Why every tech team would benefit from hiring a full-stack developer
Full-stack developers are sometimes looked down upon in the tech industry. Other developers will tell you that by attempting to be experts in everything, they become experts in nothing. But like a general practitioner in medicine, full-stack developers are useful to a tech team in more ways than you realize.
At Welcome to the Jungle (WTTJ) and Otta — the job-search platform acquired by WTTJ in January 2024 — we couldn’t conceive of working without full-stack developers. Currently, we have six of them on our teams, along with back-end and front-end developers.
“Full-stack developer” is a title that is constantly changing and evolving. At WTTJ it describes someone that is fluent in both Elixir and React. They work on all parts of a given project, including the back-end, the front-end, and the integration between the two. At Otta, the flavor of full-stack is particularly rich as the scope of responsibility includes regular programming tasks as well as DevOps and data. A dedicated team handles these two aspects at WTTJ.
Because we believe full-stack developers are key to a tech team’s performance, we wanted to share the reasons we can’t live without them.
Your delivery process will be more efficient
With full-stack developers, there is no more having to wait for someone to release something to be able to deliver a feature or a bug fix. Which means you don’t end up in this waterfall-like process where you are dependent on someone else to finish what you started.
And if someone is out sick or has had to take some holiday at short notice, any full-stack developer can pick up where they left off. There’s no more, “Oh God, there isn’t anyone in today who knows how to do this,” because the full-stack developers can oversee all of the code when issues arise.
It also means you can more easily change the scope of the thing that you are building on the fly without having to communicate with other people. Which is particularly useful with a fast-paced product like we have at WTTJ and Otta. And if you have any issues, it’s very easy to discuss them with any of the full-stack developers.
Your experts will be able to focus on what they do best
The value of full-stack developers is particularly felt in feature development or bug fixes that require handling at the back and front-ends at the same time. Having them on the team frees up a bit of scope for back-end and front-end developers to work on an area where particular expertise is needed, removing some of the pressure and mental drain for them.
Sometimes tasks involving back and front-end skills can be difficult to assess for developers as they aren’t familiar with the full scope. Instead of it ending up a pass-the-buck kind of situation, full-stack developers can fulfill a need here by taking care of those tasks, which allows the team a certain flexibility and avoids blockages occurring. This is especially true with regard to bugs, where they will be able to explore both ends to understand where the bug is coming from.
At WTTJ, we decided to use API contracts to manage communication between back-end and front-end developers and it’s the responsibility of full-stack developers to handle them so that back-end and front-end developers can focus on their tasks.
You will build a culture of end-to-end responsibility
At Otta, where full-stack developers are not limited to programming alone, there is full accountability and responsibility from top to bottom. It’s part of their job as engineers to take ownership during all the different stages of development: Build, run, and monitoring. And there’s no “Oh, I thought this person was going to do this! It’s not my problem, not my fault” kind of attitude.
Having one person responsible for the end-to-end process also makes it simpler to provide solutions that can benefit other projects because of the global vision acquired. Full-stack developers can impact back-end/front-end communication that’s part of other projects as well.
You will rely on people rather than technologies
As you all know, a big thing with software engineering is that technologies are changing all the time and you do need to be able to pick up things to learn and move. Since full-stack developers don’t have a single focus, they will be more eager to keep you up to date with the latest trends and technologies.
For example, at Otta, having full-stack developers on board meant we didn’t have to hire anyone to work on GPT prompt engineering, which was great as we had a queue of people wanting to try this technology because it’s exciting and innovative. So when changes in the market happen, you can be confident you’ve already got a team together that’s ready to go out and give things a go.
And that can be particularly useful if you use niche technologies like we do at WTTJ and Otta with our back-end language: Elixir. Hiring full-stack developers who have the mindset of continuous learning rather than wanting to focus on a specific technology has made a real difference with how we’ve expanded. As we couldn’t easily hire full-stack developers who had already mastered Elixir, we took on people who weren’t particularly opinionated about a particular language, and instead just saw a language as a tool to get a job done, which has had a positive impact. In the future, we plan to offer training to our back-end and front-end developers who are interested in moving towards full-stack development.
