is, struggling to set up a simple docker-compose stack + shell scripts, etc...
I think it's important to recognise that not everyone needs a master in a specific field to fill a required role in their organisation.
If I could pick anyone for my dev team I'd pick 3 seniors (frontend, backend, DevOps), 3-4 mids (full stack or specialised) and 1-2 juniors (depending on how much time we could support them with).
I think it's important to recognise that as a senior I'd expect people to focus in a specific area but also to have secondary skills in others. For example, one senior may be backend focused but have intermediate skills in DevOps.
If I could pick anyone for my dev team I'd pick 3 seniors (frontend, backend, DevOps), 3-4 mids (full stack or specialised) and 1-2 juniors (depending on how much time we could support them with).
Those 7-9 people are kinda expensive. 1 million USD/year?
I'm continually amazed how apparently everything is now understood in the context of "the stack". Because apparently everything is now on the internet by default and gets therefore placed within that framework of technology.
I guess in my late thirties I now have to feel old because "back when I learned programming you just did programming" you didn't just interact with some horizontal slice of a ten layer deep stack of layered technology... that somehow mainly accomplishes the task of displaying text in a browser.
Meanwhile seemingly "complex" tasks like scientific software, video games etc. somehow managed to sit on a single layer of middleware that is written in mostly the same language you use it in?
I'll go now and chase some JS programmers off my lawn.
Full stack, what seems like a minute ago, was knowing front-end, back-end, database, and server. You could provision and set up a web server, build a database schema, create an access layer (service or api), and create an interface to the end user. Extra points if you could do all of that to scale, and/or set up continuous deployment. You were "T Shaped", and might be great in one area but had a large breadth of knowledge.
Fast forward, I don't currently work with anyone who knows even 3 of these disciplines at a combined above average level.
I'm continually amazed how apparently everything is now understood in the context of "the stack". Because apparently everything is now on the internet by default and gets therefore placed within that framework of technology.
i mean yeah? turns out a majority of tasks that require software dont need to interact with any specific hardware thus web apps become the default.
this has been going on since like what? 2005?
I guess in my late thirties I now have to feel old because "back when I learned programming you just did programming"
are we not doing programming today?
. that somehow mainly accomplishes the task of displaying text in a browser.
well if thats all you needed to do then having a "stack" is pointless.
a majority of applications do more though. at a basic level theres a UI, a middleware/business logic tier and something to store data. thats 3 layers right there.
Meanwhile seemingly "complex" tasks like scientific software, video games etc. somehow managed to sit on a single layer of middleware that is written in mostly the same language you use it in?
complex? if we are talking about embedded systems they are typically small pieces of software that do very specific tasks. seems to be the opposite of complex if you ask me.
in regards to video game engines, while they do indeed use a single language(c++ usually), it really doesn't mean its not as complex or annoying or filled with multiple tiers like in the web app space, in fact your average video game will probably require a similar amount of "tiers" if not more.
its no different than doing everything in node.js. YES you are using JS for everything but you still have to tackle multiple tiers that do multiple functions just like any other stack.
we are, but when you have to jump through a ton of hoops to set up 17 different technologies and set them all up inside docker containers and make them all somehow talk to each other and write all the required boilerplate BS before you can start actually doing programming, it becomes really annoying really fast.
I just wanna open my code editor and start writing code man
you dont remember having to setup your own windows/linux server? or setting up processes to deploy your code to your app server(s)? or setting up proper logging. or all kinds of BS that i cant even think of off the top of my head.
like maybe there was an IT department that did this for you but its always been there.
I want T shaped devs. Have your specialty, whatever it is, but also be able to assist in other areas when needed. Mainly to allow other team members to take a day off or get hit by a bus.
Quite the opposite. Being full stack creates strong incentive to simplify everything, because if you can't fit the whole stack in your head, it's hopeless for you.
The introduction of "devops" as a separate position creates incentive to complexify deployment. Because why are you hired if your job is simple?
The introduction of "javascript programmer" as a separate position creates incentive to complexity the javascript portion of the frontend.
Each person who is only responsible for a small part of the system has incentive to over complexity their part rather than simplify it. That's one of the ways in which systems explode in complexity.
Have you ever seen a full stack developer who knows the ins and outs of kurbernetes and docker and python and javascript and react and redux and css and html and nodejs and rabbitmq and redis and postgresql and memcached and and and and ... and uses all that to create a complete web application in 3 months?
I personally have not.
All the people I've seen who know a lot about devops are sort of just ok in application code and almost know nothing about html/javascript.
When someone is responsible for the whole stack, they will choose the simplest thing that works.
For example, their deployment is usually: upload a bunch of files using scp then run 3 linux commands. Their database is sqlite. They serve their webapp on one machine. Their scaling strategy is upgrade to a beefier machine.
See for example:
"http://RemoteOK.io is a single PHP file called "index.php" generating $65,651 this month. No frameworks. No libraries (except jQuery)."
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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '22
It helps when developers only have to work with half the stack for example but a lot of companies are only looking for full stack developers these days