7 ms·

I’m sorry, but this “Full Stack” meme makes me mad/sad

42 points by fagnerbrack 7y ago

frou_dh 7y ago
I remember seeing a snarky tweet saying something along the lines of "Try asking your full-stack developers which direction the stack grows on x86"
- Redoubts 7y ago
  This was the kind of joke I was expecting, based on the title.
bluetidepro 7y ago
> I think it's just a cheeky joke. The point it underlies is rooted in truth - that it's really difficult to master both frontend and backend development in real life. That comment on the post sums it up perfectly, in my opinion.
- jmkni 7y ago
  True, however you may as well try to!
- masukomi 7y ago
  Agreed. The JavaScript world is evolving at a crazy fast pace. Front end development has become inextricably linked to it. No-one writes Vanilla JS + CSS anymore. It's unrealistic to think someone can be an expert an the front end stuff (changing by the month) and be an expert at the back-end stuff with its own completely separate set of skills and knowledge. It's like asking for a back-end dev who's also a DevOps expert and can handle all 100+ AWS services. Hell, good DevOps folks can't handle that _without_ trying to become good back-end developers too.
choeger 7y ago
The idea of naming developers based on the tools they are currently using is akin to name an mechanical engineer a wrench guy or a carpenter a hammer guy. Of course not everyone is a computer scientist but even then everyone who is worth their salary should be able to get up to speed with a new language or deployment scenario. That being said, how many job postings do you know that explicitly mention "we work with XXX - do you think you want to, too?"
- ohaideredevs 7y ago
  I think devs who think they can do everything are lying to themselves. Sure, I can do Java and understand the environment. Sure I can do React and there is nothing special about it. But I am better at C#/.NET/Angular, because I have been working with edge cases for the past x years. To say I can lead a team in a Java environment would be a lie, because of all the minor details. Just because you can do something in a language doesn't mean devs are truly universal and "it's all the same." Can I write some function integration in C/Go/Powershell, etc? Sure, but when I do, I am not nearly as efficient as when I am using my daily languages/frameworks.
  - aequitas 7y ago
    > Can I write some function integration in C/Go/Powershell, etc? Sure, but when I do, I am not nearly as efficient as when I am using my daily languages/frameworks. Should you be so efficient though? At the end of the day the only thing that matters for most employers is that you get the job done and the product out of the door. If your general programming knowledge with other languages frameworks allows you to quickly asses a problem and write a fix you create value, even if it not the most idiomatic solution. Of course everyone should write the best code in the most efficient and idiomatic way possible. But we don't live in an ideal world. As long as you take responsibility and apply your general knowledge together with common sense and best practices. Just don't go cowboying around a codebase just because you think every language is the same.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > I think devs who think they can do everything are lying to themselves. I don't think I agree with this, but there's an underlying truth here. Personally, I have at least dabbled in pretty much everything that I've come across. I do this intentionally for two reasons -- first, it makes me aware of what tools exist, so I can make better tooling decisions, and second, it gives me a little head start if it becomes desirable to actually achieve competency in one of them. I'm minimally competent in a very large variety of things. I can accomplish pretty much anything with a tech if I'm minimally competent with it. It will just take me longer to do so. I'm competent in a variety of things, and I'm expert in a handful of things. An expert dev should be able to at least muddle through with pretty much any tech, where "muddle through" means that you can produce using that tech, but it will take you longer than with someone who is at least competent. But you can still do it, and recognizing that isn't lying to yourself.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dahart 7y ago
> What do you think? Has your company pushed too hard for split UI/Backend teams? I haven’t see this personally, I’ve only seen the opposite, companies pushing for full-stack devs. And from what I’ve seen, people self-select frontend vs backend despite teams pushing and hoping for more full-stack activity from every person on the team. Frontend and backend and ops are specialized activities, and those domains are only getting more specialized and more complicated over time. Writing an API and designing CSS almost couldn’t be more different, and they’re both full time problems. When I started a company with a friend, we both wanted to be full-stack and we both tried multiple times, but we just automatically drifted to me on the UI and him on the bots. After a while, when I would try to write bot code I would screw it up despite good intentions, strong knowledge of the code, and unit-tests in place. I would forget important security or schema details, or not quite understand the way my partner’s code had changed structurally even when we talked about it for hours. He’d get tired of explaining it and just write the code. Same thing happened the other way when he’d dip his toes in the frontend. If two people who want to be full-stack and communicate non-stop can’t make full-stack happen, I’d guess it’s a hard problem.
- mbostleman 7y ago
  At my company, the product team leads want full stack for the flexibility of having any dev pick up any story. But the devs gravitate to their preferred side. Personally, I tend to avoid the front end because I'm weary of learning yet another js paradigm there every year or two and because I'm just more passionate about the back end than the UI anyway.
  - testvox 7y ago
    This is also what I have seen. The push for "full stack" devs and teams came from product because they don't like to have to coordinate multiple people or teams in order to get a project done.
- fagnerbrack 7y ago
  There's Pair Programming
Analemma_ 7y ago
Every "full stack" team I've ever been on almost immediately partitioned itself into "the frontend people" and "the backend people", with people only crossing sides if there was some kind of emergency fix needed and the "right person" wasn't available. From what I gather in talking to others, this is pretty typical. Full-stack development is mostly a myth that we all pretend to believe in.
- scotty79 7y ago
  Isn't that ability to cross to wherever you are needed actually what full-stack means? I was hired as front-end and did angular and css but earned respect of my back-end devs by pestering them successfully about creating correct indexes on the tables involved in queries that were mysteriously slow to them. The other front-end guy just switched to Java were team were short of back-end capacity.
rossdavidh 7y ago
