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krageon

> Full-stack engineers need to know a lot of things

> Being competent at a thing takes a long time

> You cannot study many things at once

> Being a full-stack engineer will therefore take years

> Burnout is something that results from poor planning, poor expectations and poor positive feedback

> If you try to do something you can't, you may be burned out

They then go from there to concluding that this means that it is somehow likely you will develop burnout from trying to become a full-stack engineer. This is incredibly infantilising and damaging - people can be taught to learn constructively over a long time. They can learn how to do a great many things and they can store a lot of information.

If studying leads to burnout because it's not done within a year, that is a mental model that assumes everyone is functionally dysfunctional mentally. We call this a disorder. Patently ridiculous as a conclusion, IMO.

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Beeing a full-stack engineer isn’t problematic. But searching those amongst really young people may be misguided. Because yes, learning takes time. If you want someone with profound knowledge and experience in nearly every programming language, concept and project management methodology, you should look for people in their 50s. Those, who had time to invest 35k-40k hours into their passion and are going strong still. The real „unicorns“!

As a self-proclaimed full-stack person with some mastery in a lot of areas, the biggest hurdle I've had is actually the interview process which is very frustrating. I constantly get smug interviewers who ask questions a specialist in X, Y, or Z would know. In some cases I know the right answer, but because I have dealt with so many FE, BE, DevOps, and data technologies I have evolved to learning the art of learning, generalized good practices, the context around tech, and the architecture decisions needed to apply them, instead of the minute details of each technology. To make matters worse for my working memory, I have started learning knowledge about other industries outside of pure software. To the average interviewer, this makes me look inexperienced or untalented. If instead I am evaluated based on applied knowledge in the form of a take-home tech assessment I always pass with flying colors. It's very frustrating and is pushing the industry towards only being able to see the trees and not the forest which can't be good.

I feel you! I worked with Hashes in Perl since the 90s, Did almost 10 years of Java used Dictionaries in the early versions of C#, switched to JS, Ruby and Clojure for a while and didn‘t remember how to correctly declare a typed Hash in Java in a programming kata - ouch! So if you are a unicorn, you need to find a special environment i guess?

Older programmers are mostly white males.

Lots of people don't like to hire those anymore.

I hired in at one place, was informed afterwards that it was only because they were so desperate that they hired me despite my demographics. Was reminded repeatedly on my sins of being a white male.

You're working with a different scenario than the one sketched above, though the article is drawing a premature conclusion.

The scenario implies that, since you're learning multiple skills at once, it takes a long time to reach satisfactory results with any of them. Humans aren't invulnerable to poor feedback, especially adults, so they have a tendency to give up early in learning an individual skill if it takes too long for satisfactory results. Since you're actively judged on your results, feedback is inevitable, and poor feedback is probable.

The scenario itself is shaky on a few things:

Giving poor feedback isn't a given, some places are instead overly happy to see any form of progress (mostly verbally, though). I'd even say giving poor feedback to beginners is a sign of unprofessionalism (but this doesn't help anyone who experiences this).

A combination of skills may provide a different type of satisfactory result. A highly performant solution requires a far higher understanding of programming. A clean, useful webapp can be made with various skills at "meh-okay" levels.

I don't agree with the scenario either drawing the conclusion that it's the "full-stack" part and not the "too many expectations in too short of a time" part, which applies to any field. You'd generate the same burnout if you'd expect translators to do multiple languages baseline, rather than just X->Y and Y->X.

almost like things are challenging or something

the newsletter signup thing for an email subscription really made me laugh, it's like this is what you make your money on while acting like people who rise to the challenge are victims?

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