Full Stack Developers wanted
Everyone is looking for full stack developers these days.
But when you look at these job ads, you see a very wide variation of what is actually expected in this role. There are also many people out there that call themselves “Full Stack Developer”. But when you look at all these CVs, you see a very wide variation of profiles.
Obviously, some variation is expected — the term implies breadth rather than depth. Still, what I see is variation that defies any patterns or consistency (even for a deranged mind that sees connections everywhere, like mine). I feel that “Full Stack Developer” has become a buzzword, much like “Microservices”, and like with all buzzwords, the true meaning got lost somehow, somewhere. I’m almost at the point where I no longer trust people calling themselves “full stack”, or saying that they’re looking for one. Why? Because I’ve learned that when someone says it, they can mean anything. Here are some of the examples that I’ve encountered when asking people what they understand as “full stack”:
- Someone who does mostly backend but will do frontend too if needed
- Someone who does mostly backend but also knows a bit of HTML. Javascript? That’s not a backend technology!
- Someone who knows a lot of different programming languages (seriously, someone actually said this)
- Someone who knows .NET and was doing some DevOps, that is, managed a build server for another team, in the past
So what exactly makes a stack full? I guess it depends how broad your own view of the software is. If your company equates “software development” with “writing code”, and perhaps has its own, separate QA department (QA isn’t software development after all, right?), and totally has a dedicated IT function that maintains the servers for the software to run on (they probably call them DevOps, cause that’s fancy), then it makes sense that this company will limit their perception of full stack development to a definition from one of my examples.
For me, the software development is not just coding. Granted, coding is very important, but it’s only a fraction of the whole process. There is figuring out if we should even do it, then designing how to do it so that we’re not running in circles, then some coding, then making sure it works and won’t cause us problems later, then putting it in production and making sure it actually runs the way it did on our machine, then we code some more because there were obviously bugs we didn’t predict, and so we need to put this new code in production as well, and then there’s monitoring if the users are happy and this means we may also need to answer some of their stupid very reasonable questions and requests.
For me, full stack encompasses all of these aspects at least to some extent. Being a Full Stack Developer means spanning not only across the component boundaries, but also life cycle or process boundaries.
I obviously don’t expect a single individual to be the best at all aspects of software development. This brings me to another point — some people think that becoming “full stack” is an upgrade. While it could be, I tend to look at it more as a side-grade. You sacrifice specialization for a broader skill set. You will never be as good at server maintenance as that IT guy who’s been doing it forever. But you will be able to maintain your own server if you need it (or be smart enough to use technologies that don’t need it at all).
Asking people what they think is a “full stack developer” became one of my favorite interview questions. It reveals much about how people approach software development, and exposes their level of maturity. (And in some cases it provides a comic relief in the middle of a train-wreck conversation.) But because the answers vary so much, I never never dare to use this term in my job descriptions, unless I’m trolling. And since I’m a serious person, I’m never trolling. Well, unless you troll me first. True story.
Now my curiosity demands to ask you — what do you think of Full Stack Developers? Is it a buzzword or not? What do you picture when you hear it? And do you have any funny stories involving people misunderstanding the concept?
Originally published at bytesandsenses.wordpress.com
