We've all seen the job postings. "Looking for a Full-Stack Developer proficient in React, Vue, Angular, Node.js, Python, Django, Ruby on Rails, Pos...
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I think two things are clear here. Both the writer has misunderstood that full stack means 'front end' and 'back end' and not every tech under the sun, and that this article is AI slop.
Next time remove the long dashes and know this: if it isn't worth writing then it isn't worth reading.
Haha fair enough. Like many developers these days, I do use AI to assist me with coding but it doesn't touch what i wrote here.
AI content is everywhere these days, so I get the skepticism! But nope, this is all me. I just like 'em dashes for asides and emphasis. Old writing habit.
Re: the full-stack definition—my point is that job postings have inflated what they expect 'full-stack' to mean beyond just frontend/backend. That's what I'm critiquing. But I can see how that could've been clearer.
Anyway, appreciate you reading (even if you thought a bot wrote it ) 😄
I think this comparison is a bit like apples and oranges. You said that “full stack developer” used to mean HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL, and that now it involves different frameworks, libraries, and concepts.
But those things have always existed. PHP had (and still has) many frameworks, just like JavaScript does today.
When a job post says “full stack developer,” it usually doesn’t mean they expect experience with all possible frameworks or tools. Most teams use one main stack, for example React or Vue, not both.
There’s also a misconception that developers have to specialise vertically, like frontend or backend. In reality, many specialise across a horizontal slice, such as React, Node, and AWS.
Being a full stack developer is still what it’s always been: someone with a deep understanding of their chosen stack across the full web development spectrum.
Preach! The “full-stack” job descriptions out there read like wish lists for superheroes. What teams really need are people who understand how their piece connects to the rest, not one person juggling AWS, Kubernetes, React, and Figma at once. Time to retire the unicorn myth and celebrate collaboration.
IMO most full stack are doing the same job today: making data flow from back to front. Say ORM to React. They won't be the best at implementing UI nor maintain the Design System, they won't be the best at managing DB or run k8s cluster, but they will model the data, implement endpoint and data fetching layer in the frontend and maybe up to implem' pages/features on the frontend. It's role as any other, it just happens to be at the interface of two stystems in the current architecture, but why not.
That's about it, it needed in most teams and there's no use to over-complicate this role. Languages? Let's be honest, it's going to be Python + TS in most cases, maybe swap for PHP, Ruby, Elixir or C# . I don't think I've seen any posting for fullstuck Go or Rust. And that's it.
Now can a frontend/UI guy tranrsition to fullstack? Can a backend/devOPS transition to fullstack? Of course yes!
Amen, my brother!
Strange that this reminds me of another blog i read some years ago. It was on similar line but the discussion was about the term 'Data scientist'. One sentence which i still remember from that blog was that some people want to replace a whole department with one person and that will never work.
In today's context with all that AI tools available, it might be a reality but five or six years ago it was asking too much from one person.
I think similar mentality here where 'full stack' developer is supposed to replace your full team :-)
The problem is that people use the title "full stack" for anything. Originally a full stack developer was someone who did both frontend and backend, which is still a very legit position in web development imho.
Since I come from the Paleolithic :-P, I like to specify that: originally a "full-stack" developer was someone who did both client-side and server-side development (which are the terms we used 25 years ago, or earlier).
in a way yeah, but the definition of a full-stack dev that does just frontend and backend sounds a bit outdated now, doesn’t it?
Frontend and backend used to be relatively compact worlds — HTML/CSS/JS on one side, PHP/MySQL on the other. Now each of those layers has exploded into entire ecosystems that take years to truly master.
So while the spirit of “full-stack” — being able to bridge both ends still makes sense, the practical reality has shifted. Today, even staying current in just one of those areas is a full-time job. The bar moved, the tools multiplied, and the term never caught up.
It's just a focus shift. Before, everybody was reinventing routing and app state for each project.
You shouldn't learn all the FE frameworks. And there were plenty of other backend languages besides PHP in the "old" days. Besides there were hundreds of PHP frameworks too...
No matter where you stand on this, there are people out there that are full stack developers and are good at it. Don't doubt their positions.
The beginning is very true though. People demand impossible amounts of experience in their postings that nobody has because this is still new stuff.
Amen! It's insane when you think these companies expect a plumber, electrician, carpenter, and car mechanic all rolled into one person. Stop being cheap and hire front and backend specialists.
I am a full stack developer. I worked on vercel front with supabase edge and store. I hooked it up with LLMs through openrouter and implementing RAG to create my Mentor app. Okay I have no idea what I am doing and in fact am I even saying it right? because I am vibe coding. The app is working by the way. Mostly 🙈 clueless what is happening.
That isn't even half of the list any dev should know. This is absolutely outdated lol. Do not take this ancient advice. Learning is easier than ever, this is 9-5er energy. "Full stack" is just something people say who are too afraid of their own power and pretend they can only handle "front end" or only "backend". utter nonsense. Same people who think testing is either "Manual" or "Automated" and don't understand either.
Love the energy. though I gotta say, " that's not even half the list " kind of perfectly illustrates the problem, doesn't it?
