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I have noticed that when interviewing, the more specialized technical people often look down on full stack engineers, whereas managers are more excited about it

I have noticed that when interviewing, the more specialized technical people often look down on full stack engineers, whereas managers are more excited about it. I consider myself full stack, but in my last role I presented myself as a frontend engineer, with some backend experience. Eventually this role just kinda expanded into both frontend and backend. Now that I do contract work, I present myself as whatever they need, with my current contract, I was hired to do frontend, but just started looking at the backend when running into some problems or questions about the data. There's always a point where they ask you "oh, you can work on the backend too?".

micahbule 4y ago
Specialized technical people often look down on supposed fullstack engineers because specialized technical people value mastery over familiarity -- something a lot of FS engineers really try to be exaggeratingly proud of. While familiarity with your stack is great for cross-cutting concerns, mastery is what truly builds great software, not to mention in a timely manner. Managers are excited about FS engineers simply because if they scoop up good ones, those who really know what they're doing -- masters of several areas of their stack -- they can rotate them effectively at a fraction of a cost, if not for free.
- cerved 4y ago
  The idea that you can't be great at very different things isn't confined to software engineering. I think it's because most people can only master one thing so they can't imagine other people working differently
  - dijit 4y ago
    To be perfectly fair though even “mastering” backend is quite close to impossible. You’ve probably heard of the 10,000 hour rule, it’s a hard and fast rule to say that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of doing something to fully master it. Maybe not true in all cases; but consider the suite of tools you have to be practicing every day to do even a single role: VCS/DVCS, shell, OS fundamentals, build-systems, networking, DNS… now we have distributed computing concepts such as kubernetes and various DSLs, then there’s your programming language(s), their standard libraries, their extended contrib libraries. Completely non-exhaustive list and we’re already closing in on 5 years working full time for each of those. The sheer hubris of assuming you can throw together a few frameworks and understand 1 or 2 paradigms and then claim you know “the whole stack” is immature and exhausting; similar to the sysadmins of yore who could read QuickStarts and claim to know how to maintain software fully. Delivering business value is definitely what we’re trying to do, but when it comes down to it: engineering is understanding; and nobody can claim to understand everything, not with a straight face. Full Stack is either: the most senior you can be or the most surface level you can be. If the former: we can’t afford you and I’m not sure how you managed to keep all your skills up to date. If the latter then specialists will need to clean up after you anyway.
    - kilburn 4y ago
      Fist, the 10,000 hour rule is false common knowledge [1,2]. Second, splitting a general role ("backend engineering") in arbitrary atomic skills doesn't make sense because there's no end to it. Backend engineering -> OS fundamentals -> Driver programming -> Hardware design -> Boolean logic -> Set theory -> and so on... Third, all engineering roles have cross-cutting concerns. You do need some network knowledge to be a "backend guy"... but also to be a sysadmin, devops, etc.. It's not like all these roles exist in a vacuum and you're starting from 0 if you switch between them. Finally, most people that think of themselves as experts in some role, language or framework end up in the "1 year of experience repeated 10 times" trap. True experts are also somewhat generalists too, because you can't built a tall knowledge without growing the base too (pun intended). [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20121114-gladwells-10000-hour-rule-myth https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20121114-gladwells-10000-... [2] https://nesslabs.com/10000-hour-rule https://nesslabs.com/10000-hour-rule
      - dijit 4y ago
        10,000 hours, whether true or not, is a ballpark and even if it's patently untrue: it will always require some non-trivial amount of time to get good or master a particular subject. Not all subjects are equal, granted. having overlap in knowledge between roles is also somewhat granted; being a complete master in backend gives a person a lot of knowledge towards being a sysadmin (maybe even 60-70% of the way to being a master in that direction!); But, you've failed to convince me that any single human on earth can do "everything"; even if a person could literally master all technologies in use (not counting your strawman of driver programming) then there would still be a discipline mismatch.
    - cerved 4y ago
      I'm not sure I understood the point you tried to make Nevertheless, I have a solid understanding on all the things you mentioned and if you need help give me a holler because my rates are fair and I'm open to opportunities
  - whoooooo123 4y ago
