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Are you specifically targeting better career opportunities? Now is as good a time as ever to be a seasoned Full Stack engineer. Pursuing an MS and shifting spe

Are you specifically targeting better career opportunities? Now is as good a time as ever to be a seasoned Full Stack engineer. Pursuing an MS and shifting specialties seems very expensive. Despite all the support other commenters are giving, I believe you should be very hesitant about making such a career shift.

WalterSear 8y ago
Fwiw, my experience has been that many of the job openings spurring the growth in advertising for Full Stack engineers are actually glorified Front End roles, with very little work at the interface or on the back end. I suspect that, due to bias against Front End developers (and javascript :) ), hiring managers are have trouble justifying senior front end developer positions and so are resorting to overqualifying the position and unicorn-seeking. There's also a bias in technical interview questions, since conventional algorithmic/puzzle questions hold less relevance on the front end, so qualifying experienced engineers without asking back-end appropriate questions poses difficulties. Which means that, despite a role being a Front End position, Full Stack candidates end up looking like a better fit, since they do better in the interviews.
- gaius 8y ago
  growth in advertising for Full Stack engineers are actually glorified Front End roles Right. People think I’m a hater because I say “full stack engineer” is just title-inflation for webdev, but I’m just telling it how the entire rest of the world sees it. Throughout most of the history of the web, the same people wrote the CGI scripts, and any SQL in them, as wrote the HTML; working this way is perfectly normal for a webdev for like the last 20 years. I guess we were all “full stack engineers” back then, just we didn’t have a grandiose title.
  - WalterSear 8y ago
    IMHO, it's got more to do with the expansion and change of the Front End developer role, than direct title inflation per se. Now, a front end developer has to maintain consistent behaviour across a panoply of platforms - each under constant change and growth, whereas the scope of actual 'web development' has remained a relatively static. It's becoming less and less realistic to expect one person to be able to effectively handle both roles any more, without making compromises on UI behaviour and compatibility.
- sidcool 8y ago
  IMHO, front end specialization is not as trivial as we think. Building websites may be simple, but building a fast front end is still quite an engineering task.
sidcool 8y ago
I am targeting a specialized work which hopefully would pay well. For example, someone working on the Google Spanner DB. Full stack is better paying, but after some time it feels like doing the same thing over and over again. What downsides do you foresee in making the career shift? (Apart from a risk to salary)

WalterSear 8y ago

Fwiw, my experience has been that many of the job openings spurring the growth in advertising for Full Stack engineers are actually glorified Front End roles, with very little work at the interface or on the back end. I suspect that, due to bias against Front End developers (and javascript :) ), hiring managers are have trouble justifying senior front end developer positions and so are resorting to overqualifying the position and unicorn-seeking. There's also a bias in technical interview questions, since conventional algorithmic/puzzle questions hold less relevance on the front end, so qualifying experienced engineers without asking back-end appropriate questions poses difficulties. Which means that, despite a role being a Front End position, Full Stack candidates end up looking like a better fit, since they do better in the interviews.

gaius 8y ago
growth in advertising for Full Stack engineers are actually glorified Front End roles Right. People think I’m a hater because I say “full stack engineer” is just title-inflation for webdev, but I’m just telling it how the entire rest of the world sees it. Throughout most of the history of the web, the same people wrote the CGI scripts, and any SQL in them, as wrote the HTML; working this way is perfectly normal for a webdev for like the last 20 years. I guess we were all “full stack engineers” back then, just we didn’t have a grandiose title.
- WalterSear 8y ago
  IMHO, it's got more to do with the expansion and change of the Front End developer role, than direct title inflation per se. Now, a front end developer has to maintain consistent behaviour across a panoply of platforms - each under constant change and growth, whereas the scope of actual 'web development' has remained a relatively static. It's becoming less and less realistic to expect one person to be able to effectively handle both roles any more, without making compromises on UI behaviour and compatibility.
sidcool 8y ago
IMHO, front end specialization is not as trivial as we think. Building websites may be simple, but building a fast front end is still quite an engineering task.

sidcool 8y ago

I am targeting a specialized work which hopefully would pay well. For example, someone working on the Google Spanner DB. Full stack is better paying, but after some time it feels like doing the same thing over and over again. What downsides do you foresee in making the career shift? (Apart from a risk to salary)