The '9-5er energy' comment is interesting too. I've been in this industry long enough to watch brilliant engineers burn out chasing the 'know everything, work constantly' mindset. The ones who last decades and build amazing things? They usually work sustainable hours, specialize strategically, and don't mistake YouTube tutorials for production expertise.
Nobody's " afraid of their own power " by choosing depth over breadth ( come on ) - they're making smart career decisions based on how human learning and memory actually work.
But I respect that we see this differently. Check back in 10 years and let me know how the " master everything " approach worked out.
Genuinely hope it does!
bro follow your own advice.
erm... that is my advice? That's literally what I'm arguing in the article. Companies need to recognize this distinction and stop treating 'full-stack' as 'do everything for cheap'
Maybe the section structure wasn't clear enough, but we're on the same side here lol
Bruh… full-stack in 2025 is just “I fear no man… but that JavaScript ecosystem… it scares me.”
…
Also yeah, nobody’s mastering all that. We’re all just speedrunning documentation at this point.
Definitely Agree! Absolutely TRUE
That's exactly what happened to me in past 3 years.
That's one only way to get scapegoated if you are not core part of the team working as T shaped domain on UI/Backend.
So sticking to c# then for everything would be nice I guess?
yup. or more widely, stick to mastering the stack you're more familiar with.
Alright thanks, my mentor has been telling to do that for months now....but I was thought it's sort of outdated...so i learnt react and laravel instead.
Just picking it up again
Great post, I completely agree with you, but I can actually do both. I know a little about everything and a lot about certain topics.
These days, a full-stack developer is basically an entire IT department. 😉
and full of those who know what they actually can do
and those who claim they’ve mastered everything, haha.
Totally with you — the “full-stack unicorn” is basically a tech Bigfoot: we keep talking about it, but nobody’s ever seen one in real life.
I mean, I’ve been building stuff for {X} years and I still Google how to center a div every other Tuesday. The front-end alone is now a fractal of frameworks: just when you think you’ve nailed React, someone ships a new meta-framework that claims to hydrate faster than you can say “bundle-size regression.”
Backend? Same circus. Yesterday we were cool with a monolith and Postgres; today it’s micro-services, event-sourcing, CQRS, and a side of Kubernetes manifests that look like they were written in Elvish. Oh, and don’t forget “just spin up another cluster” — like clusters are cheap Pokemon cards.
DevOps used to mean “SSH in, pull, restart.” Now it’s GitOps, Argo, Terraform, Helm, sealed secrets, service mesh, policy-as-code, observability, SLIs, SLOs, MTTR, MTBF… I spend half my time alphabetizing three-letter acronyms instead of shipping features.
The honest job description should read:
“Looking for someone who can swim the Mariana Trench and base-jump off Everest on the way back. Must also enjoy on-call at 3 a.m. for a service you didn’t build and can’t pronounce.”
Look, I’m not saying generalists aren’t useful — I live in that fat part of the T. But mastery needs depth, and depth needs time. You can’t binge-watch YouTube tutorials and suddenly grok distributed consensus or browser paint phases. Real expertise is earned in production wars: paging, outages, race-conditions that only repro on a blue-moon Tuesday when Mercury is in retrograde.
So let’s stop putting “10× full-stack ninja” on the req and start hiring teams of sharp T-shaped people who can overlap without burning out. I’ll own the front-end perf cliff, you guard the DB query swamp, and we’ll meet at the API contract for coffee. Ship together, learn together, sleep occasionally — everyone wins.
And if you actually have mastered React, Rust, Kafka, K8s, and can eyeball a packet-capture while designing a color palette in Figma — congratulations, you’ve leveled up to a higher plane. Please send a postcard from the astral realm; the rest of us will be here, happily Googling “kubectl get pods” for the hundredth time.
I am a backend engineer and am happy.
I have been saying this for a long time.
Those job postings for full-stack developers always give me the impression that what they are actually looking for is an entire developer team.
Great read. Funny, and Spot on!
Living the myth every single day.
the dream or the nightmare? 😆
actually really true but someone could use this for better things, like helping other starting games and other people who want some help. If i learned it, i would do this...
没想到我仍然活在20年前
"Must have 10 years of experience with technologies invented 3 years ago."
I feel seen. Glad I'm not the only one noticing this trend.
Good information given
This was such an entertaining read. Being 20 odd years in the industry I have fond memories of a simpler time, before CI/CD pipelines and container orchestration.
I definitely agree with a lot of this article and a lot of your points, but if you'll allow me a few points where I disagree, because I'd say I am, and have always been, a full-stack developer. That's almost certainly because I'm old enough that there wasn't a distinction when I started my career.
If being a full-stack developer means knowing every language, front-end framework, and database in detail, then I agree: you can't, and you shouldn't be expected to; and you don't. But that's not how I would define it.
For me, being a full-stack developer means being able to consider the database, business logic, and presentation layer, and to be able to architect across all of these. It means understanding the infrastructure, and the intercommunication between services - to decide on micro front ends or monoliths, and the methods of implementing services. To truly grasp the concepts, strengths and weaknesses of those. If you get those concepts, then the job is researching what are the shortest routes to the line for each concept you want to implement at the inception of a project.