"Full Stack", in my experience (which is anecdotal and just my own), means "We want Front-End but can't find enough people so we're going to hire you as 'Full Stack' and then give you all Front-End work, but you wouldn't accept the job if we told you that's what it was". In other words, "Full-stack" means "Bait-and-switch", when coming from an employer. Not saying that you shouldn't want Front-End work; if you enjoy that, great, and I am happy to support you with that API in a timely fashion. Happy to work closely with the designer and/or Front-End dev to make sure you get what you need so that things look good on the front end. But, I prefer Back-end development, for the most part. When I take a job that's described as "back end" it usually will involve every once in a while doing a bit of js, html, or css, but not much, and it's understood that it is not what I am going to be doing most of the time. Again, this may not be other people's experience, but it's mine.
- cholantesh 7y ago
  >When I take a job that's described as "back end" it usually will involve every once in a while doing a bit of js, html, or css, but not much, and it's understood that it is not what I am going to be doing most of the time. Do you feel that 'reporting' (of the SSRS variety)falls under the backend umbrella?
  - rossdavidh 7y ago
    Tough question. It's kind of like, does "data science" count as back-end, or a separate category? I tend to think both reporting and data science (which are at different parts of a spectrum of data-oriented roles) are different enough from other back-end jobs to deserve a separate designation. In practice, I've also seen a similar "bait-and-switch" where people get told they'll do data science, and then get pressed into back-end development instead.
- abright 7y ago
  This was my experience with the job I'm at now. I was hired as a "full stack" developer and when I got here I learned I was the only one on my team comfortable working on the back-end. The team is small and very much the opposite of the ideal scenario he talks about in the article (people have their specialties and are only willing to pick up work within those specialties). This has actually given me an opportunity to create a niche for myself where I am able to jump into just about any project at any point in the stack.
gambler 7y ago
This is not just a meme. This is a mentality. At my last job at a big company we had HipChat rooms for all kinds of user groups. The one for frontend devs had constant discussion about their job (in)security, and every couple of weeks someone posted an article complaining about the existence of "fullstack" engineers. I wouldn't care if this ended at chats and picture, but it's these people who deliberately push for ever increasing fronted complexity to make sure they're not easily replaceable. The sad reality is that IT industry is currently in a bubble. It is choke-full of overspecialized tool junkies with no transferable skills. Certain complexities you "have to know" to perform basic operations are often 100% artificial and shouldn't be there in the first place.
- dcosson 7y ago
  I never understood this concept at all. Is this a metaphor somehow, or do you literally think everyone is secretly conspiring to make life more complicated for themselves and their team because of job security? What about the fact that everyone changes jobs every 1 to 3 years anyway? The market for engineers is pretty hot these days, I don’t think most devs even want all that much job security, much less are willing to go to such extreme lengths for it. Have you considered that problems you’re not working on may actually have more inherent complexity than you realize? From my own experience, and also just based on Ockham’s razor, it seems much more likely that people are mostly giving an honest effort and trying to solve real problems. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail to solve the problem, or fail to recognize the right problem to work on, but overall real things are certainly getting done in the software world — new products launch and companies provide real value and gain real customers.
gonyea 7y ago
I'm a Full-Stack developer at Google, which is fairly uncommon given the complexity of systems here. The chief trait of a Full Stack developer, in my opinion, is often just growing into the needs of the team/moment. I've been weighted in different directions because that's where the product needed me; I'm currently the Front-End domain expert on my team. Self-adulating thought leaders who throw shade at Full-Stack are themselves just really bad at using more than one language, let alone thinking about different parts of a large system. (I'd also expect a Full-Stack developer to understand systems and resource provisioning/monitoring. Not just JS vs. Java.)
benjohnson 7y ago
I'll admit - I'm that horse drawer. The converse problem is a brilliant but un-coordinated team of front end and back end developers that make things that the other team has trouble interfacing with: the severed front half of a narwhal and the back end of of a dragon with thousands of JSON/XML ants going between the two distant mounds of meat.
hsk823 7y ago
To me this isn't making light of full stack teams, it's making light of expecting a single individual human being be able to do it all by themselves, the full stack "dev" as in singular dev. A unicorn. A super hero. A single person who at any given moment know every single line of code and how to fix any problem that comes up off the top of their head.
saidajigumi 7y ago
> What do you think? Has your company pushed too hard for split UI/Backend teams? One relevant (anti-)pattern I've seen too often: nominally full-stack teams who fail to value and take ownership of their UI component. In my examples, this happens when they "require" full-stack devs, but will give full rating to the "meme horse" developer (weak UI, strong backend) and completely de-rate the opposite developer: strong UI, weak backend. That said, I agree with the author's preference for "full-stack team" where the entire team puts real value in the whole range of competencies rather than just pushing the full-stack need down onto every individual developer.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mizchief2 7y ago
I think Mitch Hedberg described it best: https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-when-you-re-in-hollywood-and-you-re-a-comedian-everybody-wants-you-to-do-other-things-mitch-hedberg-129-5-0509.jpg https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-when-you-re-in...
amorphic 7y ago
A lot of comments here bemoan "Full Stack Engineers" as being Jacks of All Trades but Masters of None. But that misses the point. Don't forget that the full quote is: “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” In a startup or smaller organisation an Engineer with a deep understanding of a single area (frontend, backend, devops etc) is far less valuable to the business than an Engineer with "T-shaped" skills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills), a solid understanding of fundamental best practices and the ability to quickly understand new things as required. This article nails it: https://angel.co/blog/what-skeptics-get-wrong-about-full-stack-engineers-and-why-we-need-them https://angel.co/blog/what-skeptics-get-wrong-about-full-sta...

