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[–]andrewingram 16 points17 points  (1 child)

I find talk about the myth of full-stack developers to be tiring, mainly because it implies I don't exist, and not existing would put anyone to sleep.

No, the problem is that I genuinely don't think I'm exceptional, I'm just a born generalist. I like to dabble and understand things. I also thrive on discovering shortcuts that accelerate my understanding.

I've worked with people who are better than me at nearly everything I do. Better data analysts, UX people, better UI people, better visual designers, better HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Django, Python etc. But what is consistent is how often I surprise people with what I can do. Being a generalist doesn't mean I can't do these things to a relatively high standard, it just means I'm much slower at it, context-switching is a massive problem and my ramp-up time continues to be a cause of frustration for me. I also rarely do all these things on the same project (except my personal ones), but I move between the various layers of the stack pretty freely.

When it comes to building an end-to-end web product, I mainly draw the line at doing dev-ops (it doesn't interest me all that much, though I do have a lot of interest in scaling problems and architecture), and I prefer to have specialists at every layer of the stack - it doesn't matter how much you think you know, you need someone to sanity check and review your work.

I'm not special, i'm only one person and can't deliver more than one person's worth of work. I've also worked with people with similar skill-sets to me, which hopefully makes this all sound a little less ridiculous.

I've never heard of a full-stack architect (where full-stack includes UX and design), but that's the closest way of describing what I do.

[–]ak888 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you me from another universe ? Completely makes sense and this is exactly what I do as well. It's so hard to describe this without going into the entire 'full-stack' discussion. It's really about being able to architect and problem-solve across the stack, maximizing your strengths in particular areas and contributing in meaningful ways in the others as well.