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Comment by irskep | Hacker News Reader

Sure, you can do all that, but have you also written video games, UI frameworks, compilers, Twitter bots, localization tools, and web-based whiteboards? Have you ever made a music video or gotten a novel published? If not, why not? I'd say it's because you had different interests and spent your time elsewhere, which is completely fine and not a problem at all. People are allowed to have their own interests and explore the amazing world of technology in their own ways.

It's weird to say that people aren't learning these things because they're "stopping themselves." They're just going in other directions. No one in my life has ever accused me of learning too few things and failing to learn by building things.

Edit: I think I misunderstood the parent comment, sorry for the defensiveness here

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No whiteboard, music video, or a published novel yet.

But, come now, his point was he’d never worked with a full stack developer and that they don’t exist.

> that they don’t exist

To my reading, that's not what was claimed.

It seemed to be more like "they exist, but most of them turned out to be pretty shallow with each of the technologies".

As the sibling comment notes, yes -- my point was that the 2023 version of a "full stack developer" is distressingly shallow in most of the individual skills.

I'll use myself as an example. I am a "full stack developer." I have fairly deep backend knowledge. But my React skills basically amount to the ability to make small JSX tweaks, and my sysadmin-y skills are also at roughly the same level.

Conversely, the folks who are really sharp at front end technologies tend to write some psychedelically bad backend code in terms of scalability and maintainability.

For some projects this admittedly doesn't matter. Some projects are simple and don't need to be wonders of engineering.

No offense and not here to toot my own horn, but just because you are better on one side of the stack doesn't mean that true full stack developers are unicorns.

Like others upthread, I am one of them, and probably because I've been paid to do this job for 16+ years.

Honestly my challenge is making potential employers understand that yes, I know my way around Elixir or React, as I do around C or Rust, as I do around sysadmin (not only DevOps) or DBA work, as I do around low-level system code. I'm no world expert at any of them, but most companies need a person that can wear many hats when things go crazy and specialisation is for insects anyway.

Sadly, generalist engineers like me have lost against the trend of "full stack developer" to have been stolen from us by recruiters and less skilled devs to now mean "can use Express and React and maybe deploy on Heroku".

    I know my way around Elixir or React, as I 
    do around C or Rust, as I do around sysadmin 
    (not only DevOps) or DBA work, as I do around 
    low-level system code

To what level do you know these tools?

This is a challenging discussion because the idea of "knowing" or "being good at" a tool is so nebulous.

As I mentioned elsewhere I'm using a definition that is essentially, "the level of skill a solid engineer would acquire after working full-time with a technology for 1-3 years." Not world-class expertise necessarily, but enough time to surpass basic literacy and achieve a real fluency. To encounter edge cases and pitfalls and develop well-supported opinions about best practices.

If you have that level of fluency in all those tools, great! Sounds like you're pretty awesome. In my experience that level of mastery of the entire stack at once is exceedingly rare.

I've used Elixir full time for the past 6 years.

I've written Rust full time for the past 3 years.

I've written C since I was 14 in 2001. I wrote a small operating system (up to reading and running a binary from ext2) around 2004 in C, so I know how a computer works at low level. I might still be able to write x86 assembly.

I've been a MySQL DBA full time for 3 years.

I've administered Linux systems since I was 14 in 2001, and for all my professional career.

Then there's Python, Go, etc.

Probably the one I know the least is React, which means I was PM on a React codebase for a short while, and spent way too much debugging weird issues with Next.js. I stopped paying attention post-hooks, since the frontend world changes too fast, and I'm getting old.

Again, this is not to toot my own horn, it's just that if you live and breathe computers, and hate doing the same thing for long (I blame my ADHD), over a long enough time you tend to have quite the repertoire. I think I'm quite average compared to other people that have been around as long.

You'll soon notice there doesn't tend to be anything revolutionary in computing. After your third framework and language, you'll keep finding the same ideas and concept with minor variations.

    I've used Elixir full time for the past 6 years.

    I've written Rust full time for the past 3 years.

What does this mean? You've been working 80+ hours a week for the last three years?

I'm also fairly generalist although my title is cloud engineer, and have all the skills listed by the OP + IaC infrastructure deployment and cloud stuff, as does everyone on my team. I think that's the trick; everyone on my team is responsible for everything, so we're constantly taking tickets in whatever we're weakest at and consulting each other, which causes really fast skill growth. I can see how it would seem impossible in a more siloed environment though.

> I know my way around Elixir or React, as I do around C or Rust

Interestingly, I find that I've never been asked to write anything in a compiled language yet. I've been wondering how I could work those skills into my job, but it seems like it doesn't come up much in the things I end up working on

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