42 points by fagnerbrack 7y ago

I remember seeing a snarky tweet saying something along the lines of "Try asking your full-stack developers which direction the stack grows on x86"

Redoubts 7y ago
This was the kind of joke I was expecting, based on the title.

bluetidepro 7y ago

> I think it's just a cheeky joke. The point it underlies is rooted in truth - that it's really difficult to master both frontend and backend development in real life. That comment on the post sums it up perfectly, in my opinion.

jmkni 7y ago
True, however you may as well try to!
masukomi 7y ago
Agreed. The JavaScript world is evolving at a crazy fast pace. Front end development has become inextricably linked to it. No-one writes Vanilla JS + CSS anymore. It's unrealistic to think someone can be an expert an the front end stuff (changing by the month) and be an expert at the back-end stuff with its own completely separate set of skills and knowledge. It's like asking for a back-end dev who's also a DevOps expert and can handle all 100+ AWS services. Hell, good DevOps folks can't handle that _without_ trying to become good back-end developers too.

choeger 7y ago

The idea of naming developers based on the tools they are currently using is akin to name an mechanical engineer a wrench guy or a carpenter a hammer guy. Of course not everyone is a computer scientist but even then everyone who is worth their salary should be able to get up to speed with a new language or deployment scenario. That being said, how many job postings do you know that explicitly mention "we work with XXX - do you think you want to, too?"

