I’m a bit confused why so many people claim they want Full Stack Developers.

During the time of my professional career i’ve seen some companies or teams or individuals trying to be “Full Stack”.
Lets put it like that: The results were not what you’d expect to see.
Nor what the customer wants

  • What about the discussion about cross-functional teams?
  • Why do we employ Information Architects? Forget about them - fire them all. The full stack dev will do the job!
  • Backend business logic? The frontend guy knows JavaScript. We should just fire up a node express instance and we’re fine.
  • Data modelling? Hey, there’s always an ORM mapper at hand. Just create some POJOs, add some some annotation fairy dust - we’re set.
  • Concepters? We’re brilliant - we just KNOW what the customer needs. We don’t need those meta-guys.

Ok, lets put the humor aside and get serious. Otherwise we’d burn precious money.
Of course the bullet points have some dramatic sugar.
Not every aspect applies to each situation. I hope you just get my point.

Rule of thumb: Neither ask a developer to do a designers job - nor vice versa.

Developers are trained to accept nearly every challenge. (How often did you hear a developer say: “Naa, i can’t do that. Leave me alone!”)

You want to get the job done right? Then ask the right people!
(Watching our guys sketching ideas is just fun.)

I think what we really want is a bunch of trained people working together.
Not just sitting in the same office or on the same floor.
People respecting each other.
People actually talking to each other to solve problems.
People understanding each other. And understand their challenges and contraints.
We want and need people working together. To get the job done.
Make the customer happy - and earn some money.

Lets find out what others think. I agree with some of the ideas. I disagree with some.

As always: Use your most valuable tool. Your brain!
Proceedings have to fit the customer and the team.

Thank you for reading,
Volker

Lets try to find out what a “Full Stack Developer” actually is: Hackernoon says this:

A full stack developer is an engineer who can handle all the work of databases, servers, systems engineering, and clients. Depending on the project, what customers need may be a mobile stack, a Web stack, or a native application stack.

w3schools:

(WTF: they have a definition of Full Stack JavaScript )

A full stack web developer is a person who can develop both client and server software.

In addition to mastering HTML and CSS, he/she also knows how to:

Program a browser (like using JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, or Vue) Program a server (like using PHP, ASP, Python, or Node) Program a database (like using SQL, SQLite, or MongoDB)

I’m pretty sure there’re many descriptions like the two i list here.

Well, this sounds like the hunt for the holy-grail: A human one-stop-shop to solve all your developing probl.. - eh - challenges.

Just for the sake