    > most people can only master one thing Can they? My experience of people is that most of them can't master anything.
- woutr_be 4y ago
  > While familiarity with your stack is great for cross-cutting concerns, mastery is what truly builds great software, not to mention in a timely manner. I fully disagree with that. Great software isn't just about what stack you have mastered, great software is build by people who can do whatever it takes to build great software, and that's not necessarily just about your stack.
- tremon 4y ago
  That's funny, because as a generalist I tend to look down on single-purpose developers. Way too often they don't know anything about the rest of the system they're interfacing with and produce locally optimal but globally inferior solutions. My main gripes include frontend developers that don't understand HTTP and backend developers that don't understand SQL. And besides, where does your notion of "full stack" begin? Is it backend application code? Operating system libraries? Kernel code? Hardware drivers? I'd argue "full stack developer" is a misnomer anyway, since no developer can (or would want to) write both kernel drivers and html/css frontends.
  - eschneider 4y ago
    I dunno...that's actually my job. :) I work (mostly) doing embedded software (drivers/os/apps) but also help with some of the supporting back end web services and yeah, some of the front end code as well. It's handy for the company since I can work on whatever's most needful from week-to-week as well as take features from device to backend to production. Why would I want to? Well, I get to learn (more) new things and the scenery changes more often. It's not a bad gig if you can pull it off.
  - lupire 4y ago
    The problem in both cases is being an asshole who doesn't respect the value of other people's skills. The main thing "wrong" with a specialist is that not every org needs a full time specialist, so specialists are more likely to need to work as consultants.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    > since no developer can (or would want to) write both kernel drivers and html/css frontends. You do realize this comment is going to pull the exceptions out of the woodwork? I wrote all of the software for the first version of the Teledyne Lumenera Ethernet cameras. Everything from assembly codes in the bootloader to CSS in the on-camera web pages. Heck, I even had to review and debug the PCB design before I could start. I don't think this is a particularly uncommon experience. Embedded development usually has very small teams, and very often the hardware has HTTP API's. P.S. I'm available for work. Information in profile.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I think the differentiating factor, for me, if I were in a hiring position, would be that full-stack engineers are curious, flexible, and both eager and very able to learn. Specialists, I have less experience with working with them though so take these generalizations with a big and hopefully non-insulting grain of salt. On the one hand they will be experts in their field, know whatever they work on inside-out, and can squeeze every last grain of performance out of it - good DBA's are worth their weight in gold, they can solve a company's performance problems and save them millions depending on the scale. On the other you have a group of people that sorta know one language, like Java, and will just coast along on it for their careers; their CVs will look impressive, their skills will be indistinguishable from someone who has one year of experience. I've literally seen code that was a copy / paste of the first google search result of "java sql query", buried ten indentation levels deep, in a critical core codebase.
laserlight 4y ago
> Now that I do contract work, I present myself as whatever they need I realized that I should have done so for a contract work that I wasn't hired for. They told me that they were looking for someone specialized. I knew exactly that they needed a generalist, mostly because they were an early stage startup. They never hired for the “specialized” position they contacted me for, because that position shortly became obsolete.
trashtester 4y ago
I actually dislike the term "full stack engineers". "Full stack applicaton developers" is slightly better, at least it's limited to a single output (the app). I would not trust them with the design of an airplane, nuclear plant or military submarine, all of which are engineering tasks. 30 years ago, every app developer was "full stack", and the concept didn't even exist. As apps moved to the web during the dot-com era, the added complexity made some companies split their teams of entry level developers into front-end, back-end and database. Still, at that time, this "stack" was simple enough at the time that a good dev could learn the basics front-end, back-and and basic db work within a few years. So, a few years after dotcom, the "full stack dev" became popular, but really what they were delivering was the same as the app devs of the early 90s. But even within software, engineering is so much more than just making web apps or RESTful microservices behind the web apps, and the field is still grown rapidly. There is data engineering, machine learning engineering, infrastructure ("devops") engineering, operating system engineering, driver engineering, network engineering, real time system engineering, algorithm/library engineering, and I probably left most of the sub-fields out. So my main issue with "full stack engineers" is that I've met a few with (in reality) a fairly limited skillset who are quite overconfident about other aspects of software and the infra around software, who assume that the principles they follow when buildings web apps apply to all domains of software, and show a significant amount of hubris [edit] but still often failing spectacularly when trying to use their particular skillset in a somewhat different domain. I realize that this impresson of mine is based on a few bad apples. But I think there is something in this "full stack" concept that can contribute to some devs underestimating the the kinds of work that are normally not considered part of this stack.
