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Evgeny
Evgeny

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A mythical full stack developer

How full is your stack? It really depends.

I have friends deploying real-time systems to chips, and know developers writing artificial intelligence code, there is somebody submitting code to Linux kernel or nodejs, and somebody is creating a to-do app right now.

For whatever reason I never understood this notion of a full stack developer. On the other hand I don't believe in front-end developers, or back-end developers or whatever end developers either.

A good developer could figure out what is needed and what's the best way of doing it. In my mind, measuring people by skills is reducing their potential usefulness to a box we want to put them in.

One thing that is more important than discussing stacks is becoming really good at figuring things out on the fly.

Technology will evolve, there always be new programming languages and frameworks. You might want to stop chasing the latest tools and rather become excellent at figuring stuff out.

Oldest comments (28)

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

Short, to the point, and all too true!

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xenthered profile image
Rory O'Connor

On the fly Developer. Not the developer you want, but the developer you need.

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Nikita Agafonov

Agreed.

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Brandon Martinez

As someone who has written automation tools, applications in JS frameworks, worked in ASM, C, and Go but on the other end has also written a lot of PHP, Perl, and Python. Thank you...

Languages are just tools.

Some jobs require certain concepts (Like front end design vs systems design) but that's about it the tool doesn't matter and as a developer you should be able to learn everything you need to complete the task.

If the task is best completed in BrainFuck and you have the budget to do it in that, then you better start learning BF!

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Bruno Gonçalves

Fullstack nowadays is just another way of saying "we want to pay less for more".

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Richard Yhip

It's almost like they should have "problem solving schools" instead of code schools.

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Gregor Gonzalez

Yes. A programmer is here to solve things. The frontend/backend is more to divide work or give you the choice to do what you like. Also do you wannabe good at many things or expert on a few? I love to learn new stuff but companies only want an expert on one thing.

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adulfan

Well, not everyone is good at everything all at once. Some are great at figuring out algorithms and math functions, others at seeing that one pesky pixel that is out line. Another observation is Java Developers and Javascript Developers are two different animals.

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Friedrich Nowak

I would not recommend to give a task for numerical high performance and vectoization on a backend to a Web Front-End developer - or other direction.

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Jason Kretzer

I wrote a similar post on LinkedIn with some of the same thoughts and wanted to share.

linkedin.com/hp/update/62637520705...