I came across this tweet this morning.
There are no actual full stack developers in 2019.
The stack has become too large for a single person14:42 PM - 20 Oct 2019
What do you think?
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Top comments (11)
Yes and no...
Yes, the stack is too large for one person. There is more technology than anyone could know in enough depth to cover the "full" stack.
However.
I consider myself a full stack developer. I have professionally used a solid range of technologies ranging from a number of different databases, serverless technologies, build a number of api's for a range of content and (my favourite) created complex and responsive front-ends in a range of frameworks.
I will openly say I don't know Vue or Google Cloud. I have no real experience with any Angular post AngularJs or many of Azure's newer features. Then sites like DEV are built on Ruby... But I could learn any of them in a short time span to an acceptable level if needed. The underlying technologies and principals are the same.
So yes, if your definition of full stack is knowing every possible technology, no matter age or market share.. then yeah, there are no full stack developers. However that isn't my definition or the definition of most of the companies out there recruiting full stack.
I believe you don't have to know everything to be considered full stack. You define your own stack and fill it.
I tend to think of full stack devs as engineers who build products across the stack using infrastructure created by backend, frontend, data and dev ops engineers. For example a full stack engineer will use UI widgets, frontend frameworks and build processes created by frontend engineers, but might not be involved much in creating and maintaining the infrastructure they use.
In my opinion, a fullstack developer should have capability to do a project alone.
That's true.
But to what standard?
A lot of devs could make a passable attempt at every part of a solo project, but I could count on one hand the number of people I've met who I'd consider capable of producing a professional result in all aspects.
I think people have different definitions of what a full stack developer is.
I say as a full stack developer you can develop every part of the project but it doesn't mean that you have to because most developers work in teams.
You also define the stack you want to be full in.
Depends on the stack.
No-one forces you to build a rocket-ship-stack.
Fx. LAMP and MEAN stacks are very manageable.
With hosted container services they are also very easy to set up.
Even in a high volume environment, you can cheat with caching services like Cloudflare or Akamai. Making even that manageable to learn for a single person.
So i would say he is wrong.
Granted it does take a lot of time to learn all the tools.
Sounds reasonable. You own your own stack. So you become a full stack in your own right.
This is a well thought out response and I think you are absolutely correct. I like the way you put it across.
My thoughts on the issue.