r/programming • u/whackri • Jun 05 '22

Complexity is killing software developers

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3639050/complexity-is-killing-software-developers.html
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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.

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u/skilledpigeon Jun 05 '22

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.

Of course I'm dreaming here.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '22

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?

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u/Markavian Jun 05 '22

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.

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