Comment by jliechti1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jliechti1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Many engineering types seem to feel more at home making tools to "automate all the things". On the surface, it appears a lot easier than making 100s or 1000s of phone calls, but it can be dangerous because it gives you the feeling of doing important work (not to say it isn't important, but for early stage startups, it's not the highest priority).

But I guess everyone is learning that this is not a substitute for all the grunt work needed to grow a business. PG wrote it in his "Do Things that Don't Scale" essay:

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

--

On another note, I hope this term doesn't catch on, because full stack already has an abundance of meanings depending on who you are talking to:

- Full Stack Web Developer (backend, frontend, maybe design?)

- Full Stack Developer (backend, frontend, design, ???)

- Full Stack Developer (older meaning) (knowledgable about hardware and software)

- Full Stack Startup (developing, business, and everything else?. They call it a "complete, end-to-end product or service")

The whole overloading of "full stack" really bugs me. I lean towards definition (3) above. Software can run front end to back (or some portion there of), but most "full stack developer" gigs kinda stop at above the hardware level.

For me, knowing the right choice of software components best suited to the platform (vms, direct hardware, etc) and how to tweak the platform is as critical as any other layer above it.

I always thought it was meant to indicate proficiency with all 7 layers of the OSI stack.

So if you can't design and build a network (2 or 3 buildings 2-3k hosts) you are not a full stack developer.

Btw this small network is what CISCO expects a CCNA to be able to do.

I'm just waiting for the Full Stack Cloud to become a thing

Surely that would disrupt the industry. Social, mobile, local!

For me "Full Stack" means: there is no stack.

Its difficult to argue about this with academic reasoning, but my 'feelings' after 30+ years in the software business is that the more you treat the artificial borders between technologies as insignificant, the less significant the effort required to grasp the technology. In other words, there are no real 'borders'; these are self-imposed on the individual programmer, socially, in sometimes very sexy packages. "Framework Developer" is another nasty phrase arising, in my opinion, because what does it mean? You use the framework, or you build one?

Either way, this artificial division allows for the ordering of 'developer skills' in such a way that one higher skilled programmer can sell the other lesser but nevertheless competent, programmer .. something.

There is no Stack, means, if you need to know something about your computer, you can. Dig into its depths faster and with more passion, not slower, because 'there is no way to understand it all' is a fallacy. You can, indeed, understand every single thing that the computer is doing; it was made that way.

wow - I've been using full stack to mean someone who can go from embedded to OS driver to web backend to web front end - add mobile apps too.

i dislike it though, alas ive succumb to the desire to use the hip title in discussion.

"full stack" == "jack of all trades"

"full stack already has an abundance of meanings depending on who you are talking to"

That's why it's useful! There isn't a pre-existing term that means the same thing exactly, and there is enough need for one that we are seeing it employed in the wild.

No, there's no need for a new term. From what I've read 'full-stack' in this context is not much different to 'vertically-integrated'. The way it's being used, it's about as useful as 'ninja' or 'rock star' in job ads.

Doesn't full stack just mean decent ability all the way from assembly or C, to web dev or phone apps, pretty much

Reply on news.ycombinator.com