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You are not expected to know ALL of both. You don't know ALL of both.

A pure SQL specialist of similar talent as you probably knows tons of stuff you don't. Man, I would love to have one at my side all day.

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I guess I should qualify my statement better. You are expected to know both frontend and backend, in interview or daily work, to the same degree of a frontend engineer and a backend engineer respectively.

I would expect an SQL specialist to know more about SQL than a backend engineer. But that's a different scope all together.

To the same degree? I disagree there. I would never expect a full-stack engineer to be more proficient at front-end when compared to a FE specialist. You are expected to know some, but not to the same degree. That’s the reason they are specialists, in comparison.

Yeah, if a company is interviewing full-stack devs at the same level as they do front- or back-end specialists, they probably have a severe shortage of full-stack folks (bar too high) or a glut of mediocre specialists (bar too low).

I wonder though, how can you be a frontend specialist when you don't even know how backend and servers work?

I am sure there are people that expect that, but they are wrong to do so!

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