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Comment by CodeSgt | Hacker News Reader

Why is it unrealistic to expect a single doctor to have mastery in every medical specialty?

Why is it unrealistic to expect a school teacher to be able to teach every single subject?

Because in these fields, along with software development, there's too much breadth of material to sufficiently explore the depths of all of it. Having the breadth and depth of experience required to have mastery in every bit of minutia is a even slightly complex webapp is enormously difficult to obtain and maintain for a single person.

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> Why is it unrealistic to expect a single doctor to have mastery in every medical specialty?

Full stack doesn't mean everything.

And actually all the doctors are doctors first, so they know everything about medicine, except they are not specialized in all the medical specialties.

Which is rarely a requirement in medicine.

Brain surgery or conjoined twins separation isn't that common, but an highly specialized surgeon is perfectly capable of curing common diseases just like a cardiologist can perform common surgery, such as appendicitis.

Full Stack means that you can get things up and running, not that you know everything of everything.

Yeah fair enough, I'd agree with that assessment and I think that definition of "full stack dev" makes it a much more attainable target.

I disagree. It just takes time and practice.

Someone can master a subject in 5+ years if they do it everyday. A fullstack dev with 20 years experience can master all those stated and more and I know fullstack devs (granted not many) than can maintain entire apps like this.

I didn't say it was impossible, just very difficult.

The word was "unrealistic."

A lot of how to interpret this article is from the context you're viewing it in. You, personally, can be a full-stack developer with complex stacks if you're working at it. If you're someone who's building a team, requiring deep knowledge of all tiers is going to make it incredibly hard to hire in terms of both people who have all those skills, and more importantly people who want to use all those skills.

> Someone can master a subject in 5+ years if they do it everyday.

The problem is that all of these are moving targets. You don't master DevOps in 5 years and then you're done forever (same with backend and front-end development), these are constantly changing fields that require continually honing your skills.

Just chiming in this looks basically like my day-job.

I'm a fullstack dev who is often our devops/kubernetes lead. I'd say over 50% of my day is around DevOps tasks, but I'm likely to write an API or hone a frontend animation as well. I contribute on all parts of our microservice based kubernetes government application, but do skew to the devops side where the rest of my teams' experience is lighter. I can write iptables or webpack configs, I can implement OAuth or modify bezier curves for animations, and frequently do it all at my job. I have just over 10 years of professional experience but have been programming longer.

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