Comment by titanomachy
5 years ago
I've been a "full-stack" developer at large tech companies, and my experience is there at least it means "frontend developer who can put together a basic API server". My fellow full-stack developers and I would spend most of our time building out frontends, which was generally regarded by others as challenging and specialized work, and maybe 20% of the time adding API endpoints to fetch or update some data, which was considered straightforward.[0]
Not having to wait for some other engineer to make the backends made us a lot more efficient. It definitely was rewarding to be able to complete products end-to-end.
Hiring standards and pay were the same as for any engineer, at least in FAANG.
[0] Yeah, occasionally we had to optimize some SQL queries or whatever but we're competent engineers, we can figure it out even if it's not what we do every day.
> my experience [full-stack] means "frontend developer who can put together a basic API server"
This is 100% accurate in my experience too, and it's also true in the other way around: "full-stack" means backend developer who can put a basic SPA using React/Vue.
From the frontend perspective: they call themselves full-stacks for knowing how to spin up a NodeJS HTTP Server powered by Express with MongoDB inserting JSON in the database. But they are missing:
- AWS/cloud computing: not necessarily creating the infrastructure (although that's a must on more senior levels), but how to orchestrate the different components together.
- databases: why SQL/NoSQL, beyond basic SELECTs, knowing how to properly add indexes, debug why queries are slow, modeling, understanding locks implications and transaction levels, and so on.
- tooling: how to set up a bundler, linter and formatter, testing, CI/CD. This overlaps a bit with the responsibilities of the DevOps engineer, but a full-stack should know at least on intermediate level all of those things. I can't say how many times I've seen "senior full-stacks" that had no clue about how webpack worked at all.
From the backend perspective: they call themselves full-stacks for knowing how to spin up a React/Vue app that does basic CRUD operations using forms, powered by a UI framework like Material UI. But they are missing:
- CSS: most will find CSS hard/annoying and won't bother understanding at all how it works even on a fundamental level, will defer to hacks most of the time to make things work, especially when it comes to adjusting for edge cases like responsive design or cross-browser support.
- the DOM: normally they don't understand it at all, or to a very limited extent.
- Web vitals: how to measure and makes things faster and performant—not really including here overly optimized, but just making sure your app is 60fps or close to that most of the time. Usually when things get slow either on the network side or in the app itself, those engineers will blame is the framework/library, not their misusage of it.
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Those lists are definitely non-exhaustive, as I didn't even mention more advanced stuff like protocols (how HTTP works? most can't answer), caching, etc etc, but you can get the point I'm trying to make:
The problem with the term full-stack is that only very few engineers really are sufficiently great on both sides of the stack and could say that they mastered both, simply because there's just too much to learn! Frontend has become so much more complex with SPAs compared when it was about rendering static HTML with some CSS and basic behavior with jQuery. Same for backend with the advent of cloud computing and several types of databases.
I've been coding professionally for a decade and I've met only a single engineer that I'd consider him full-stack (he checked all those boxes I mentioned and more). I think I would also include myself, because I spent 50% of my career spent as a front-end engineer, became senior, then I transitioned to back-end engineering because it pays the same or more and it's less stressful (for most of the regular companies that most of us work at). My current title is "principal full stack engineer", but in practice I only do backend/devops, I don't actively code front-end but I keep up with the industry by following the new trends and testing things here and there in personal projects.
Ultimately, I believe for being a full-stack engineer you have to be first a front-end (or back-end engineer) then learn the other, what we have today is most people doing the same from the very beginning of their careers and they either go deep on a single one or in none of them.
Full stack is not really a skill level qualifier - that's what junior, senior, principal, staff, etc. are for. It means you work in different areas and can't say "oh I don't do that work here" when someone gives you work in those areas. People call themselves front or back end engineers long before they've mastered it, and you don't have to wait for full stack either.
The front or backend bias you and your parent's comment talk about are team specific things so you don't give a hard front-end task to someone who is biased towards the backend. That still means they can take the less difficult tickets.
You can replace full stack for your example with "extremely good/talented/gifted engineer" and I'm almost sure it has nothing to do with the full stack label because it's the only example in a decade you've found.
But also the jobs that they get feed back into what they call themselves. So even if that's your example, it isn't how the business defines it, which IMO is ultimately why it's just a cost savings label to get people to work harder for similar amounts of pay as front or backend people.