I’ve always been full stack and feel like I’d be bored just focusing on one area. am I deluding myself?
I work full stack and even do dev operations and my title is not “full stack” and I believe the reason why is so HR can argue to pay me less.
Just web, which is bullshit cause i literally work with like 3 OSs and 5 programming languages, ci cd. I just get thrown into a random project and come out with solutions. I told my manager my title should be software dev but he disagreed, shucks I guess.
Eh, this is a thing, large companies often have internal rules and maximums about how much they can pay any given job title. For example, on our team, everyone we hire is given the role “senior full stack developer”, not because they’re particularly senior, in some cases we’re literally hiring out of college, but because it allows us to pay them better with internal company politics.
I prefer to use statisics rather than anecdotal evidence. The stack overflow survey shows full stack pretty far down:
That really depends on the company. At big tech companies, it’s common for the levels and salary bands to be the same for both generalists (or full stack or whatever you want to call them) and specialists.
It also changes depending on market conditions. For example, frontend engineers used to be in higher demand than backend and full-stack.
“It depends” is a good answer, and is in line with me questioning the above comment.
Here’s a link to a recent huge worldwide study: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#salary
This is quickly becoming the norm in every industry. Every employer wants fewer employees to do more, without paying them more of course.
It’s not just developers. I’m in web marketing and I’m expected to do front end work including creating figmas and writing code. This is along with my regular duties as a marketer.
UX designers use figma to create mockups that front end developers use to make landing pages.
I’m falling into that myself… It seems my boss is trying to prevent me from being Pidgeon-holed into being just a programmer.
Aka, he is diversifying my portfolio to keep me on board as an employee.
Guess it helps some full-stack’ers if they also have experience in graphics design and copywriting.
can anyone explain to a hobby programmer?
the term normally refers to a developer that can be productive in every layer required for a typical application to work.
They can do the front end design/styling/implementation and are familiar with front end languages and frameworks
They can do the backend API design and are familiar with the typical backend languages and patterns.
They can do the database table design, write and optimize queries.
They can handle the ci/cd scripting that handles building and deploying the application
They can design and write the automation tests and are familiar with the libraries used for that.
And a bunch of other crap like load testing or familiarity with cloud services.
The latest thing added to the list is AI model creation which is a nightmare… but, I can’t say no 🤷♂️
Also, in practice, they’re usually only good at one or two of the things on the list (at best) and hack their way through the rest. As much as people make fun of overspecialization, it happens in every field for a reason.
Eh, not sure if this is true at all. I think the reality is that niche specialized roles are valuable (frontend expert) but you are not “hacking” your way in full stack unless you are a junior or just bad at development.
I don’t consider myself to be hacking anything I do, even things I’m not as strong in (ci cd) I pay full attention to documentation and examples before blinding coding or writing ci scripts
Start saying no. If you don’t know how, start learning. It’s hurting everyone up and down the industry.
I am almost purely focussed on creating DNNs (“deep neural networks” for the unaware) and it’s almost always a nightmare work-wise, even without all the rest of the other crap.
My situation, give it to the “computer” guy.
I’m not even in tech. I teach maths at night school to support myself while doing my masters. Somehow I’ve become the ‘computer guy’ at my job. All the teachers and even office staff ask me to explain software to them that I myself have never even used. I need to learn to say no.
