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Discussion on: Tell me an unpopular software opinion

 
scott_yeatts profile image
Scott Yeatts

Define "working" ROFL (Kidding)

Getting paid? A little over 10 years now.

But writing web code? Let's just say I remember writing code at a time when CSS didn't exist.

And absolutely it takes experience. I would look sideways at someone calling themselves a "Full Stack Engineer" on the first day of their first job without some significant background information haha.

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jsbeaulieu profile image
Jean-Sébastien Beaulieu

I'm 3 years in, have worked on production environments maintaining and developing PHP/Node.js back-ends as well as React/Vue front-ends, and CI/CD infrastructures...

I'm still having a lot of trouble calling myself "full-stack". I'm way too junior to pretend I know both well enough.

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scott_yeatts profile image
Scott Yeatts • Edited

First: Sounds pretty "Full Stack" to me. Second, make sure you have a specialty that you feel like is your "go-to" (Front-end, back-end... and even though "DevOps" is a mindset, it CAN be a specialty too).

If you've got that, but you wouldn't "little Bobby Tables" if you touched another piece of the stack, then you're full-stack.

You DO need a realistic assessment of your own skills. If you're mid-level in the front, but junior in the back, be honest about it and ask for mentorship and guidance from a senior backend engineer, but don't be afraid to pickup those stories either :D

xkcd.com/327/

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jsbeaulieu profile image
Jean-Sébastien Beaulieu

Pretty much the opposite situation for me! I'm primarily back-end, but learned JS, then React/Vue, then CSS out of sheer necessity, then realized I wasn't half as bad as I thought I was at it. I still suck at layout, especially when responsive, but I'm getting decent at scaling things in mostly sensical ways.

I'm probably getting to mid-level in back-end at this point, maybe? And I learned DevOps-y stuff by scaling up my team's growing architecture past their FTP and manual CRON jobs on a single VM.