I can’t be the only person who thinks “full stack” translates to “master of nothing.” One of the best career moves I ever made was shrug off the pressure to go full stack, and dedicate myself to backend only.
As someone who likes to dip their toes into everything, I feel a bit called out by “master of nothing”.
The truth is that there is value in both a generalist and a specialist.
I think knowing about frontend is important for a senior or higher level engineer. I would expect someone at that level to be able to contribute where necessary, and know enough to make sane decisions and know when those decisions impact backend/frontend. But to be equally good at both isn’t reasonable
As a fullstack developer I don’t appreciate you calling me out like this. Write an efficient SQL query you framework monkeys.
But also, this is very true.
I sometimes wish my employer didn’t know that I can write Python code, so that I would never be assigned front-end work. I prefer to deal with programs that take lists of numbers and return lists of other numbers.
(I’m not as bad as one guy I used to work with, because at least I accept ASCII input. His backend code only took binary-encoded configuration files for no reason I can think of except maybe to punish anyone except himself who tried to use it.)
I’m terrified by this binary config file. Why?! Was he writing C and said “fuck it, memcpy”?
Edit: I suppose it would be more like “fuck it, fprintf(f, (char*)my_config_object, sizeof(my_config_object))”
Who is using python for frontend?
Backend Requirements: “When x,y goes in, I want x+y to come out!” - Okay
Frontend Requirements: “Well it needs to be more user-friendly, and have this rockstar wow effect” - Yea wtf are you even talking about? You want me to add random glitter explosions, because I found a script for that, that’s pretty ‘wow effect’ right?
Actually the front end stuff is more like “we need to make the ‘sign in’ button bigger. No one can click it because it’s tiny, and it’s in German.”
Marketing want us to add more typos to make the site feel more “friendly”.
As a SaaS founder I’m now wondering if this actually works. Will have to talk to the front-end devs on Monday.
Please don’t
Isn’t our main audience German? If you wanted non German stuff you shoulda asked for regional translations. Not only is that a change request, but you’re gonna be pushing the release window by months.
But it doesn’t even say “Sign in” in German. It says “Das Bootton” because someone thought it would be funny and never changed it.