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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Full-stack development and architect are roles, not skill sets. That's what I see as going missing in these discussions. Anybody can do either job. Whether they do them well depends more on their general level of software knowledge, and not so much on individual skills known.

The roles are driven by business needs. The more budget is available, the more you can afford to stratify roles into front-end, back-end, and architect. But it's up to the business to decide what roles they need, not us. The output of engineering departments is something normal people have to be able to reason about. We don't build bridges just for other engineers. We do it with taxpayer money to serve taxpayers.

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Those are fair points. However, also missing in these discussions is the fact that oftentimes throwing more people at a software problem is known to not necessarily increase output, and can sometimes have the reverse effect. Depending on the situation, having specialists on the front-end and back-end may not improve things unless there is a specific goal/problem in mind that a specialist in one area can solve.

> Full-stack development and architect are roles, not skill sets.

That's the thing the article seems to be glossing over categorically. I kept looking for the distinction between skill sets/productivity thing and what I'll just call jobtitle capitalism. You can't cash in on being master of none, but being a Jack-of-all-trades doesn't make you look competent either.

I saw the article as a harkening back to how crafts and trades work. You have handymen and the craftsmen, who go about their jobs in very different ways for very different reasons. The author's basic point is that you can't use handymen to build anything remotely sophisticated.

My counterpoint is that if you had to rely on craftsmen for everything, the number of buildings we can have is always going to be limited to what they can produce. We need handymen software developers because Pandora's Box has been opened and the business need for software is utterly insatiable.

It won't be long before we're longing for good ole' days of code schools. People will be entering the software field with nothing more than CodeCademy on their resume soon.

In an ideal world, few craftsmen would beat more handymen's asses regularly so they take the things that matter seriously. So how do we get VC to align with this?

EDIT: What's wrong with codecademy? See, figuring things out in a way that efficiently translates human ideas to machine processes isn't straight forward and usually involves multiple attempts. Which means, I, as a craftsman, need to be pointed to shortcomings of what I do multiple times to arrive at the ideal solution. Whether I studied what I'm doing in college actually has less to do with this process, though, and more with my own humility towards my own craft.

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