Your front-end and back-end developers will understand each other better
The presence of full-stack developers can greatly benefit both back-end and front-end teams by fostering a deeper understanding of each other’s work. Many full-stack developers possess a genuine curiosity about the entire development process which can enhance collaboration and problem-solving. Their interest lies not only in performing every task themselves but also in comprehending the underlying reasons behind various decisions and implementations.
Sometimes back-end and front-end developers can get frustrated about pushing things that aren’t immediately useful. As a back-end developer, for instance, you don’t get that involved in the design of a page and thus don’t get to feel what the end user will experience.
Keep in mind that, historically, a lot of back-end developers were full-stack (or simply web developers, as we called them back then) at a time when applications were often monoliths. But the excessive increase in front-end languages and frameworks in the past few years has discouraged some of them from keeping up, leading to them returning to the familiar environment of the back-end. Rather than learning more about jQuery successors, for example, they preferred to focus on what they knew best.
You will challenge product managers in new ways
Because they have a broader vision of a project, full-stack developers can better understand a feature, challenge product decisions, and provide product managers with food for thought. It’s not really the full-stack aspect that forces them to develop soft skills like communication, empathy, and persuasion, but because they find themselves having to interact with more people, they end up developing them.
They’re also able to easily produce a proof of concept (POC) to help people to make a quick decision and can more readily see where effort still needs to be made, both on a particular task and a whole feature. In addition to their programming skills, they often acquire knowledge about deployment itself.
OK, I get it! But how to get and keep the greatest full-stack developers now?
Now that we’ve explored the excellent reasons to hire a full-stack developer, it’s time to see how you can make sure you get the most out of them.
Adapt your hiring process
At WTTJ, our entire business logic is back-end oriented. Consequently, it’s important to test our full-stack candidates on the back-end. But it can be the opposite for you if the logic of your application is in the browser, for instance. Anyway, keep in mind that fundamentals on the back-end are often the most difficult to get to grips with. Our belief is that data architecture or building data tables and understanding how to work with SQL, for instance, are fundamentally important and take quite a while to learn.
When recruiting full-stack developers, we focus more on the candidates’ excitement and passion about learning things. From a hiring manager’s perspective we’re always looking for the answer to these questions: “Do you ask good questions and are you willing to try things, be wrong, and learn and keep your ego reined in?” You can always learn things, but you can’t force that excitement and passion about full-stack software engineering.
It can also be interesting to focus the interview on the explanation full-stack developers give for the technical choices they make during their test — they are going to have to make lots of decisions in their role, so understanding how they arrive at them is important. As full-stack developers, they usually have to come up with twice as many solutions as experts.
Make them feel included
Some back-end or front-end developers tend to overlook the input of full-stack developers unintentionally. This can happen because of perceived expertise levels, particularly when developers feel fully in control of their specialized domain and can swiftly address tasks. Consequently, they may not always seek the insights of full-stack developers when making decisions and might more readily question technical choices made by them compared to their peers.
It’s important to recognize that full-stack, back-end, and front-end developers all share the title of software engineer, albeit with differing day-to-day paradigms. Full-stack developers possess a broader range of knowledge, while back-end and front-end developers typically have deeper expertise in their respective domains. However, these differences in expertise shouldn’t exclude any developer from contributing or participating fully in collaborative processes.
Therefore, it’s crucial that all developers, regardless of their specialization, are afforded the same privileges, legitimacy, and opportunities within the team. This includes participation in workshops, chapters, and other collaborative settings where diverse perspectives can enrich discussions and solutions.
Additionally, full-stack developers have to ensure they are explicit about what they can take on and the contribution they can make to the team in general, as well as pinpoint the experts they need to contact if they have any queries. Legitimacy for full-stack developers is not always assumed — they often find themselves needing to explain and justify their actions more frequently compared to some of their colleagues.
That’s all folks!
We hope this article has helped you understand how full-stack developers contribute to tech teams’ efficiency and adaptability. Their ability to navigate both front and back-ends fosters collaboration, innovation, and a deeper understanding within the team. Embracing full-stack development also empowers teams to leverage diverse technologies and methodologies for continued growth. To attract and retain top talent, it’s essential to tailor hiring practices and create an inclusive culture that recognizes the invaluable contributions of full-stack developers.
Written by Anne-Laure Civeyrac, Tech editor, based on interviews with Billy Williams, Emma Ritcey, Irene Gonzalez, Sylvain Colignon and Sébastien Azimi
Illustration by WTTJ
