How do you define a developer? For one, I’d say in one view it’s quite easy: someone who develops. The question gets fuzzy when you ask _what_ are they developing. You could argue (as some in the huddle apparently have) that a CEO is a developer, as they develop a company. But you wouldn’t necessarily require your CEO to be a full stack web scale developer even if they potentially had that skill set, because their development domain is different.

I think this question was really “how do you define a Cloud developer”, and the proposal that someone should be capable of understanding the end-to-end Continuous Delivery process and implementing the entire stack of the system, perhaps misses the point of what people can actually do. It’s one thing to say one should be aware of the entire stack, and the requirements of the pieces, and even to a certain extent an individual’s role in supporting and working within that framework, but it’s quite another to imply that a person should be able to operate the entire stack. And this is where the concept of a Developer as DevOps resource falls flat. If you are a one person show? Yes, you need to be able to understand it, and know where to outsource the aspects you can’t manage yourself. IF you are part of a team, understanding that you need to write both integration/unit tests _and_ acceptance tests, is important. But also being able to extend and operate the Continuous Deployment framework misses the point. If that were the case, it would be safe to say that you should only hire developers that can build a cloud from scratch, and don’t forget to include the CD pipeline that deploys that cloud, and the monitoring framework that keeps it running over time!

It is certainly important to understand a specific Developer’s role in the cloud, and the fact that cloud today enables Continuous Deployment of applications, but you will find that the pool of resources that are truly Full Stack developers are few and far between. I for one look to hire developer resources that are good at a particular space, like UI/UX, or data science, or platform operations, and do not expect them to be able to do each others jobs, even if they might have the capability to do so!