- woutr_be 4y ago
  In my last fulltime role, we were called “product engineers”, which I actually really liked. It highlighted that our focus was on building a product, and not necessarily on frontend or backend. Because there was so much more involved, we all also helped out with deployments, or looking through log files, or talking to the business about issues.
deltasevennine 4y ago
The reason why technical people look down on full stack engineers is because they are usually just web developers. Web development is one of the easiest and over saturated areas of software development. That is not to say web development is easy, it's just "easiest." It's hard for a full stack engineer to see or admit to this because of bias, it's much easier for someone outside of web development to see it, or a more well rounded engineer to realize it. Full stack isn't even the correct term for these engineers. They usually aren't truly full stack. They just "front end" and "back end", of the web development stack. AN actual "Full" stack encompasses far more. OS development, embedded development, compiler development, database development, graphics programming, are all really hard things that are missing from someone who typically refers to themselves as "full stack".
- woutr_be 4y ago
  > The reason why technical people look down on full stack engineers is because they are usually just web developers. To give some context here, yes, when people refer to full stack developers, they're usually referring to developers who are focused on web development, but that would also include API development, or even mobile development. I don't think anyone thinks of full stack developers, as developers who know embedded development or compiler development, so I don't know anyone who looks down on them for not knowing these things. > It's hard for a full stack engineer to see or admit to this because of bias, it's much easier for someone outside of web development to see it, or a more well rounded engineer to realize it. Now obviously, the way that you put it, it's extremely difficult to say why you're wrong, because you've started by adding a bias to people who would defend it. So maybe, when you want to have a discussion about it, don't start by stating something that makes it extremely difficult to argue against it without being seen as having a bias.
  - deltasevennine 4y ago
    >I don't think anyone thinks of full stack developers, as developers who know embedded development or compiler development, so I don't know anyone who looks down on them for not knowing these things. Yes, I'm referring to technical people who are specialists outside of "web development". >Now obviously, the way that you put it, it's extremely difficult to say why you're wrong, because you've started by adding a bias to people who would defend it. So maybe, when you want to have a discussion about it, don't start by stating something that makes it extremely difficult to argue against it without being seen as having a bias. Why would i want to be told I'm wrong? People offer arguments in the belief that they are bullet proof so it's natural to say things that are harder to argue against. If you're a full stack engineer this excludes you from answering because you may be biased. I can empathize with how you feel. I guess there's two things you can consider here. Consider that you are biased and that the statement is correct. Consider that I, the person who posed the statement, is biased and wait for a programmer outside of web development who has experience working with "full stack web engineers" to respond with his own opinion. You would be biased not to consider the possibility that I am right, so strive to be unbiased.
Aromasin 4y ago
Echo this sentiment completely. I'm the only one in my team covering both hardware designs, software development, and sales. I'm not nearly as expert in any of these areas as my colleagues, but my manager can throw pretty much anything my way and I can run with it, and as a result generally do the best in quarterly reviews. From a managers perspective, if they can hire someone who can do 3 jobs for the price of one, then that's the best return on investment. However, an expert in an area will see through that. They know a job split 3 ways is a job 1/3rd done. I can get something working to a proof-of-concept level, but not to a scalable, problem-free one (unless given more time to work on something singularly). Best bet is to play to the crowd from my experience. Management class: tell them how much you've done. Engineering class: tell them how well you've done something.

