Functionally today this usually means anything from CI systems and OS/networking config all the way up to CSS tweaks. Sometimes though, it extends to lower level things, hardware things, mobile development, more "business" things like SEO or understanding marketing -- it's similar to "a utility player".

I do think many people think of it in the context of just web dev, though.

My tag-line on my old personal website was inspired by Pulp Fiction: "Hi, I'm Winston Wolf, I solve problems."

These days I go with "jack of all trades" and "software engineering generalist."

That person is full-stack :-)

System architecture, devops, database design, backend processes, server side code, website, design, ux, hi, html, css, js… the list goes on.

There is only so much a single engineer can hold in their head and use efficiently.

But I also observe that a lot of companies have trouble coming to terms with the fact that they do not in fact need a FULL stack developer; they might need a front-end dev who can implement the occasional API endpoint themselves. But that person will never touch DB schemas or such.

I think Full-Stack has become a term that's too often used by non-technical people. just my two cents

And I'm with business people here: coordination between multiple devs is definitely an overhead that impacts businesses and heavily limits possibilities of experimenting and iterating with ideas.

The separation is also often a kick the teeth of Agile ("we gotta do the backend before frontend starts") and performance ("just call those 5 endpoints N times, we don't have time to make an aggregated endpoint, should have told us before"). You can still have specialists for micro-optimisations and fine-tuning that SQL query, but the initial implementation phase really suffers from the separation.

There's also lots of "prejudice" and pedantry around the term "full-stack", and that's almost always from less experienced developers or students (which is why you don't see it here in HN but see a lot on Reddit), but that's another discussion.

It's even worse with developers who had some design training, IME. "Oh you say you had design training but I'm 100% sure you're absolute garbage in either that or in database modelling. Or perhaps in both!"

Sure, everyone has a specialty, but writing frontend and knowing not one line of SQL or how to structure a database or working in the backend but not knowing a bit of HTML or CSS or how to configure a web server, these examples just seem like bad programmers?

You don't need to know everything, but surely you should know enough the have an idea of the system as a whole? How can you avoid doing shoddy work otherwise?

I trust our iOS & android devs though that if I speak to them about an API and we agree on a specification, that they are sure it can be implemented cleanly & efficiently on their side. But yeah, that requires an abstract understanding of computing as a whole, and good comms.

FWIW I wouldn't consider myself full-stack by any stretch :P

But that's just the perspective of someone firmly wedded to the backend.

Angular is a total rewrite of AngularJS, that as far as I know is incompatible with the original (no firsthand experience, going off what I remember others saying about it). It was first released ~6 years ago, while AngularJS's last release was ~2 years ago.

No comments on Vue, never used it and I don't hear about it as much as the others.

About the other two: like you said, both React and Vue can still run old code, almost unmodified. The track record of those two is way better than most backend frameworks, by miles. It’s not even a fair fight.

Sure there's new concepts, but it's not arbitrary stuff or old patterns, it's legitimate stuff that makes writing UIs better. But the old ways are still there too.

Backend work today seems less like "knowing a bit of SQL and PHP" and more like "knowing a bit about these 5 competing new programming languages".

I find it frustrating when my clients employees actively refuse to dive deeper because they "don't know how/I'm not experienced enough", well, then it's your job to figure it out, that's why they pay you money.

As long as most of us are "just" implementing bog standard web frontends and bog standard backends using some sort of SQL, then I find there's no excuse for not being able to pick up the slack, if you're asked to.

To me, and I would describe myself as one among other things, a “full stack developer” in the “web developer” sense is someone with F shaped skills in web development. Able to to get by anywhere on the stack, but with deep understanding and expertise in both a particular backend and a front end tool.

An F shaped full stack developer is someone you can rely on to work on you whole stack, but with particular emphasis on a key front end and backend area.