ohaideredevs 7y ago
I think devs who think they can do everything are lying to themselves. Sure, I can do Java and understand the environment. Sure I can do React and there is nothing special about it. But I am better at C#/.NET/Angular, because I have been working with edge cases for the past x years. To say I can lead a team in a Java environment would be a lie, because of all the minor details. Just because you can do something in a language doesn't mean devs are truly universal and "it's all the same." Can I write some function integration in C/Go/Powershell, etc? Sure, but when I do, I am not nearly as efficient as when I am using my daily languages/frameworks.
- aequitas 7y ago
  > Can I write some function integration in C/Go/Powershell, etc? Sure, but when I do, I am not nearly as efficient as when I am using my daily languages/frameworks. Should you be so efficient though? At the end of the day the only thing that matters for most employers is that you get the job done and the product out of the door. If your general programming knowledge with other languages frameworks allows you to quickly asses a problem and write a fix you create value, even if it not the most idiomatic solution. Of course everyone should write the best code in the most efficient and idiomatic way possible. But we don't live in an ideal world. As long as you take responsibility and apply your general knowledge together with common sense and best practices. Just don't go cowboying around a codebase just because you think every language is the same.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > I think devs who think they can do everything are lying to themselves. I don't think I agree with this, but there's an underlying truth here. Personally, I have at least dabbled in pretty much everything that I've come across. I do this intentionally for two reasons -- first, it makes me aware of what tools exist, so I can make better tooling decisions, and second, it gives me a little head start if it becomes desirable to actually achieve competency in one of them. I'm minimally competent in a very large variety of things. I can accomplish pretty much anything with a tech if I'm minimally competent with it. It will just take me longer to do so. I'm competent in a variety of things, and I'm expert in a handful of things. An expert dev should be able to at least muddle through with pretty much any tech, where "muddle through" means that you can produce using that tech, but it will take you longer than with someone who is at least competent. But you can still do it, and recognizing that isn't lying to yourself.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dahart 7y ago

> What do you think? Has your company pushed too hard for split UI/Backend teams? I haven’t see this personally, I’ve only seen the opposite, companies pushing for full-stack devs. And from what I’ve seen, people self-select frontend vs backend despite teams pushing and hoping for more full-stack activity from every person on the team. Frontend and backend and ops are specialized activities, and those domains are only getting more specialized and more complicated over time. Writing an API and designing CSS almost couldn’t be more different, and they’re both full time problems. When I started a company with a friend, we both wanted to be full-stack and we both tried multiple times, but we just automatically drifted to me on the UI and him on the bots. After a while, when I would try to write bot code I would screw it up despite good intentions, strong knowledge of the code, and unit-tests in place. I would forget important security or schema details, or not quite understand the way my partner’s code had changed structurally even when we talked about it for hours. He’d get tired of explaining it and just write the code. Same thing happened the other way when he’d dip his toes in the frontend. If two people who want to be full-stack and communicate non-stop can’t make full-stack happen, I’d guess it’s a hard problem.

mbostleman 7y ago
At my company, the product team leads want full stack for the flexibility of having any dev pick up any story. But the devs gravitate to their preferred side. Personally, I tend to avoid the front end because I'm weary of learning yet another js paradigm there every year or two and because I'm just more passionate about the back end than the UI anyway.
- testvox 7y ago
  This is also what I have seen. The push for "full stack" devs and teams came from product because they don't like to have to coordinate multiple people or teams in order to get a project done.
fagnerbrack 7y ago
There's Pair Programming

Analemma_ 7y ago

Every "full stack" team I've ever been on almost immediately partitioned itself into "the frontend people" and "the backend people", with people only crossing sides if there was some kind of emergency fix needed and the "right person" wasn't available. From what I gather in talking to others, this is pretty typical. Full-stack development is mostly a myth that we all pretend to believe in.

scotty79 7y ago
Isn't that ability to cross to wherever you are needed actually what full-stack means? I was hired as front-end and did angular and css but earned respect of my back-end devs by pestering them successfully about creating correct indexes on the tables involved in queries that were mysteriously slow to them. The other front-end guy just switched to Java were team were short of back-end capacity.

rossdavidh 7y ago

"Full Stack", in my experience (which is anecdotal and just my own), means "We want Front-End but can't find enough people so we're going to hire you as 'Full Stack' and then give you all Front-End work, but you wouldn't accept the job if we told you that's what it was". In other words, "Full-stack" means "Bait-and-switch", when coming from an employer. Not saying that you shouldn't want Front-End work; if you enjoy that, great, and I am happy to support you with that API in a timely fashion. Happy to work closely with the designer and/or Front-End dev to make sure you get what you need so that things look good on the front end. But, I prefer Back-end development, for the most part. When I take a job that's described as "back end" it usually will involve every once in a while doing a bit of js, html, or css, but not much, and it's understood that it is not what I am going to be doing most of the time. Again, this may not be other people's experience, but it's mine.