micahbule 4y ago

Specialized technical people often look down on supposed fullstack engineers because specialized technical people value mastery over familiarity -- something a lot of FS engineers really try to be exaggeratingly proud of. While familiarity with your stack is great for cross-cutting concerns, mastery is what truly builds great software, not to mention in a timely manner. Managers are excited about FS engineers simply because if they scoop up good ones, those who really know what they're doing -- masters of several areas of their stack -- they can rotate them effectively at a fraction of a cost, if not for free.

cerved 4y ago
The idea that you can't be great at very different things isn't confined to software engineering. I think it's because most people can only master one thing so they can't imagine other people working differently
- dijit 4y ago
  To be perfectly fair though even “mastering” backend is quite close to impossible. You’ve probably heard of the 10,000 hour rule, it’s a hard and fast rule to say that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of doing something to fully master it. Maybe not true in all cases; but consider the suite of tools you have to be practicing every day to do even a single role: VCS/DVCS, shell, OS fundamentals, build-systems, networking, DNS… now we have distributed computing concepts such as kubernetes and various DSLs, then there’s your programming language(s), their standard libraries, their extended contrib libraries. Completely non-exhaustive list and we’re already closing in on 5 years working full time for each of those. The sheer hubris of assuming you can throw together a few frameworks and understand 1 or 2 paradigms and then claim you know “the whole stack” is immature and exhausting; similar to the sysadmins of yore who could read QuickStarts and claim to know how to maintain software fully. Delivering business value is definitely what we’re trying to do, but when it comes down to it: engineering is understanding; and nobody can claim to understand everything, not with a straight face. Full Stack is either: the most senior you can be or the most surface level you can be. If the former: we can’t afford you and I’m not sure how you managed to keep all your skills up to date. If the latter then specialists will need to clean up after you anyway.
  - kilburn 4y ago
    Fist, the 10,000 hour rule is false common knowledge [1,2]. Second, splitting a general role ("backend engineering") in arbitrary atomic skills doesn't make sense because there's no end to it. Backend engineering -> OS fundamentals -> Driver programming -> Hardware design -> Boolean logic -> Set theory -> and so on... Third, all engineering roles have cross-cutting concerns. You do need some network knowledge to be a "backend guy"... but also to be a sysadmin, devops, etc.. It's not like all these roles exist in a vacuum and you're starting from 0 if you switch between them. Finally, most people that think of themselves as experts in some role, language or framework end up in the "1 year of experience repeated 10 times" trap. True experts are also somewhat generalists too, because you can't built a tall knowledge without growing the base too (pun intended). [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20121114-gladwells-10000-hour-rule-myth https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20121114-gladwells-10000-... [2] https://nesslabs.com/10000-hour-rule https://nesslabs.com/10000-hour-rule
    - dijit 4y ago
      10,000 hours, whether true or not, is a ballpark and even if it's patently untrue: it will always require some non-trivial amount of time to get good or master a particular subject. Not all subjects are equal, granted. having overlap in knowledge between roles is also somewhat granted; being a complete master in backend gives a person a lot of knowledge towards being a sysadmin (maybe even 60-70% of the way to being a master in that direction!); But, you've failed to convince me that any single human on earth can do "everything"; even if a person could literally master all technologies in use (not counting your strawman of driver programming) then there would still be a discipline mismatch.
  - cerved 4y ago
    I'm not sure I understood the point you tried to make Nevertheless, I have a solid understanding on all the things you mentioned and if you need help give me a holler because my rates are fair and I'm open to opportunities
- whoooooo123 4y ago
  > most people can only master one thing Can they? My experience of people is that most of them can't master anything.
woutr_be 4y ago
> While familiarity with your stack is great for cross-cutting concerns, mastery is what truly builds great software, not to mention in a timely manner. I fully disagree with that. Great software isn't just about what stack you have mastered, great software is build by people who can do whatever it takes to build great software, and that's not necessarily just about your stack.
tremon 4y ago
That's funny, because as a generalist I tend to look down on single-purpose developers. Way too often they don't know anything about the rest of the system they're interfacing with and produce locally optimal but globally inferior solutions. My main gripes include frontend developers that don't understand HTTP and backend developers that don't understand SQL. And besides, where does your notion of "full stack" begin? Is it backend application code? Operating system libraries? Kernel code? Hardware drivers? I'd argue "full stack developer" is a misnomer anyway, since no developer can (or would want to) write both kernel drivers and html/css frontends.
- eschneider 4y ago
  I dunno...that's actually my job. :) I work (mostly) doing embedded software (drivers/os/apps) but also help with some of the supporting back end web services and yeah, some of the front end code as well. It's handy for the company since I can work on whatever's most needful from week-to-week as well as take features from device to backend to production. Why would I want to? Well, I get to learn (more) new things and the scenery changes more often. It's not a bad gig if you can pull it off.
- lupire 4y ago
  The problem in both cases is being an asshole who doesn't respect the value of other people's skills. The main thing "wrong" with a specialist is that not every org needs a full time specialist, so specialists are more likely to need to work as consultants.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  > since no developer can (or would want to) write both kernel drivers and html/css frontends. You do realize this comment is going to pull the exceptions out of the woodwork? I wrote all of the software for the first version of the Teledyne Lumenera Ethernet cameras. Everything from assembly codes in the bootloader to CSS in the on-camera web pages. Heck, I even had to review and debug the PCB design before I could start. I don't think this is a particularly uncommon experience. Embedded development usually has very small teams, and very often the hardware has HTTP API's. P.S. I'm available for work. Information in profile.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I think the differentiating factor, for me, if I were in a hiring position, would be that full-stack engineers are curious, flexible, and both eager and very able to learn. Specialists, I have less experience with working with them though so take these generalizations with a big and hopefully non-insulting grain of salt. On the one hand they will be experts in their field, know whatever they work on inside-out, and can squeeze every last grain of performance out of it - good DBA's are worth their weight in gold, they can solve a company's performance problems and save them millions depending on the scale. On the other you have a group of people that sorta know one language, like Java, and will just coast along on it for their careers; their CVs will look impressive, their skills will be indistinguishable from someone who has one year of experience. I've literally seen code that was a copy / paste of the first google search result of "java sql query", buried ten indentation levels deep, in a critical core codebase.

