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"At ThoughtWorks, we think of our roles as fluid and non-exclusive areas of championship. [...] To be clear, I’m not saying that we all need to be experts in

"At ThoughtWorks, we think of our roles as fluid and non-exclusive areas of championship. [...] To be clear, I’m not saying that we all need to be experts in everything. That would be impossible. Today’s technology stack goes down a long way, so being a genuinely balanced full-stack dev is probably not the most realistic of goals — but staying open-minded is."

dakiol 6y ago
It's impossible to be an expert in everything, but it's very doable to be competent in many areas. I just don't see the problem in being quite decent,for example, at Vue.js and Kafka and Postgres. Let's say you have been working with Postgres during the last year: you are very competent at it. Now, for reasons, you need to work on the client side app of your company: you don't know Vue.js, but you go and read the documentation (as any competent dev would do). You spent months learning and working on a SPA, and you spent less time with Postgres. Done. Now you're competent at Vue.js (it doesn't take years to get competent with Vue.js, but certainly it takes years to become an expert). You go back to work on your daily tasks with postgres. And now... You have to deal with Kafka. Rinse and repeat. Perhaps then later in 2 years you have to work again in the front end, but this time with React: easy, you already know Vue.js., so knowledge is transferred.
andresp 6y ago
People with no legitimacy trying to make blanket statements like this is an anti-pattern. Frontend is massively different from the backend. It appeals to very different people. I care about scale and performance, not UI work. For me BE is much closer to infrastructure/ops/OS than the JS library of the week. This "full stack" mindset also shows the limited experience of the author. He has no idea of the depth of specialization that some of these tasks include. The fact that he can get away with basic knowledge in both of them just shows the level of the technical challenge in his work. If you are in that context, sure, I even wrote business plans when I had to (and that doesn't mean I think those roles should be merged for everyone), but there's more outside of your knowledge bubble.

dakiol 6y ago

It's impossible to be an expert in everything, but it's very doable to be competent in many areas. I just don't see the problem in being quite decent,for example, at Vue.js and Kafka and Postgres. Let's say you have been working with Postgres during the last year: you are very competent at it. Now, for reasons, you need to work on the client side app of your company: you don't know Vue.js, but you go and read the documentation (as any competent dev would do). You spent months learning and working on a SPA, and you spent less time with Postgres. Done. Now you're competent at Vue.js (it doesn't take years to get competent with Vue.js, but certainly it takes years to become an expert). You go back to work on your daily tasks with postgres. And now... You have to deal with Kafka. Rinse and repeat. Perhaps then later in 2 years you have to work again in the front end, but this time with React: easy, you already know Vue.js., so knowledge is transferred.

andresp 6y ago

People with no legitimacy trying to make blanket statements like this is an anti-pattern. Frontend is massively different from the backend. It appeals to very different people. I care about scale and performance, not UI work. For me BE is much closer to infrastructure/ops/OS than the JS library of the week. This "full stack" mindset also shows the limited experience of the author. He has no idea of the depth of specialization that some of these tasks include. The fact that he can get away with basic knowledge in both of them just shows the level of the technical challenge in his work. If you are in that context, sure, I even wrote business plans when I had to (and that doesn't mean I think those roles should be merged for everyone), but there's more outside of your knowledge bubble.