The "Full-Stack" Developer Is A Myth In 2020

Hi! I could have sworn I’ve visited your blog before but after going through many of the articles I realized it’s new to me. Anyhow, I’m certainly delighted I found it and I’ll be book-marking it and checking back often!

Great article! I've been having the exact same thoughts about the mythical "Full Stack" title for some time now. If you think you're "full stack", you are most likely a jack of all trades, master of none. If you insist that you're a master of all, you most likely have a severe case of the Dunning-Kruger effect. There's simply not enough time in the day to be an expert in all tech layers at this point. You could be decent, but you will NOT be a true expert. The only way to gain true expertise is to go deep. By going deep, you must narrow your focus which by default decreases your time spent on other layers of the stack, hence your level of expertise automatically decreases in those areas.

This is a humbling article. I liked to think of myself as a full-stack programmer for the past decade, but I guess the fact that, if I had to choose, I'd say I'm a backend dev, goes to show that I'm not. I guess the real difficulty is in concisely expressing your proficiencies (or at least, how proficient you think you are) so that you don't give off the impression that you aren't at all adaptable. Maybe we should just start using radar charts? :D By the way, what's up with OAuth login on this site? For Twitter it asks for literally all permissions including reading private tweets/account info, for Google it says it's disabled because this site hasn't verified.

Full Stack developer is a SuperHero in human world.

Very good read, thank you for taking the time to write this.

People say today that you should be language agnostic...meaning that you should be able to implement things in any given language required by the spec of the project. Businesses respond to the explosion of new technologies, languages, Libraries and frameworks in very much the same way as developpers....which is?...the best they can, with respect to their own perspectives, from their own conference room chairs. It's nothing new by the way. When there was 15 or 20 technologies only Businesses still listed 75% of them in the job postings they released. The thing is that they don't have any key individual reason to act any differently. By listing everything, some dude will show at their offices which the team lead will have to pick from the average of many they interviewed. Is that guy fullfilling the job posting's synopsis they published for the job? Of course not...it's the dude that could go enough of the stuff they code with , that masters a certain combination of toolchain items that complements their needs...Stacking giganto amounts of skills one on top of the other also scares away the less secure developpers and has a way of letting only the bravest and well armed developpers show up at the interview. Enterprises use this as a filtering mecanism and have just no real genuine incentive acting any differently...they are not the guy who will be doing the interviews to qualify for the job..so to hell with common sense ....all of it is all wins and no loss for them

I get this David, I came to this conclusion after having many interview experiences like the one you described. What the employer did not know is that an acquaintance worked in the group. I told him about the write a whole site test and he informed me that is an active open project on their Job board. I told the employer I would like to change the purpose of the 'technical assessment' to a site unrelated to their business. The following day I received an email stating they have decided to go another direction. I was glad I didn't waste my time and energy at the end of the day although I was a great fit for the position. These companies typically aren't developing talent within their organization but would rather "hire-up" instead of train. Full Stack has many stacks and they haver each and every one of them been expanded to the point you have to specialize. After, thinking about it further, do I want a Full Stack doctor\surgeon? Hell no, because it's a smoothly spoken lie to say you are up to date on every front when it's changing all the time and expanding. I don't want to know it all and don't feel like I have to know t all because we are intelligent human beings with the thirst for and capacity to learn what s necessary to do a great job. I've been certified developer in multiple stacks primarily Microsoft, but also many others. It's a classic case of unrealistic expectations and nobody is calling it out.

The major issue of the “Full Stack Developer” positions in 2020 is the expected quality of the final solution. I see it as an attempt of “optimisation by cost” and/or “concentrating responsibilities”. Whatever motivation drivers are, the result is most likely to be a mediocre quality solution of at least one part of the system (ie. frontend or backend). It is also common that projects conducted by only “Full Stack Developer(s)” tend to take longer and have higher maintenance costs. All these factors at the end mean that “optimisation by cost” in this way turns out to be an illusion, at least on a long run. Example: A company hires a team of “Full Stack Developers” consultants primarily for the reason of “concentrating responsibilities”. The project is to develop a web site to support a business workflow. It takes many years. The UI is oldtime in style and inconsistent among the parts. Backend technological stack in the years is outdated. It becomes more and more costly to test the changes, because there are no automated tests. Here is a tweet with a short funny video on the topic: https://twitter.com/FedorovYury/status/1330527667867807746?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

I agree with the statement. You talked about all the technology and stack but not mentioned Data Strecture and Alg. Now a days company takes 2/3 rounds of DS and Algo round and that itself demand lot of practice and focus. After practicing those it's really really difficult to be "Full stack Developer"

Spot on. Nothing more needs to be added. I had a real small one man army software consultancy firm back in 90s writing business applications using Clipper. When i moved from DOS to Windows, I realized that an entire enterprise grade application cannot be written by one person managing learning curve, quality, time to market and after sales support. I realized it it prudent to close the business and just take up an employment with some IT consulting firm. I am pretty certain many like me just picked contractor position more prevalent in western world.

yes agreed

Interesting topic David. Here is my take on this. Becoming a full stack developer is difficult, simply bc there is so much to learn on front-end, back-end, and middle later. A full stack developer is someone who can built entire application. Unless you've done it all for years, its not possible to become a full stack developer. However, in cloud-world, its much easier to do it all. If an application is broken down into smaller, separable modules or say, you're using microservices architecture, and one developer is responsible for managing, say customers functionality. Its much easier for same developer to work from database, creating stored procedures or queries, build a library/API, and eventually the front-end. But yes, in my experience, developers try to stick to either front-end and back-end. It also make senses because developers have their choice and I know some backend developers may not be good at creating awesome front-ends and vice versa. I know many senior consultants who work as an architect or lead developer or even web developers (title doesn't matter) but they build everything including UI, API, backend, and database.