laserlight 4y ago

> Now that I do contract work, I present myself as whatever they need I realized that I should have done so for a contract work that I wasn't hired for. They told me that they were looking for someone specialized. I knew exactly that they needed a generalist, mostly because they were an early stage startup. They never hired for the “specialized” position they contacted me for, because that position shortly became obsolete.

trashtester 4y ago

I actually dislike the term "full stack engineers". "Full stack applicaton developers" is slightly better, at least it's limited to a single output (the app). I would not trust them with the design of an airplane, nuclear plant or military submarine, all of which are engineering tasks. 30 years ago, every app developer was "full stack", and the concept didn't even exist. As apps moved to the web during the dot-com era, the added complexity made some companies split their teams of entry level developers into front-end, back-end and database. Still, at that time, this "stack" was simple enough at the time that a good dev could learn the basics front-end, back-and and basic db work within a few years. So, a few years after dotcom, the "full stack dev" became popular, but really what they were delivering was the same as the app devs of the early 90s. But even within software, engineering is so much more than just making web apps or RESTful microservices behind the web apps, and the field is still grown rapidly. There is data engineering, machine learning engineering, infrastructure ("devops") engineering, operating system engineering, driver engineering, network engineering, real time system engineering, algorithm/library engineering, and I probably left most of the sub-fields out. So my main issue with "full stack engineers" is that I've met a few with (in reality) a fairly limited skillset who are quite overconfident about other aspects of software and the infra around software, who assume that the principles they follow when buildings web apps apply to all domains of software, and show a significant amount of hubris [edit] but still often failing spectacularly when trying to use their particular skillset in a somewhat different domain. I realize that this impresson of mine is based on a few bad apples. But I think there is something in this "full stack" concept that can contribute to some devs underestimating the the kinds of work that are normally not considered part of this stack.