Many people deride “full stack developers” as “jack of all trades, master of none”. I couldn’t disagree more, full stack developers are the artists of the web, the true creatives, pushing development forward and inventing new things.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills

Because they forget the second part: "jack of all trades, master of none, is often-times better than master of one."

As someone with a huge passion for learning new things, I find remaining a generalist brings the most value to a company (as a contractor), as you're hired to deal with problem A, but if you can also help with problem B and aren't afraid of learning to fix problem C as well, you're worth your weight in gold.

Specialization is for insects, and engineers without ADHD.

Even a generalist full-stack developer (which I, too, am) is still specialized to tech work. Heinlein's "real man" is effectively impossible in the modern world, and reeks of a particular kind of "rugged individualist" prejudice.

Specialization is not just for insects if you want to do things like go to the moon or formulate a polio vaccine. It is the unfortunate nature of tough problems that they require a very deep, nuanced understanding to solve.

And I didn't mean to disparage insects nor specialists. Both are incredibly important for the world.

I majored in CS 24 years ago (am I old now?) and have had my fingers and toes just about everywhere in the last few decades.

I think your definition is pretty good but I think the primary question/problem is that too many people who don't really understand what it means just throw it around — especially in management/hiring/hr/etc.

At the end of the day, if you wanted to be nit-picky the response would be "what stack?" because no one is the master of all stacks and all things. I have worked with some amazingly talented people in my career and everyone has gaps, unless you're constantly learning and never building.

Maybe the real question/concern is that they're going to expect you to do N jobs and only pay for 1.

What you should really look for when you hire people isn't what they claim to know and ace on a "is X a native type in Y?" they question but instead how they think and how they can learn. Developers who are curious and want to learn are far better imo than ones that claim they know everything.

But how it's used? A browser-based client and a bit of server code probably.

These are the people who can see the big picture and have "enough skills to be dangerous" in each field. These skills are user experience, user interface, getting things done, communication, programming in various languages, architecture and devops, debugging and bug fixing.

Of course on the lower level there is API design, writing type safe code.

And on the even lower level there is optimising SQL queries, writing Chromium patches, designing network protocols, defining new EcmaScript primitives. These are extremely specific skills and people who can do them might have more narrow and deeper experise.

It ended up being a bit o a ramble, hope it hints at a useful perspective.

So, unless your are one of the first hired developers in a newly established startup that develops web products, fullstack means you are able to write api endpoints, db migrations and react/vue/whatever components.

I've worked in several of companies that size, two of which were stable, profitable businesses about a decade old. These small companies have 2-4 engineer-type staff, and they are expected to do everything - front end, back end, ops, and DB. In the same day I could rack a server in the colo, write some PHP/HTML/JS, manage a deploy, and troubleshoot MySQL replication.

Sometimes there's no one else to delegate to.

I found these jobs did the most to grow my technical skills. I developed the flexibility to tackle a wide variety of problems, and I feel confident diving into anything web-dev related. And as a bonus I've had an easier time passing contrived architecture design questions on interviews because I had hands-on experience with the whole stack.

[0]: State of JS, State of CSS, State of Postgres, StackOverflow survey

I've worked on everything from CSS to microcontrollers. For CSS/SCSS on the frontend (though I generally rely more on things like Bootstrap). I'm very comfortable working in JavaScript land. I worked with jQuery and Dojo in the 2010s and nowadays work with React. I've built "web view" style apps (an app you most definitely have on your phone) and worked with Android-Java and iOS-Objective-C native level code to interact with the phone-OS apis and make backend calls with auth, multi-level-caching, and retries.

On the "backend" I've worked primarily with Java (but Go and Python rock too) but other languages as needed. Mostly Spring Boot & MVC or Dagger+Lambda based backends using API Gateway, Ec2/Fargate/Lambda and cpu, and RDS and/or DynamoDB (depending on the use-case).

From college, I also have an EE degree alongside my CS degree and worked in IT part-time while going to school.

