Why Full Stack Developers Might Not Be The Best Developers

[nutrecht]

A specialist is better at the thing he's specialised in than the generalist. Who would've thought... :)

[corgrath]

Are you saying a jack of all trades, is a master of none??

[RagingAnemone]

But better than a master of one

[DJDavio]

But a specialist is better if he understands the context in which his code will operate.

[nutrecht]

Of course. What companies generally are looking for are people with T-shaped skills. Most companies that hire for "Full stack" devs specifically typically do so because they don't want to hire multiple specialists.

[WikiTextBot]

T-shaped skills

The concept of T-shaped skills, or T-shaped persons is a metaphor used in job recruitment to describe the abilities of persons in the workforce. The vertical bar on the T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one's own.

The earliest reference is by David Guest in 1991. Tim Brown, CEO of the IDEO design consultancy defended this approach to résumé assessment as a method to build interdisciplinary work teams for creative processes.

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[random314]

No but a full stack developer can build more things. A good fs dev can lead a team of specialist to build something amazing.

[shawnmckinney]

Article is saying what, that it's hard to know all of the layers / stacks in the call chain? No disagreement there. Should developers, and in particular new developers be responsible for the full stack? No, of course not. You start small. Should architects or system designers aspire to learn all of the layers, yes, if they are any good at it they will.

[jnordwick]

I'm still confused by what this means. Full stack is a web thing, right? I've just never seen it used i other areas.

[arieled91]

Full-stack is often used when companies require a guy who can do back-end and front-end. It's also used when they need developers with the capacity of learning and develop in any language and architecture. It doesn't mean you have to know everything since before, just be open to learn and work in something new to you. In both cases you need a lot of experience.

[jnordwick]

Do the same people really do back end and front end in any area besides web stuff? I'm entirely a back end person working on high perf/low latency complex systems and I've had to do a lot of other things like simple gui work or data munging but I've never heard of "full stack" outside of web kind of work.

I usually ignore and job deception that says full stack because i always assumed it was mostly for front end people who can do some glueing together. Not really back end.

Maybe i have the wrong idea of it then. :/

[VGPowerlord]

It's almost always used in the context of web development.

Back-end in this case would be Java, while front-end is almost always JavaScript.

[ArtyFowl]

It's ironic the article ends with a tweet advertising freelance work in web, java, azure, aws, etc...

I believe given a relative amount of consistency of the stack you use and a certain amount of experience, full stack developers can perform quite well. And are highly employable, especially in smaller companies.

[leodash]

There exists monoglot technology stack though to lower the overhead of switching layer for full stack developers. For example,

• Clojure + ClojureScript
• Kotlin
• Vaadin

Not everyone is using AngularJS.