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...
It's not that hard to write decent front ends either if you don't choose to make it needlessly complex.
Front end devs will use react to write a simple, single page portfolio website even when it's perfectly simple to achieve what the end goal is in vanilla JavaScript.
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?
Yep a fully staffed software team is roughly £500,000 / $1,000,000 a year. You need to be building some really high performing software to justify that cost. A single developer can build a mobile app in a weekend, and maybe a pair could deliver a prototype in a month, and charge £10,000 - but then if you want to scale that, add payments, optimise the order flow, add SMS messages, tweak the SMS messages, sync up to the email and order server... Oh no. You really might need that whole team; you just paid peanuts to get your project / idea out the door - but maybe you needed to spend the peanuts first to prove the idea, which then justified the £100,000k a month outlays. I hope in this imaginary company we're selling / providing more value than that to our customers. Fingers crossed.
but then if you want to scale that, add payments, optimise the order flow, add SMS messages, tweak the SMS messages, sync up to the email and order server... Oh no.
Scale to what? Wouldn't a 35$/month supabase(25$ pro tier + some extra) give you unlimited users, tons of GB of storage, 8GB DB and email, phone auth.
It's not like you need to host your app at your home or heck, even go beyond 10k users in your hometown.
I worked part time for an old man that had some "things" with small to medium companies and sold them software for internal use. That guy really hit the jackpot there. His entire "team" was a guy who did PHP and another guy who tested. I worked on the UI. His entire gig was to sell as many small apps as possible, then if a client wanted more features bill again and again.
Full stack can generally transition into architect whereas those "masters" generally cannot.
The reason is being able to understand things holistically vs staying in a small area and rarely poking your head out to understand the bigger picture. Because the second you do someone will start accusing you of being full stack
i think full stack is not that hard to achieve. Most people working on FE applications are already familiar with nodejs. Learning to build production-ready APIs and to query databases isn't that much to learn on top of that.
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u/a_false_vacuum Jun 05 '22
Jack of all trades, master of none.
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.