Professionally, I've also lead teams to deliver multi-year projects successfully. I conduct interviews, do mentoring, evangelize best-practices and CD/CI, and go on-call once every two months.

If there's a problem and it has something to do with a computer and the internet, it's safe to say I could help solve it and deliver what a company needs.

Like I said, I mitigate the "edges" by leveraging: I use bootstrap to avoid writing too much CSS and I use ORMs to interact with DBs. In the "middle" I let React and Spring do what they do best. I'll admit my SQL could use some work, but I've also been on teams with a dedicated Business Intelligence sector. I haven't worked a whole lot with "native" mobile views, again, leveraging "web-view" style (think React Native) UIs.

Sure, there are folks who spun up a react and express CRUD stack and call themselves "full-stack" but there are also people who have worked with many aspects of the bit and baud.

I'm terrible at designing, management, or "product" management. But I'm pretty decent at all of the others, stronger on some areas and a bit weaker on others, but I can do all of what's required to ship a working web application/site to our customers and I have a pretty awesome salary because of this.

People with the most experience with developing across the entire software stack tend to just call themselves "developers" (or alternatively "burnt out").

I got the job, and I do think this is the real answer. Just be honest about which side you're better at and where your real experience lies.

You never witnessing it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Anyway, it'd be a jack of several things, probably. All is a bit hard these days.

If someone can be considered "senior frontend developer" with say four years of experience, and careers span four decades, it should be the norm to be decent at multiple things.

Sure, but skills need to be kept sharp and relevant as well. There was a time in the distant past when I no doubt qualified as a "senior frontend web developer" (although we didn't use that term back then). However A LOT of things have a changed since then and I am out of date on the latest "frontend web develop" techniques and tools. Were I to want to get a job as a frontend web developer today I would no doubt be considered very much a junior.

I said we don’t need to point out the exceptions every time. Of course some people are equally talented in front end and back end, no one should take the statement literally. It is clearly hyperbole expressing that fact that most people are not.

It's more akin to extending the three-point line between college and the NBA. While extending, you say "but nobody can shoot from that far away" while NBA hopefuls are draining shots just out of your view. Sure, the line is too far out for college, but there are _plenty_ of professionals who can shoot from that far out who are both in and out of the NBA.

Sure, nobody at a charity obstacle course will be able to perform at the same level as a professional. Good thing we're talking about professionals software developers when we talk about full-stack developers and we're not talking about professional nurses or amateur painters.

It's rare within the general population, but it's not rare within the world of software development.

The thing is of course that there are many different stacks, and that someone can do both frontend and backend doesn't mean they have a lot of experience in the exact stack a company wants to recruit for. But that can't be helped, you can't really expect a two word label to cover all the complexity involved.

It's become popular to combine JS frontend work with JS in the backend, and share code between them. That makes it relatively easy to be full stack. So for some people, it doesn't mean more than that exact stack.

That seems almost completely impossible, right? I'd call myself nearly equally adept at both as I have spent all of my career doing both in equal measure. Certainly there are others like me. I work with several. I have worked at past companies with many more.

I have never understood why some thought it so strange that people have multiple skillsets.

1. Write sql, work with databases & nosql stuff.

2. Work with server side code in C# & nodejs. Read from some data source & built API’s.

3. Create a usable product in React / React Native / NextJS / Vanilla JS making use of those API’s.

4. I can make wireframes, design stuff in illustrator/photoshop.

In general I think people who can built complete products end to end are full stack developers.

You have the misfortune of being a generalist in a world that does not value generalists. Best bet is to look for a job in one area you like, then continue to help out wherever needed. This is probably easier at a startup where roles have not yet hardened.

Good luck!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_stack

You’re just a software engineer. Period.

And you try to avoid those inexperienced hiring managers/teams who still play these silly naming games.

As a web developer of 20 years, this has always been a field of self-educated professionals with widely-varying backgrounds and abilities.