Full Stack Developer

SagXD@lemm.ee to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 988 points –
53

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.

What's figma?

I need to figma resume and get out of here.

Open source alternative is called penpot.app

Worth checking out

There are so many plugins for figma that it is hard to switch to anything else.

Yeah, I’m full stack and use it for quick mockups and communication with our marketing person at work.

But I never hoped on the figma train fully, so penpot works for me.

What are some integrations that I might find useful?

(I work predominantly with a Stencil.js website and react native app (traditional MERN stack for the app, the stencil website has tons of custom integrations))

I use a handful of tools. I think the one I use the most is build. Io. It basically scrapes a page and creates a figma design from a webpage. It's useful if I'm planning on building a test or creating a new page that requires me to bring elements from other pages.

It cuts my workload in 1/2.

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.

Nah your boss is just getting you to work beyond what you're paid to do.

...and that, too. Tried to look at it as an existing Jack of All Trades. Get to learn new stuff!

But yeah... I feel like I'm being taken advantage of, sometimes.

Yea, do it to fill your resume with some good points but once you're not learning anything new it's time to leave.

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.

Why would you think full stack developers make more money in general?

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.

My manager gave me a talk about how I couldnt be intermediate because I don't have enough years there. My friend intermediate is about pay and my YOE not about my tenure here (won't be long till I quit)

Very useful rules, I see... impossible to bypass :-)

They do according to can stats

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.

At the moment it looks like what the market is demanding. A few years ago specialisation was in

The only way to get what you're worth is to change jobs. Then do it again in a couple more years.

What’s it then? 3/4 stack developer?

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.

Did you tell him you guess you have to stop doing non-web development then? Clearly you're not qualified if you can't have the corresponding title.

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.

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.

In reality lots of developers are not even good at what they claim to specialize in.

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.

The latest thing added to the list is AI model creation which is a nightmare.. but, I can't say no 🤷‍♂️

That's funny, I'm working with AI models for my thesis. Good to know that professional programmers struggle with it too.

They develop software on Marshall Full-Stack amplifiers, rather than the smaller, less powerful Half-Stacks.

Hope that helps clear things up.

This is why I stopped identifying myself as full-stack and only do front end.

I used to work as a full stack developer 😢

I've always been full stack and feel like I'd be bored just focusing on one area. am I deluding myself?