Many years ago, while still a student of software development, I was not familiar with the concept of development stacks. In my head a developer was a developer plain and simple – not a C# developer or a back-end developer, and so forth. So when this lady asked me what my stack is, I stared at her blankly. It took me an awkward minute to understand what she meant, and to this day I still cringe inwardly to remember that moment. No matter, the modern developer is expected to not be simply a C# developer or a back-end developer, but a full-stack developer. He or she is expected to know many things about many things, never you mind that the art is long. He is required to have necessary skills and knowledge (and experience!) to work on any side of a product, from the designing of the user interface, front-end and back-end development, database implementation, deployment, and even, poor soul, some aspects of manual testing. It is debatable whether this should be the case, but it is easy to see that this is the case.
A jack of all trades is a master of none, so the expression goes. For one might know React and Django and Postgres, and combine these and many others, to develop a stunning web application, but can one really be dangerous? Certainly, there are full stack developers who really know their stuff, but I have met a developer who could build an entire project alone, from scratch, and make it good enough, then spend many miserable months fixing just one bug. Also, there are some skills that take a significant time to acquire before one is truly professional. For example, a full stack developer might be able to mix .NET and Angular like a mad man and conjure up stunning interfaces, but professional interfaces that adhere to UI guidelines need more than expert programming knowledge. A red button might seem to have the obvious meaning of ‘warning’ or ‘danger’, but might actually convey a different meaning due to its context or the context of the user clicking the button. “The mountains labor in child birth, there is born a ridiculous mouse.”
Now, development is not ever linear. I mean this, that when working on both the back-end and front-end of a product, for example, one is not always completely done with one end before starting the other. Instead, it is sometimes the practice that both ends are developed somewhat concurrently, like civil engineers building a bridge from both ends at once, hopeful that the “math will math”, that the two ends will actually meet. But the lonely full stack developer must switch back and forth between the front and the back. This switching, especially if the language of the front is not the same as that of the back, can be expensive and exhausting, or, which is worse, cause painful errors – when the application of one language is directly translated to the other, or vice versa. I have once caught myself happily using “var” in C# then using it again, still as happily, in JavaScript.
The full stack developer must also be constantly learning. To be sure, non-full-stack developers should be learning constantly too, but the broad responsibilities of an all-round developer, mean that he has so much to learn, often in so little time. To think that you have mastered server side rendering, and can finally apply it on your code, only to learn that .NET 9 has been released, and management insists on immediately applying all its hot features.
But full-stack development is not all woe and misery. There are certain perks too.
A full stack developer can be an expert in the many fields that he dares to venture in. And, indeed, one should probably not be so specified in one field at the complete and utter exclusion of all others. It pays to be curious, and there is much satisfaction, intellectual and otherwise, in mastering many fields. Being able to do many things also implies that one is able to fix more bugs, for example, and get more work done, at least in principle.
That a full-stack developer must constantly be learning can be advantage too. He is able to keep his skills sharp as opposed to the non-full stack developer, who once upon a time knew enough SQL to be dangerous but let his skills gather dust in a shelf somewhere while sticking to front-end development. And this learning need not be official and formal training in computer labs and hours of YouTube tutorials. One can learn simply by doing, by sticking to the grind and solving new problems that require some research. The full stack developer is thus able to learn a bit here and a bit there, to a great cumulative advantage.
Also, the many responsibilities ideally mean better pay. One is able to walk into the bank smiling, and walk out smiling still. And among the many motivations for working is to be able to keep a shirt on one’s back and the wolf from the door. But a word of caution is probably necessary here, that one should not seek more responsibilities simply for more pay: that way burn-out lies.