woutr_be 4y ago
In my last fulltime role, we were called “product engineers”, which I actually really liked. It highlighted that our focus was on building a product, and not necessarily on frontend or backend. Because there was so much more involved, we all also helped out with deployments, or looking through log files, or talking to the business about issues.

deltasevennine 4y ago

The reason why technical people look down on full stack engineers is because they are usually just web developers. Web development is one of the easiest and over saturated areas of software development. That is not to say web development is easy, it's just "easiest." It's hard for a full stack engineer to see or admit to this because of bias, it's much easier for someone outside of web development to see it, or a more well rounded engineer to realize it. Full stack isn't even the correct term for these engineers. They usually aren't truly full stack. They just "front end" and "back end", of the web development stack. AN actual "Full" stack encompasses far more. OS development, embedded development, compiler development, database development, graphics programming, are all really hard things that are missing from someone who typically refers to themselves as "full stack".

woutr_be 4y ago
> The reason why technical people look down on full stack engineers is because they are usually just web developers. To give some context here, yes, when people refer to full stack developers, they're usually referring to developers who are focused on web development, but that would also include API development, or even mobile development. I don't think anyone thinks of full stack developers, as developers who know embedded development or compiler development, so I don't know anyone who looks down on them for not knowing these things. > It's hard for a full stack engineer to see or admit to this because of bias, it's much easier for someone outside of web development to see it, or a more well rounded engineer to realize it. Now obviously, the way that you put it, it's extremely difficult to say why you're wrong, because you've started by adding a bias to people who would defend it. So maybe, when you want to have a discussion about it, don't start by stating something that makes it extremely difficult to argue against it without being seen as having a bias.
- deltasevennine 4y ago
  >I don't think anyone thinks of full stack developers, as developers who know embedded development or compiler development, so I don't know anyone who looks down on them for not knowing these things. Yes, I'm referring to technical people who are specialists outside of "web development". >Now obviously, the way that you put it, it's extremely difficult to say why you're wrong, because you've started by adding a bias to people who would defend it. So maybe, when you want to have a discussion about it, don't start by stating something that makes it extremely difficult to argue against it without being seen as having a bias. Why would i want to be told I'm wrong? People offer arguments in the belief that they are bullet proof so it's natural to say things that are harder to argue against. If you're a full stack engineer this excludes you from answering because you may be biased. I can empathize with how you feel. I guess there's two things you can consider here. Consider that you are biased and that the statement is correct. Consider that I, the person who posed the statement, is biased and wait for a programmer outside of web development who has experience working with "full stack web engineers" to respond with his own opinion. You would be biased not to consider the possibility that I am right, so strive to be unbiased.

Aromasin 4y ago

Echo this sentiment completely. I'm the only one in my team covering both hardware designs, software development, and sales. I'm not nearly as expert in any of these areas as my colleagues, but my manager can throw pretty much anything my way and I can run with it, and as a result generally do the best in quarterly reviews. From a managers perspective, if they can hire someone who can do 3 jobs for the price of one, then that's the best return on investment. However, an expert in an area will see through that. They know a job split 3 ways is a job 1/3rd done. I can get something working to a proof-of-concept level, but not to a scalable, problem-free one (unless given more time to work on something singularly). Best bet is to play to the crowd from my experience. Management class: tell them how much you've done. Engineering class: tell them how well you've done something.