How To Evolve As a Full-Stack Developer In Your Career Path

If you’re reading this, I assume you’re like me: a full-stack developer, and you’ve been one for a few years. You have a preferred part of the stack in which you rock and others in which you are okay. You can work on almost any task, but some you finish faster while others take you longer. You’re thinking about your next career step, but you’re not sure what it will be.

I started writing this post with these thoughts in mind after thinking about my options for career development. I noticed that developing my career toward full-stack expertise isn’t always an option. Moreover, it’s sometimes hard to define how to get these expertise (if they even exist).

In this post, I’ll explain the dilemmas that full-stack developers face. I’ll talk about the “traditional” career path and also share my view on a different career path, which is rarely considered.

The mid-level full-stack’s dilemma

At some point in every developer’s career, they start to expand beyond their position’s responsibilities. This may be as part of their scheduled career path or as a result of learning new technologies or skills. A promotion or title change that matches these new responsibilities often follows. As a full-stack developer, you are faced with two options:

Choosing a specific area and excelling in it

The obvious option is to transition to frontend or backend by gaining extra knowledge and skills in those areas. Another option is aiming for leadership roles (the first role would probably be as a team leader). These roles often need less technical expertise and more soft/organizational skills. Or you can start learning a whole new area, like DevOps or DB management.

Specializing in full-stack development

The other option is to keep being a full-stack developer, practicing and learning different parts of the stack all at once. But is that even possible?

When I joined Duda as a full-stack developer, I had extensive experience in client-side development and sufficient knowledge in backend development. Duda enabled me to grow and learn in every part of the stack I desired, and I was able to spend a few months focusing on advanced tasks in one field. After a few months of transitioning from one technology to another, I started understanding the struggle of trying to have my cake and eat it too. Every time I learned and improved on one end, I missed important research or technical updates on the other.

This process raised several questions for me: can a developer have multiple areas of expertise? Or are they bound to be stronger in a specific field? If you try to master multiple skills at once, do you become a jack of all trades, master of none?

Finding the full-stack developer’s areas of expertise

With these questions in mind, I started to think about how my experience as a full-stack developer could help my team. I found several areas that a full-stack developer must master.

End-to-end flows

First, I understood that an experienced full-stack developer should verify the quality of E2E flows, which may include:

• How the data is saved & passes throughout the stack.
• What the contracts are between the layers.
• What vulnerable & error-prone points exist in the end-to-end flows and how to avoid them.
• How technical, end-to-end design fits the product requirements and helps achieve them efficiently.

To perfect these issues, the developer must find and integrate new tools and methodologies, and learn and establish best practices.

Educating and mentoring backend/frontend developers

Other than aligning technical aspects, I believe that the full-stack developer has a unique role to play in the team itself. In teams with both backend and frontend developers, the gap between them sometimes becomes too big. Each part of the stack is considered a black box to “outsiders”. At this point, it is the full-stack developer’s responsibility to bridge this gap.

This can be achieved by educating and mentoring developers from different areas of the stack, taking them out of their comfort zones. Understanding different aspects of the tech stack can help with debugging, flow analysis, and designing better features. For example, understanding how forms or state management worked in the frontend helped our backend developers plan and design their UI-facing APIs, while understanding our data structure and constraints helped our frontend developers understand the limitations and data separations needed in the UI.

Team communication

The most obvious and painful area has been cross-team communication. When you have frontend and backend developers, there’s a risk that the design of new features will be separate and not synced. A full-stack developer has the insights and deep understanding of the system that others sometimes lack. They should challenge and ask fellow developers how all the parts in the flow communicate. Sometimes, it’s the developer’s responsibility to initiate a discussion between the frontend and backend developers, when they lack the insight that such a discussion is even required.

Improving communication with the product team

As the only developer who knows and develops across the whole system, the full-stack developer should:

• Help translate product requirements to technical tasks.
• Communicate technical limitations (from the entire stack) to product managers.
• Explain how these can be fixed or avoided.

Often, after receiving requirements, developers design the feature separately. Afterward, they combine the design into an E2E flow. Lastly, they present the product managers with the issues/limitations/required work.

Full-stack developers should have familiarity with the system. They can identify and alert the product team to (some of) these points upon hearing the requirements for the first time. This may save crucial time. They can also create a bridge between developers and product managers to help make conversations more efficient and clear.

Wrapping up

In my point of view, the advantages and strengths of full-stack developers don’t come from their technical knowledge or experience. They can be the glue that holds a team together, improves the workflow, and increases productivity.

This kind of role and responsibility is not necessarily needed in every team or company, and it’s very dependent on the product, work methodology, and team dynamics. I’m not sure every developer would agree to take on these responsibilities and decide on this career path. Heck, even I haven’t decided yet, and my career path dilemma remains unresolved.

But I would love to hear your opinions: do you think your team could use a full-stack developer as I described? Do you see yourself taking the time and effort to accept this responsibility? Or do you prefer sticking to your part of the stack?