From an engineer's point of view, if they call themselves a full stack engineer they're usually a front end dev who have written a few apis in the past. No shame, but I've seen way too many people say they're backend without fully understanding what being a backend engineer really is in terms of scale, speed, and flexibility.

From q businesses point a view, a full stack engineer is a role they made up that means "we expect an expert in all areas but want to pay a lower rate".

Both areas need experts. I'd say I'm an expert in backend. I think it's impossible to be an expert in everything, and companies who want "full stacks" should expect jack of all trades master of none, and will attract literally any engineer, because what the hell is full stack.

I've probably pissed off a lot of fellow engineers, but I guess what I'm trying to say is be a master of your domain. Learn how frontend and backend work, but don't try to be an expert in everything. It's good to specialize. When you're asked if you are a full stack engineer it's perfectly fine to say "I have experience in the full stack, my expertise is on the backend, but I can do react when needed"

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are both kinds of full stack developers: the frontend dev that doesn't understand the backend enough to know they suck at it, and the backend dev that doesn't understand the frontend enough to know they suck at it.

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I couldn't agree more with the latter part, I know a lot of backend engineers who consider frontend simple without ever trying what it really takes. This is not a healthy way to view someone else's work, and it usually produces friction between back and front end teams

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You can always spot them when they have to ask about state.

I always asked about state.

Backend engineer here who got gud at frontend because of mobile, but recognize others are way better than me at it.

[–] I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm a chemical engineer, you didn't piss me off

[–] towerful@programming.dev 8 points 1 week ago

Oh, a real engineer? ducks

[–] arendjr@programming.dev 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So I do consider myself to be a true full-stack developer, since I do have 5+ years of experience working on each of server-side, CLI, desktop applications, and mobile applications and 10+ years on the web frontend. Then again, I’m 40 and I feel too old to get offended over that shit. I also agree the term “full-stack” is diluted as hell, so I don’t even call myself that anymore.

Now get off my lawn :p

[–] firelizzard@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

Experience != expertise or skill. I have never met someone who was actually good at both. Maybe if your backend is just some SQL queries. I am a backend engineer and I’m adequate at front end but I’d never hire someone whose skills were merely adequate unless I thought they had the potential to reach ‘good’.

[–] Sas@beehaw.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Agreed but i feel at least in scrum theory it is encouraged to have a T of skills with deep knowledge about your speciality and shallow but for basic stuff sufficient knowledge in the rest of skills in the stack. So i think it is known that full stack doesn't mean master of everything. But yeah it's impossible to master everything. My skill gets smaller the further i stay from the frontend. Like I can get backend tasks done but tell me to write a plsql package and I'm gonna have to learn a lot of new shit

[–] firelizzard@programming.dev 0 points 1 week ago

If you actually have deep knowledge in a specialty, then you describe yourself as that specialty. ‘Full stack engineer’ coneys that you don’t have a specialty/are a master of nothing/your skills are _ shaped.

[–] RiikkaTheIcePrincess@pawb.social 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

"Full-stack" 🤮

[–] einkorn@feddit.org 30 points 1 week ago (1 children)

More like "I do two jobs but only get paid for one".

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 8 points 1 week ago

I was toldo the other day that in ten years there will be no testers because developers will do all the testing.

I've seen how it works out in practice: there's not enough time for testing and for developing, too, developers are going to burn and the product is going to be shit done and shit tested. Maybe it works if your company is willing to spend extra for less results by someone doing all the stuff less efficient than what they could, but that's a rare occurrence.

[–] Eiri@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

All the full-stack devs I've worked with so far were just back-end developers who write terrible front-end code.

[–] ursakhiin@beehaw.org 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've worked with my fair share that were front end devs that didn't understand the backend, too

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Isn't that basically the entire use case for Node.js?

[–] ursakhiin@beehaw.org 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not sure if you're suggesting that it's a problem of knowing the language or sarcastically saying that Node.js allows for developers to not know what's happening.

On the case that you're thinking it's a knowledge of the language issue, that's not what I'm getting at. Typically, what I see with full stack developers is an over reliance on frameworks to do the heavy lifting to the detriment is their skill sets. Often not knowing how to optimize DB queries or trouble shoot performance problems. This works fine in purely CRUD use cases, but falls apart when scaling using more complex patterns starts to occur. I've spoken with Sr and staff full stack developers that truly believe the only thing you need to do in order to scale a web app is add nodes.

[–] Eiri@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Hey, if it consoles you, three quarters of our pure back-end C# developers are as you describe, too.

[–] luciferofastora@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 week ago

See, you should have worked with me - I write terrible back-end code too! You'd have gained a whole new appreciation for the people who can do at least that.

[–] RonSijm@programming.dev 6 points 1 week ago

This feels like a personal attack

[–] i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 week ago

A full stack developer is either a back end developer that has no business writing front end code but does it anyway, or they’re a front end developer that has no business writing back end code but does it anyway.

Or they’re perfectly capable of doing both because they’re at a startup that’s years away from running at scale or having to worry about performance and security.

[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 4 points 1 week ago

Weird artificial distinctions of our time.