cholantesh 7y ago
>When I take a job that's described as "back end" it usually will involve every once in a while doing a bit of js, html, or css, but not much, and it's understood that it is not what I am going to be doing most of the time. Do you feel that 'reporting' (of the SSRS variety)falls under the backend umbrella?
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  Tough question. It's kind of like, does "data science" count as back-end, or a separate category? I tend to think both reporting and data science (which are at different parts of a spectrum of data-oriented roles) are different enough from other back-end jobs to deserve a separate designation. In practice, I've also seen a similar "bait-and-switch" where people get told they'll do data science, and then get pressed into back-end development instead.
abright 7y ago
This was my experience with the job I'm at now. I was hired as a "full stack" developer and when I got here I learned I was the only one on my team comfortable working on the back-end. The team is small and very much the opposite of the ideal scenario he talks about in the article (people have their specialties and are only willing to pick up work within those specialties). This has actually given me an opportunity to create a niche for myself where I am able to jump into just about any project at any point in the stack.

gambler 7y ago

This is not just a meme. This is a mentality. At my last job at a big company we had HipChat rooms for all kinds of user groups. The one for frontend devs had constant discussion about their job (in)security, and every couple of weeks someone posted an article complaining about the existence of "fullstack" engineers. I wouldn't care if this ended at chats and picture, but it's these people who deliberately push for ever increasing fronted complexity to make sure they're not easily replaceable. The sad reality is that IT industry is currently in a bubble. It is choke-full of overspecialized tool junkies with no transferable skills. Certain complexities you "have to know" to perform basic operations are often 100% artificial and shouldn't be there in the first place.

dcosson 7y ago
I never understood this concept at all. Is this a metaphor somehow, or do you literally think everyone is secretly conspiring to make life more complicated for themselves and their team because of job security? What about the fact that everyone changes jobs every 1 to 3 years anyway? The market for engineers is pretty hot these days, I don’t think most devs even want all that much job security, much less are willing to go to such extreme lengths for it. Have you considered that problems you’re not working on may actually have more inherent complexity than you realize? From my own experience, and also just based on Ockham’s razor, it seems much more likely that people are mostly giving an honest effort and trying to solve real problems. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail to solve the problem, or fail to recognize the right problem to work on, but overall real things are certainly getting done in the software world — new products launch and companies provide real value and gain real customers.

gonyea 7y ago

I'm a Full-Stack developer at Google, which is fairly uncommon given the complexity of systems here. The chief trait of a Full Stack developer, in my opinion, is often just growing into the needs of the team/moment. I've been weighted in different directions because that's where the product needed me; I'm currently the Front-End domain expert on my team. Self-adulating thought leaders who throw shade at Full-Stack are themselves just really bad at using more than one language, let alone thinking about different parts of a large system. (I'd also expect a Full-Stack developer to understand systems and resource provisioning/monitoring. Not just JS vs. Java.)

benjohnson 7y ago

I'll admit - I'm that horse drawer. The converse problem is a brilliant but un-coordinated team of front end and back end developers that make things that the other team has trouble interfacing with: the severed front half of a narwhal and the back end of of a dragon with thousands of JSON/XML ants going between the two distant mounds of meat.

hsk823 7y ago

To me this isn't making light of full stack teams, it's making light of expecting a single individual human being be able to do it all by themselves, the full stack "dev" as in singular dev. A unicorn. A super hero. A single person who at any given moment know every single line of code and how to fix any problem that comes up off the top of their head.

saidajigumi 7y ago

> What do you think? Has your company pushed too hard for split UI/Backend teams? One relevant (anti-)pattern I've seen too often: nominally full-stack teams who fail to value and take ownership of their UI component. In my examples, this happens when they "require" full-stack devs, but will give full rating to the "meme horse" developer (weak UI, strong backend) and completely de-rate the opposite developer: strong UI, weak backend. That said, I agree with the author's preference for "full-stack team" where the entire team puts real value in the whole range of competencies rather than just pushing the full-stack need down onto every individual developer.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mizchief2 7y ago

I think Mitch Hedberg described it best: https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-when-you-re-in-hollywood-and-you-re-a-comedian-everybody-wants-you-to-do-other-things-mitch-hedberg-129-5-0509.jpg https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-when-you-re-in...

amorphic 7y ago

A lot of comments here bemoan "Full Stack Engineers" as being Jacks of All Trades but Masters of None. But that misses the point. Don't forget that the full quote is: “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” In a startup or smaller organisation an Engineer with a deep understanding of a single area (frontend, backend, devops etc) is far less valuable to the business than an Engineer with "T-shaped" skills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills), a solid understanding of fundamental best practices and the ability to quickly understand new things as required. This article nails it: https://angel.co/blog/what-skeptics-get-wrong-about-full-stack-engineers-and-why-we-need-them https://angel.co/blog/what-skeptics-get-wrong-about-full-sta...