Why the Full Stack Engineer Is Problematic

Yoh. I battle to keep myself updated just with angular and I am miles behind every day. Full stack devs must be quite something.
 
There are two areas I see this full stack developers fail at miserably all the time: DBA type work and security principles.

A team of full stack developers are great, but make no mistake - you will need a couple of good DBAs and cybersec guys to keep them in check.
 
SAguy said:
There are two areas I see this full stack developers fail at miserably all the time: DBA type work and security principles.

A team of full stack developers are great, but make no mistake - you will need a couple of good DBAs and cybersec guys to keep them in check.
Click to expand...
More like full click developers.
 
Crimson & Blue said:
Lol. So now full stack devs are your devsecops engineers as well?
Smaller operations need full stack devs. Bigger operations do better with specialists. So many areas of expertise in IS. There will always be overlap... There's definitely no one size fits all but having a bit of knowledge about the next and prior stages in the lifecycle is always good.
Click to expand...
This your day time at teazers?
 
Crimson & Blue said:
Lol. So now full stack devs are your devsecops engineers as well?
Smaller operations need full stack devs. Bigger operations do better with specialists. So many areas of expertise in IS. There will always be overlap... There's definitely no one size fits all but having a bit of knowledge about the next and prior stages in the lifecycle is always good.
Click to expand...
Nope, but security is very low down on the list of skills a full stack developer cares about - which is why you see a lot of "when it doesn't work, chmod 777 everything until it does".

If I had a small company I'd probably have a few full stack developers, a devsecops person and a dba.
 
Full stack is looked at as some sort of mythical creature….

Automate everything.
Have boilerplates (project structures, infrastructure as code, etc) and iterate on them as needed.
Have good developer processes and principles.
Breed a culture of making and expecting excellent and thoughtful decisions. Don’t let “new architecture” decisions be left to “whoever happens to be working on a project”.
Expect high performance. Expect it from each other. Not everyone gets to play premier league football.

None of this is rocket science. Everyone thinks their projects are so special and complicated and require complicated solutions. They likely are not. There are exceptions of course.

A developer that can only do “one” thing is kind of useless to me.

No one is asking you to be able to lay brick, sew a dress and then rebuild an engine.
You do need to know how to “rebuild a car” though. At the same time you don’t need to be in the 99th percentile when it comes to every part of a project.

Discovering and learning is the number one thing that keeps my job satisfaction high after 22 years of being on the job.
Being just a “front end developer” or a “backend developer” must be soul crushing.
That being said, you cannot learn everything. Ignore “the new hotness”.
Adopt technology that actually solves problems for your business/team (deliver quicker, recruit easier for, reduces errors/bugs).
Stay current with those things.


/“rant” over
 
SAguy said:
There are two areas I see this full stack developers fail at miserably all the time: DBA type work and security principles.

A team of full stack developers are great, but make no mistake - you will need a couple of good DBAs and cybersec guys to keep them in check.
Click to expand...
Problem is project managers want it done in X time and typically have zero or very limited software dev experience. That would be unheard of in any other industry.

The product that is delivered has to do Y. So you can get developers can say they are expert and deliver the product but there can make use of not ideal architecture, bad performance, wrong tools,frameworks or libraries and have maintenance nightmare issues.
Next developer is then told Oh there are outstanding issues, fix it. Next is constant meetings and complaining. That is why developers leave companies before a product is finished or goes into prod. They gain the max experience of using technologies by following tutorials on internet having the least amount of human interaction and can jump to a much higher salary as we are only remunerated by measuring latest tech in technical tests and interviews. Devs gain nothing from staying at the company and maintaining products they built as they have no shareholding in the product. Their asset is instead their career i.e. sofware development and they will move on.

With all the new technology, tools and architectures one can choose, software development has turned into building a house. It can be done in a crap load of architectures, styles, materials, decor etc. There is just no standard way. This is just getting worse as time goes on.

A good dev has become not someone with intelligence, communication, diligence or skill but because someone who manages their careers. Go join a company and you are constantly gaslighted to do non dev work. Fix this or that. Find a problem with that. Do costing, PM, business analyst work, workaround for this, You become a the bulding's maintenance guy that when people see they complain to or just the person thrown away once a product is delivered, rather than a builder. The worst devs have the most stable careers as they are needed to keep the software from breaking. Best devs jump projects quickly and have sought skills and earn big bucks. Agreeable devs find one day they wake up and feel like they know nothing and no one wants to hire them as their skills somehow became outdated.
 
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SAguy said:
There are two areas I see this full stack developers fail at miserably all the time: DBA type work and security principles.

A team of full stack developers are great, but make no mistake - you will need a couple of good DBAs and cybersec guys to keep them in check.
Click to expand...

Rather, fullstack developers should be complementary to a team of specialized roles. They're all-rounders to alleviate the load. Would never go for a fullstack only team unless it was for prototyping purposes or the work was trivial, otherwise you'd end up with an average result.
 
SAguy said:
There are two areas I see this full stack developers fail at miserably all the time: DBA type work and security principles.

A team of full stack developers are great, but make no mistake - you will need a couple of good DBAs and cybersec guys to keep them in check.
Click to expand...

As a full stack dev myself, I agree. I'm a bit too attached to my ORM and when more advanced or manual DB stuff needs to happen I find myself in the deep end. Ditto cybersec stuff.
 
Not entirely the topic of the thread, but on a related note, I have long had similar gripes with the roles and responsibilities of developers.

The industry and the expectations placed on 'software engineers' is such that you can spend 10 years on 5 different projects and not be able to call yourself an expert in anything after all is said and done. You are then left vulnerable to technical interviews where the aim is to quiz you on obscure details rather than evaluating you for the job you'll actually be doing, which is a general code monkey.
 
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