I've programmed in many languages over the years, though I'm currently missing Go and Rust as I haven't needed them yet. Does that make me feel like I'm not full-stack? When I interview people and consider them as full-stack, do they need to know everything? No.
I agree and I am also considered a full stack developer. The problem with this article is that they crossed swim lanes and lobbed requirements both horizontally and vertically, i.e. Mean, Mern, .net asp etc. I am .net asp full stack. Although I am at the architecture level now, I have been a Database Architect, DBA, Application Architect, Sr. FRONT end developer, sr. Backend developer, sr. web software developer, cloud Architect and chief software architect. I have seen development from all layers. Anyone who knows something about development would never cross swim lanes to define a full stack developer. It is absurd to do so. If full stack developer is a myth, then I am(was) a living myth.
I completely agree with this unpopular position. I have long held the opinion that most, if not all, developers have their preferred technology and/or tier of the stack. They might be very adept at others but their best work will always be where their skills and passion drives them.
When told someone is a full-stack developer my first question is "On which stack?" JS Devs has a bit of an advantage if the backed is a JS runtime but in other cases I usually go on to ask in which area of the stack do they consider to play to their strength.
The pursuit for a team of FS devs concerns me. I understand the motivation but a group of people all with the same skills is not a team but an army.
There is another associated term, a "T-shaped" developer. Someone with one major skill but also with a board range of experience, however shallow. All to often I have encountered such teams only to find the entire team is the same "T-shaped", which I am sure is not what was required.
Large teams can afford specialists but we need to recognise that small (one person) teams will no doubt have to comprise multi-skilled developers but as a result they cannot be expected to also be specialists as they seldom get the time to concentrate their experience in one area.
From what I have seen is that job postings follow the idea of an overconfident frontend developer. If you are good at frontend development, all the rest is a breeze.
I think it is a manager's problem, more than a developer's problem. if you understand the weight of being full stack you are never going to call yourself that.
The problem is now people see AI and start to think why do we pay people who call themselves specialists, when programming is commanding an AI to do the work.
You don't even need IT knowledge to create an application, so why hire people at all.
It is frustrating if you are looking for a job, but I think that if you land a job it will be one where there is enough respect from both sides to have a good future.
You’re absolutely right.
It’s like in medicine — there are general practitioners and there are specialists.
But even specialists aren’t ENT, cardiologist, neurologist and oncologist at once.
Those with two specialties exist — but they’re rare… and very expensive.
And yet, most of the time, a good generalist is enough — as long as there’s no life-threatening condition.
When things get critical, you call in the experts…
not the mythical all-in-one doctor who claims he can fix everything in one visit.
Disagree. This is like mangers who want to hire a "Java" engineer or a "Go" engineer, when a good engineer should be able to quickly learn and be productive in any language. There might be situations where the gap is large ie. kernel development / firmware in low level languages verses programming javascript on browser. The gap is wide there but fundamentals have a lot of overlap. I.e, programming at a deep level is about managing complexity. A true engineer could do it in a few months if we was motivated to. The real issue is certain engineers might refuse to want to work with certain technologies.
Another way to view this is. Imagine starting a new job working on complex system built with python. Imagine this system is millions of lines of code. If I hire a python expert will that person be productive right away? No, It could be equivalent to learning a new language, figuring this new system. The language won't be the main obstacle.
fair point — and I actually agree that fundamentals make a great engineer stack-agnostic.
My point was more about depth over time — even the most adaptable engineer can’t maintain true mastery across all modern tools at once.
Adaptability scales. Omniscience doesn’t.
💯 Well said. The “full-stack” myth has done more harm than good. True value isn’t in knowing every tool, it’s in understanding why systems work — and collaborating across domains to make them better. The T-shaped model captures reality far more accurately.
Reminds me of a song called "Full stack flex"
open.spotify.com/track/1U2o8guP4L4...
Yes. Be aware and capable of many technologies, be proficient in one. That's why I am actively avoiding Angular, React and other JS frameworks, and mostly focus on Vue.js and Nuxt ecosystem. Because it is already hard enough to keep the pace up with the constant development. I *would * be able to switch if some future project demands it, but I am not seeking to know everything, everywhere, all at once.
Great article - I've just re-trained as a full stack engineer and can at times feel a little daunted. I was wondering the other day at an implementation level what 'full-stack' really means. Specialise in a few areas, be able to walk the stack and fix stuff if you need to feels like a good definition (T shaped generalists as you say). Some of the specs for juniors out there look like people want super humans, who despite having a year of experience need to know everything about everything and this does a lot to contextualise this. So thank you.
Also to sharing my POV on AI generated assisted content - personally I don't really mind who / what / how it was created - as long as it has value. This article had value for me, so whatever your process - thank you for writing 🙂
Good read!
I feel your frustration. Still, it doesn't make you right. Full-stack developers are real. Some of them have mastered the entire modern tech stack.
WOWZAS