Full-Stack Developers Debate

There are no real Full stack developers

I thought "full-stack" implied you understood the front-end web environment?

People with no legitimacy trying to make blanket statements like this is an anti-pattern. Frontend is massively different from the backend. It appeals to very different people. I care about scale and performance, not UI work. For me BE is much closer to infrastructure/ops/OS than the JS library of the week. This "full stack" mindset also shows the limited experience of the author. He has no idea of the depth of specialization that some of these tasks include. The fact that he

This is not at all fullstack to me.Imho; a fullstack developer is a person who can develop all pieces of an application (or game, or whatever) and put it in production, maintain it, improve it.I.e. design the database or other persistence, implement the layers that manages the data, the business logic and the user interface.It can be very different from different applications, of course, since some may not have an ui, or a persistence requirement.It is a person who not only knows how

Full stack means you're average at frontend and backend.

In my 20+ year career, I have met very few programmers who can actually justify the claim of being full-stack. Usually it means strong back-end that happens to have worked with some front-end framework fad, and less often vice versa. Specialists (UI/UX, database admins, CI/CD engineers, automation testers, just to name a few) are still very much needed and the trend to make everybody on the team “full-stack” doesn’t work well in practice unless everyone is a 10x developer.

Why do you think that full-stack isn't a generalist position?

I dunno, full stack developer always comes across as frontend developer who also writes some node to me.

My experience interviewing "Full-stack" developers indicates that it can be a vanity title devs assign to themselves to be more marketable. Unfortunately, I've found their skillsets to be very lop-sided.Typically, I'd interview full-stack developers with lots of front-end experience and skills (based on their projects and code samples) with very limited backend experience or skills, or they were backend engineers who knew the ins-and-outs of robust, scalable backends, fami

When people say "full stack", it means something very specific to me.It means you can do both UI and server code, so you have a wide variety of knowledge in the many competing front-end and back-end frameworks out there, but you are not quite an expert in anything. At your last job you learned all the magic incantations of jQuery, Rails and MySQL, but but today you are expected to learn all the magic incantations of React, Node and Mongo. Specifically because you are expected to cha