3 ms·

The first thing I said was advocating cross functional teams with both frontend and backend engineers

• Chris2048 6y ago
  But what does that mean? One or two devs knows the other teams stuff? The whole team? also, what does it mean in the context of "different skillsets"? It sounds like the FE devs has some comprehension of the BE, but weaker skills than the BE devs. Then cross-functional just means not strongly siloed, but what is the advantage is that? a little knowledge can be worse than none. KT can be expensive, specialism exists for a reason, and you can end up limiting your hiring pool if your requirements are too strict. I don't think a FE team needs every member to know every detail of the back-end, a suitable abstraction can simplify how much you need to focus on the back-end detail. Instead I'd advocate having a few "specialists" that have a good knowledge of where FE meets BE. they needn't be the best BE or FE dev, but the best at integrating the two; I'd say this is usually a BE engineer who can write good JS and has a decent appreciation of the relevant protocols. They can architect the main touch points, and then abstract them (i.e. create relevant classes) for the FE, BE. These devs would be competent experts in integration, rather than the "jack of all trades, master of none" full-stack variant; a shallow but wide knowledge may be great for prototyping, but not for mature stacks.