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Comment by chrisabrams | Hacker News Reader

I once met a software engineer who said I was not full-stack because I didn't know how to add to the Linux Kernal. I once met a hiring manager who said I'm not front-end because I don't know how to vertically shard MySQL and "every front-end developer knows how to do that." Technology stacks differ per company and the definition of the title will also differ. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

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You should do everyone a solid and name-and-shame the frontend/MySQL company because dear God that's horrifying.

They don’t exist anymore, they didn’t have what it takes :O

And nothing of value was lost

They couldn’t hack it..

Agreed, though I don't feel like a Full-Stack Engineer should do the DevOps Engineer job as seems to be required by this hiring manager. I am not saying you should not know the underlying component you are using in your stack though, just what you need to work on it, not how to administrate a large scale database deployment.

It seems that the world clearly lacks a definition of what Full-Stack Engineering really means ...

I wish. My recent task has been writing scripts to set up Postgres on a bare-bones linux server (including all security, software, users, nfs, hot backup servers, etc) and port an Oracle database over to the postgres database and update 1000s of oracle queries to work on postgres.

In my spare time I also had to create some new admin screens and do a bunch of back end work. I also created a bunch of new svg images for the admin screens.

Basically I'm expected to do everything from setting up and managing linux servers, security, install and configure software, set up oracle and postgres databases, do DDL and DML work, write server-side code, write web services, create images and do layout work, write test cases, write html, js, css, and know a bunch of JS libraries like vue, vuex, vue-router, webpack, jest, bluebird, lodash, async, tailwind, scss, etc. ad naseum.

You’re probably underpaid for the amount of work you’re doing and should test the waters for another role that pays more.

I’d second this. A jack of all trades that can finish a “multi” stack project is worth a lot at most companies.

Yup, it differs considerably depending on the job—the point I guess is that your breadth of experience spans the software in question from end to end.

I consider myself a “full-stack” programming language engineer because I’m equally comfortable with type theory, user experience design, practical implementation, and instruction-level optimisation. Am I a full-stack web developer because I’m equally comfortable with front-end design & development, server-side infrastructure, and networking protocols?

Some would say yes, some no—but I can readily develop, maintain, and optimise a whole application by myself if I need to. I may not do as good a job in any particular narrow area as a specialist in that area, of course.

Indeed I have seen front end Django developer jobs, when Django is most definitely a server side technology. However on multi tier systems it may be handling the "front end" of the system.

In a world with no SPA django is as much a front-end framework as it is anything else (just as JSP, ASP and a million other frameworks that render html on the server and send it).

If you can't make your own transistors to speed up the UI, then you're not full-stack... and no one is.

"Fullstack is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules."

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