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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

What's your definition of full stack? Anyone that knows a back end language, sql, html and a bit of css and javascript is a full stack web developer.

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The going expectation for professional résumés is about honesty and modesty. What you say on that piece of paper should reflect what you would be able to come in the next day and be productive doing.

I interviewed over 15 applicants for just front end development last week and not a single one of all the 6-page résumés from candidates who all apparently have their masters was honest: only 5 even knew what JSON is.

Are these graduates? Are they real developers or people that know html, css and photoshop thinking their front end devs? Have they spent their lives in big companies that are still in xml land?

That's all the excuses I can think of. Some of them may be honest, just ignorant.

They generally don't have a clue, or sometimes have had job titles like "Software Engineer" but all they did was basic GUI testing, which is also the case at my company.

Is it possible you aren't offering a wage that attracts talent? You seem to be implying that Indian labor is smarter/more qualified than US labor. In my experience, (hiring in Phoenix) that is simply not the case if you're willing to pay the prevailing wage.

Yeah, this was my first though too. Even outside of the US you see companies wondering why they can't find good local talent, except they're offering wages too low for any qualified applicant to live on. Pay peanuts, you get monkeys (or the extremely desperate/exploited).

I believe that might be part of the problem, but when I joined under this same role I was being fairly compensated, so it might be mixed.

I hear these stories all the time, and yet the value of these degrees seem to hold steady, while experience is often discounted.

I would have thought JSON was more a back end

one of those things .... most people in the pipeline should know.... since it's a data container format.

That's "JavaScript Object Notation," as in, how to use objects in JS.

I think you need to be able to debug a crash of the web server or kernel. This means C and at least a bit of a clue about assembly.

I suppose it's OK to not be able to debug a hypervisor.

On the other side of things, probably you also ought to be a competent artist and writer.

"a crash of the web server or kernel"

That rules out 99% of people who are successfully doing the work right now.

It rules out 99% of the people successfully doing something which they claim to be "full stack". They might be great at their jobs, but I don't consider them "full stack". Low-level stuff is always part of the stack.

I guess there has been a sort of grade inflation on "full stack". When I go looking in the "Who wants to be hired?" threads for people, my reaction to seeing "full stack" is that the person is almost certainly exaggerating to an extreme. Real "full stack" is super uncommon, but it sounds impressive I guess. It's just not very believable.

I think you're missing the "web developer" part of the full stack. It means you know all tmthe stack required for web development.

Either way, aren't debugging crashes with c/ASM still taught at uni? Or is the idea of using gdb too much these days?

Crash of the web server => read the log and find where you made a typo in the config file

crash of the kernel => google the last error lines (hope you have one)

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