DEV Community

Discussion on: I’m sorry, but this “Full Stack” meme makes me really mad/sad

Collapse
 
pbeekums profile image
Beekey Cheung

Depends on your definition of "mastered". Mine isn't where someone literally knows all there is to know. It's when they are confronted with a problem that they have not encountered before, but have a clear idea of how they want to solve it. I've done enough backend work to be able to make this claim for the vast majority of backend problems. I can't make the same claim for frontend work despite having done my fair share of it. Sure I can search for solutions, but it just takes me an order of magnitude longer than it would when I research solutions for backend problems.

All terms are bad in many ways, but there is a case for standardization. Standards are about making communication easier. Just like we have code standards to make it easier to read each other's code, we also have language standards. While I agree the term "backend developer" can mean all sorts of different things to different people, it would be nice to have terms we can use to summarize what we are capable of rather than listing them all out (e.g. knowing SQL syntax vs creating data models at scale). Then again, the range of technology is so diverse that maybe that just isn't possible.