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I don't think many companies out there will let you play around with frontend, backend, system administration, databases, pipelines, etc., all by yourself. Comp

I don't think many companies out there will let you play around with frontend, backend, system administration, databases, pipelines, etc., all by yourself. Companies nowadays usually have frontend teams, infra teams, backend teams. Each product team owns their repositories but anything related to infra, well, it has to go through the infra team. You may have some flexibility when creating services from scratch (infra team either has provided with some sort of template for that or they require you to open Jira issues) but you'll never get complete access to debug. So, unless your are one of the first hired developers in a newly established startup that develops web products, fullstack means you are able to write api endpoints, db migrations and react/vue/whatever components.

spiffytech 4y ago
This really depends which corner of the industry you're in. Per a variety of industry surveys[0] a sizable minority (often around a quarter of respondents) work in companies with fewer than 20 total employees. I've worked in several of companies that size, two of which were stable, profitable businesses about a decade old. These small companies have 2-4 engineer-type staff, and they are expected to do everything - front end, back end, ops, and DB. In the same day I could rack a server in the colo, write some PHP/HTML/JS, manage a deploy, and troubleshoot MySQL replication. Sometimes there's no one else to delegate to. I found these jobs did the most to grow my technical skills. I developed the flexibility to tackle a wide variety of problems, and I feel confident diving into anything web-dev related. And as a bonus I've had an easier time passing contrived architecture design questions on interviews because I had hands-on experience with the whole stack. [0]: State of JS, State of CSS, State of Postgres, StackOverflow survey

spiffytech 4y ago

This really depends which corner of the industry you're in. Per a variety of industry surveys[0] a sizable minority (often around a quarter of respondents) work in companies with fewer than 20 total employees. I've worked in several of companies that size, two of which were stable, profitable businesses about a decade old. These small companies have 2-4 engineer-type staff, and they are expected to do everything - front end, back end, ops, and DB. In the same day I could rack a server in the colo, write some PHP/HTML/JS, manage a deploy, and troubleshoot MySQL replication. Sometimes there's no one else to delegate to. I found these jobs did the most to grow my technical skills. I developed the flexibility to tackle a wide variety of problems, and I feel confident diving into anything web-dev related. And as a bonus I've had an easier time passing contrived architecture design questions on interviews because I had hands-on experience with the whole stack. [0]: State of JS, State of CSS, State of Postgres, StackOverflow survey