Why Becoming a Full Stack Engineer is a Stellar Idea?

Yana Arbuzova
Nov 4 · 5 min read

Do you find cross-functional teams cool? Olga Paramonova, Senior Project Manager and Leader of one of the Competence Centers in Sigma Software, believes so. Over the last several years, her team took a course to switching to full stack. Why and was it of any help? What you, as an engineer, should get from taking a full stack side? Let`s find out.

Olga shares her experience of building a cross-functional team:

“For a significant period of time we stayed focused on establishing technology partnership and long-term relationships between our clients and engineering groups by building teams that can solve customer problems, think big, see products the same way as our customers do. Looking back at how my team started and where we are now, I can say that it was a huge step. We won a lot, it was not always a sunny day too, but we definitely saw a positive shift that both parties — customer and the team — could benefit from.

When we started, switching to full stack was not our plan from the first minute. However, as we learned our clients and understood their needs, it turned to be the only way.

It will be no surprise that clients think in terms of business needs, they rarely say, “Hey, can we have FE and BE team 50/50?” Most likely, they will ask you: “Hey, can we look into building this new platform for marketers, but in a more efficient way than the current ones?” And eventually, for sure, you will set up a team with frontend, backend, full stack engineers, you may even have a blast to afford designers. But take a look at this team a couple of years later. You will see that people and roles have significantly changed, and there are actually just full stack mates who are still with you.

Why? If any of you stayed with your client from the very beginning to the launch day, you may know that to go live you need to fight the backlog. It can take as long as months of work, but sooner or later the important moment comes and, ta-da, the product you are working on is on the market! Now it is time to pause and see how the audience responds and there is not always a plan for even another month. During this period of uncertainty, your client needs people who can help further with anything, because they don’t know where exactly a new opportunity will light up. Thus, full stack guys now play a leading role and continue, while the rest of the team start looking for a new project. This is an unfortunate choice for all the parties, since the team you disband is already on the “performing” stage — people know each other and are all warmed up. They want to keep this experience, launch something cool again. But what can be done?

Actually, we found a way — risky, but it proved to be efficient. Two years ago, when we had to pass through this choice and decide who should leave, we took a challenge, and literally agreed with all fourteen teammates that no one should leave the team. Instead of reducing the capacity, we increased the number of businesses we could help. We asked our management to give us a second project, and because we had a wide tech profile, we found such project quickly. I think it worked well, we still have that core team with us as well as our first client!

However, we learned our lessons as well. A lot of our team members (over 80%) became full stack engineers, and most of our new mates, who are not there yet, have a roadmap to grow as FS. To reach the cross-functional playground, we worked hard to:

  • Adjust our processes,
  • Close knowledge and experience gaps,
  • Revise leadership and team roles.

Still, speaking about technology, I think that taking a full stack course played a key role for us. Today we are still on our path and we build our community in this way. Within two years, we turned a 14-person team into a 50+ Competence Center. It is always people’s work happening day by day to build the right mindset, explain corporate values, create individual roadmaps. We have ongoing internships for both engineers and managers to become a part of this community, start from small, but join the big. To keep our Senior group’s minds busy, we never wait to share leadership positions with them, and we are happy to have a flexibility here, we can just start any project.

To someone, the full stack expertise may seem too wide to be a professional in something particular, still, for us, its advantages are too heavy to ignore. Think about it — being a full stack engineer, you can:

  • Stay with your beloved team for a longer time;
  • Create the entire thing that could alternatively need a team. And, surely you, having gained systematic thinking, can solve a wider range of problems. If we need to onboard an already existing solution, it is less stress and challenge, and less people to start;
  • Speak solutions, not execute a part of the stories. Having this ability, you, as a professional, will be quickly noticed by the client and will have a great room for communication, improving your language and interpersonal skills (most of our engineers talk to clients directly, not via PM). When you have an open, direct communication with the client, you see how real the world is, no more illusions, and you question your decisions more often, becoming more mature and smarter;
  • Choose between a wide range of opportunities to continue with something you love, since you have seen and tried a bunch of things and technologies. Moreover, that may be a good base for you to try yourself on leadership roles, such as TL or Architect, as you have to play with the whole system and understand how it gets wired up.

Are you ready to start?

Make your choice, switch to full stack, join the light side of the force :-)

Sigma Software

Custom software development and IT consulting

Yana Arbuzova

Written by

Content Manager at Sigma Software. Every word we share may influence other people. More words here: https://sigma.software/about/media

Sigma Software

Custom software development and IT consulting

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