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Comment by jnordwick | Hacker News Reader

Why do you only ever hear about full stack developers in web developer context?

I work in FinTech and trading systems - very high performance and low latency systems. I deal with databases and huge amounts of data too. And I've (as well as coworkers) have hacked together trading GUIs and simple CGI to throw together data visualizations. But none of us would ever call ourselves full-stack and we'd never hire a front-end person who thought they were going to go mucking around the infrastructure. They just aren't good enough. This goes equally to small startup like firms I've been a part of as well as banks.

From what I've seen "full stack" seems to be entirely a web notion. Is it just that the backends are simpler - requiring little more than glueing together some Spring components for CRUD operations?

It seems to be a very new concept.

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>From what I've seen "full stack" seems to be entirely a web notion. Is it just that the backends are simpler - requiring little more than glueing together some Spring components for CRUD operations?

Maybe it has more to do with the growing complexity and scope creep on the front end. There is an absurd amount of tools/frameworks/libraries that go into the modern stereotypical web page.

Companies (not the big SF ones) are seeing the complexities of web development multiply and don't want to pretend any different. A full stack developer just does everything they used to pay someone to do half of without much of the salary increase.

There will be people like me who are the sole developer at a small company, but my job role is simply "do all the stuffs". They will claim they are full stack developers too. The same way I am my own Creative Technology Officer, Project Manager, QA....

I just steer away from the bullshit titles that companies generally use to devalue your skill set.

>It seems to be a very new concept.

It was probably invented to get a wider range of skills in a single position for a similar price of a front-end / back-end developer position.

It could also be the business is saying they don't want specialists at this time and just need someone to do medium or lower difficulty work in either side.

Full stack is web parlance, but anyone who works with GUIs (desktop/mobile/etc.) is technically a "full stack" dev, and it's common for C# desktop developers to also do GUI work.

The web is a flexible place. When I started writing code for money, I was working up user-facing PHP interfaces to databases, and I was called a back-end developer. 7 years later, doing fundamentally the same work only moreso, I was called a front-end developer and paid 10k less a year. Everything is always in motion.

>Why do you only ever hear about full stack developers in web developer context?

Two reasons

1. Web developers wanting to improve their value

2. Companies trying to save cost

Especially on teams where you deliver a lot of product quickly, it can be easy to develop and maintain both skillsets.

You hear about it in the web developer context (and especially not in finance) because they tend to have quicker iterative cycles, and therefore may be doing quite a bit more coding. There may also be a cost, corporate maturity and scale component as well. ( At scale, you want to depend on fewer exceptional people, and many more average people, doing average things. Fullstack is still seen as exceptional, and its hard to scale exceptional).

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