Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

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I've dabbled in the whole stack as you've said. I've written a web framework, done some Docker, done some fun Javascript demos, shipped web and desktop code in a bunch of languages. Built and maintained my own physical servers back when that was a thing people did. Windows, Linux. Currently relearning C and 68K game development (at a glacial pace) as a side project. Did assembly language in college.

Ran a business. Did everything from building the servers, the code, the marketing, the design, community management, merch, and event planning. Call it "ultra full stack," maybe?

So yeah, it's extremely possible.

But I'll also tell you bluntly I was only really good at a few of those things. Most of those things, I was bad at or perhaps more accurately I just acquired the bare minimal knowledge to get by in my specific and limited use cases.

And many of those skills decayed quickly. I knew a thing or two about SEO and front end development in let's say 2000-2012 but those fields change fast and little I knew back then is relevant now.

That's why I say that in 2023, I think the notion of "full stack developer" has grown untenable. You cannot be good (in the sense of shipping actual maintainable and performant production level stuff) at the entire stack simultaneously now that complexity at each level of the stack has multiplied relative to 2005 or 2015. For example, your own db -- is that a fun (and impressive!) hobby project or is that really production level stuff?

To be ultra clear, I am not knocking what you have achieved. It sounds awesome and I suspect you have dived deeper into more things than I. Kudos, and I mean that sincerely.

I heard a story that the inventor of python was once asked in an interview at Amazon to rate himself from 1-10 in python. The interviewer didn’t know who he was and it was just a standard question. He said 7.

I don’t think you have to be a 10 to be a good. But you might need to be 10 to be exceptional. And I will agree that it would be very challenging to be a 7, let alone an 10, across multiple domains at the same time. Certainly, across months/years one’s focus might wander and thus their exceptionality might as well. Being able to adapt and pick up new things at a 7 level though - is the real FSD.

But I see your point and agree with you about the shallowing of the FSD term.

That story is hilarious.

I think it highlights how difficult it is to even discuss these things. We're all using different definitions of "good" and "mastery" and "7/10" and "10/10".

    Being able to adapt and pick up new things at a 7 
    level though - is the real FSD

This is a really interesting line of thought.

By my definition, I actually don't think this is possible, at least not for larger languages/tools/frameworks.

My reasoning is this. To be a 7 (my definition) requires time. You need to not just understand the basic premise and syntax of a language, but you need battle scars. You need to have shipped some code in that language, gotten familiar with the ecosystem of libraries, you've troubleshot production issues, and become familiar with common pitfalls and how to avoid them. You've checked out some large codebases in that language and gleaned best practices and things to avoid. You have probably also spent some time in that community, watched/attended presentations from recognized leaders, and have a sense of which way the wind is blowing.

Everything I just described takes time. I don't think even the smartest person in the world can drop in and achieve that immediately unless we're talking about a relatively simple tool.

I mean, could somebody who already knows CSS pick up TailwindCSS and be a 7 quickly? Absolutely.

Could an engineer who is new to Ruby/Kotlin/Python be a 7 quickly? Not by my definition, not by a longshot. In my experience, seasoned developers drop into existing codebases in these sorts of languages and make a mess of things at first until they get used to the ecosystem.

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