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This, and the fact that most companies don't have the luxury of having the choice. Sure, maybe in the Valley you can find expert front-end and back-end devs jus

This, and the fact that most companies don't have the luxury of having the choice. Sure, maybe in the Valley you can find expert front-end and back-end devs just around the corner, but in the Midwest USA, you take whatever competent developers you can get. Most people I know have never really worked in the sort of "specialist" position OP talks about, so most of the time they've already got "full stack" (okay, maybe not FULL stack, but...) experience, so we just run with it. I work 9-5 for a company where 90% of the devs are "full stack". Rarely are the people who "specialize" actually any sort of expert, instead their skill-level on their weaker side of the stack is just especially low.

tedmiston 9y ago
Interesting how perspectives differs. I work for a startup where all devs are specialized (headcount is ~50). At startups in the midwest I've worked almost exclusively with specialist devs. Occasionally in the early days a back end dev might also do front end work but in my experience that's far less common with scale. While we might not be able to find a senior back end dev with production experience in our preferred language / framework easily locally, we can definitely find back end vs front end at various levels of experience. AngelList is helpful for this. Front end used to be something you could just do on the side on a whim as a backend dev but as the front end web frameworks have emerged and evolved, and consequently more work has moved to the front end this has changed in the past five years or so.