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I don't know when we started splitting people into "frontend" and "backend" teams (FAANG influence?) and for what reasons, but 10 years ago we hired people with

I don't know when we started splitting people into "frontend" and "backend" teams (FAANG influence?) and for what reasons, but 10 years ago we hired people with a general background, smart and curious enough to learn SQL, HTML/CSS/JS and whatever language you want to use on the server, able to build some end-to-end CRUD features on their own. And that's like what 99% of the companies need. My point being: when you have the same person building the UI and the API, you avoid a lot of the problems described in this article.

hakunin 3y ago
In a way, this article tries to bring the alignment between the frontend and backend closer to the full stack days, while also acknowledging the increased complexity of the front-end, that may be deserving of its own team focused on great UX.
Phreaker00 3y ago
For someone who has been in this field for 20 years I remember starting out doing every aspect of webdevelopment myself. Then the bigger and more complex the projects became, the less that made sense. The requirements of the distinct fields have gotten to a point where it's very impractical and hardly worthwhile for one person to master them all. You can't expect someone to translate a design into modern components that support all types of devices, resolutions and contexts to also come up with optimized SQL queries and knowing how to choose between Docker and Ansible for their distributed serverless functions that handle a variety of external endpoints. Ofcourse not every project that uses this approach needs this approach, and there's still a market for the Do-It-All developer. My point is that the webdevelopment world of today isn't that of a decade ago.
- ggregoire 3y ago
  > You can't expect someone to translate a design into modern components that support all types of devices, resolutions and contexts to also come up with optimized SQL queries and knowing how to choose between Docker and Ansible for their distributed serverless functions that handle a variety of external endpoints. Why not? Obviously you can't expect this from someone fresh out of college/bootcamp, but that's what I do on a daily basis and I'd expect this from anyone with 10+ years of exp.
nucleardog 3y ago
After a couple decades of doing this… I’d pin it on an explosion of complexity and scope in the frontend. It used to be if you could find a solid engineer with some vague aesthetic sense they could efficiently carry something through from conception and design to completion. These days the scope of frontend development has increased to the point where learning and staying on top of it has become too large (in my opinion) for most people to do while also becoming and staying highly competent in everything else. A “full stack” developer these days is supposed to understand frontend development, backend development, systems administration, cloud operations, and what else? All of these are massive areas that are constantly shifting. By way of analogy, we used to have the town barber handle haircuts and shaves but also surgery because the main skill to master was precision with a blade. Then as the scope of being a surgeon expanded to include things besides being able to cut precisely, that became its own specialization. Further on, even within surgery each area of the body started to require so much specific knowledge that we further broke that down into all the different surgical specialties (heart surgeon, podiatric surgeon, brain surgeon, etc).
- ggregoire 3y ago
  > These days the scope of frontend development has increased to the point where learning and staying on top of it has become too large (in my opinion) for most people to do while also becoming and staying highly competent in everything else. I feel like frontend complexity is just a meme on HN to be honest. How complicated is it to learn a framework like React (which celebrated its 10 years 3 months ago) if you have a background in software engineering and some basic knowledge of HTML/JS? Like an afternoon to read the doc? 3 days to practice and be totally fluent? I managed graphic designers who knew nothing about computers but were able to learn React and be very productive. Then you pick one tool to build your production app. Yes there are many options, but you choose one (I use Vite.js) and stick with it for the next 5 or 10 years. > A “full stack” developer these days is supposed to understand frontend development, backend development, systems administration, cloud operations, and what else? All of these are massive areas that are constantly shifting. There is a new big thing every 10 years or so. Like the last one was Kubernetes and it almost 10 years old and you probably don't even need it. HTML5, ES6, React, Python, Django, SQL, Postgres, Docker, AWS, Terraform... all those tools have been there since almost forever (it feels like it) and mostly never changed. And you can build 99% of the web with that stuff. As I said in another comment, yes it's a lot if you are a junior dev fresh out of college but you probably have some solid knowledge of all of that if you have been doing this for a very long time. At least enough understanding and experience to know what to google when you need to do something and what to do with what you found.

hakunin 3y ago

In a way, this article tries to bring the alignment between the frontend and backend closer to the full stack days, while also acknowledging the increased complexity of the front-end, that may be deserving of its own team focused on great UX.

Phreaker00 3y ago

For someone who has been in this field for 20 years I remember starting out doing every aspect of webdevelopment myself. Then the bigger and more complex the projects became, the less that made sense. The requirements of the distinct fields have gotten to a point where it's very impractical and hardly worthwhile for one person to master them all. You can't expect someone to translate a design into modern components that support all types of devices, resolutions and contexts to also come up with optimized SQL queries and knowing how to choose between Docker and Ansible for their distributed serverless functions that handle a variety of external endpoints. Ofcourse not every project that uses this approach needs this approach, and there's still a market for the Do-It-All developer. My point is that the webdevelopment world of today isn't that of a decade ago.

ggregoire 3y ago
> You can't expect someone to translate a design into modern components that support all types of devices, resolutions and contexts to also come up with optimized SQL queries and knowing how to choose between Docker and Ansible for their distributed serverless functions that handle a variety of external endpoints. Why not? Obviously you can't expect this from someone fresh out of college/bootcamp, but that's what I do on a daily basis and I'd expect this from anyone with 10+ years of exp.

nucleardog 3y ago

After a couple decades of doing this… I’d pin it on an explosion of complexity and scope in the frontend. It used to be if you could find a solid engineer with some vague aesthetic sense they could efficiently carry something through from conception and design to completion. These days the scope of frontend development has increased to the point where learning and staying on top of it has become too large (in my opinion) for most people to do while also becoming and staying highly competent in everything else. A “full stack” developer these days is supposed to understand frontend development, backend development, systems administration, cloud operations, and what else? All of these are massive areas that are constantly shifting. By way of analogy, we used to have the town barber handle haircuts and shaves but also surgery because the main skill to master was precision with a blade. Then as the scope of being a surgeon expanded to include things besides being able to cut precisely, that became its own specialization. Further on, even within surgery each area of the body started to require so much specific knowledge that we further broke that down into all the different surgical specialties (heart surgeon, podiatric surgeon, brain surgeon, etc).

ggregoire 3y ago
> These days the scope of frontend development has increased to the point where learning and staying on top of it has become too large (in my opinion) for most people to do while also becoming and staying highly competent in everything else. I feel like frontend complexity is just a meme on HN to be honest. How complicated is it to learn a framework like React (which celebrated its 10 years 3 months ago) if you have a background in software engineering and some basic knowledge of HTML/JS? Like an afternoon to read the doc? 3 days to practice and be totally fluent? I managed graphic designers who knew nothing about computers but were able to learn React and be very productive. Then you pick one tool to build your production app. Yes there are many options, but you choose one (I use Vite.js) and stick with it for the next 5 or 10 years. > A “full stack” developer these days is supposed to understand frontend development, backend development, systems administration, cloud operations, and what else? All of these are massive areas that are constantly shifting. There is a new big thing every 10 years or so. Like the last one was Kubernetes and it almost 10 years old and you probably don't even need it. HTML5, ES6, React, Python, Django, SQL, Postgres, Docker, AWS, Terraform... all those tools have been there since almost forever (it feels like it) and mostly never changed. And you can build 99% of the web with that stuff. As I said in another comment, yes it's a lot if you are a junior dev fresh out of college but you probably have some solid knowledge of all of that if you have been doing this for a very long time. At least enough understanding and experience to know what to google when you need to do something and what to do with what you found.