In the soap opera General Hospital, Colonel Sanders of KFC makes a guest appearance because someone is trying to kill him to obtain the secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices. He knows Malbolge and is able to disarm the destruct sequence.
It may suggest the company doesn’t want to hire the appropriate amount of engineers, with the appropriate expertise, and instead want a mule. It also may suggest that product quality is a low priority.
I love shitting on Fullstack devs as much as the next guy. However, sometimes it really just does make sense for an (often internal) product maintained by a one-person team, and it doesn’t have to mean that the organization doesn’t value them. I’ve seen it happen.
However I would not recommend it as a career path because it’s essentially impossible to tell what you’re getting into when you get hired. Could be what I just described, could be that you inherit the full responsibility for a 20 year-old perl+php5+xhtml+angularJS mess.
I think it can only truly make sense if you work independently and get to build projects to your own quality standards, assuming you manage to find a “scope is small enough that specialization doesn’t make sense” niche. This is very hard which is why in practice “full stack” tends to mean “master of none but good enough to get a product out the door cheaply”.
Frontend dev here, can confirm. Last week I had to look at some Java code and was instantly greeted by some AbstractFactoryBuilderImpl. Nightmare fuel if you ask me.
Not understanding SQL (and in some cases NoSQL DBs) and the underlying database are a reason that so many full stack devs suck. Just because they use an ORM, they think the database work is magically solved, until they realize it’s just doing what they’re telling it to do and their lack of DB understanding has created an awful database structure. And then a DBA comes in, and then the entire ORM layer has to be scrapped because it’s trash, so on and so forth. A full stack engineer doesn’t have to be a DBA, but they sure as hell need to know what the ORM is doing to their data they are CRUDing
I sometimes wish my employer didn’t know that I can write Python code, so that I would never be assigned front-end work. I prefer to deal with programs that take lists of numbers and return lists of other numbers.
(I’m not as bad as one guy I used to work with, because at least I accept ASCII input. His backend code only took binary-encoded configuration files for no reason I can think of except maybe to punish anyone except himself who tried to use it.)
You could do templating with jinja, or do some data visualization with bokeh. I think there’s also something called dash. I don’t know much about any of them though.
I mean, python has pickle and people use that to store config. It’s a weird practice, and totally unsafe, but it works well enough. This wouldn’t be that different.
I can’t be the only person who thinks “full stack” translates to “master of nothing.” One of the best career moves I ever made was shrug off the pressure to go full stack, and dedicate myself to backend only.
I think knowing about frontend is important for a senior or higher level engineer. I would expect someone at that level to be able to contribute where necessary, and know enough to make sane decisions and know when those decisions impact backend/frontend. But to be equally good at both isn’t reasonable
A backend engineer that has adequately put in the time to operate at a senior level, will more than likely have worked closely enough with FE to check those boxes. They should be familiar with technical design and processes, which if done effectively, teach an engineer to ask those questions.
When it happens? That happened to me a long time ago. I’m still a backend developer. I can create UIs and I can spin up and manage docker CI infrastructure but I sure as hell don’t want to. A properly run company team should have separate professionals for UX, front end, back end, sysadmin, etc. Just because I am capable of doing those things does not mean I should.
Just because I am capable of doing those things does not mean I should.
This is the crux of why so many companies, especially smaller and medium sized ones, are a hot mess. capable of << good at, but of course it’s cheaper to just get johnny to do everything.
My apologies. My intention wasn’t a dig at engineers themselves, but rather the trend of employers seeking “full stack” engineers, and the implications of them shopping for a singular engineer willing to do the job of multiple engineers-- IE be taken advantage of, and the first to be let go, because of a lack of specialized domain knowledge, etc.
My company started with full stack devs only and we’ve transitioned to specialized back end and front end since we realized that 1 specialized BE Engineer and 1 specialized FE Engineer can work faster with better quality than having 2 Full Stack Engineers.
What if I wanna learn to code because I want to make more money than what I’m making now but lack creativity to make something like a game or an app that’s supposed to be good practice?
Sometimes motivation can make your better in forced way
Your case same like mine actually. in the end i forced to learn programming because it’s digital era & everything will be digital at some point, at first i admit i suck at everything but as time goes on i can made something better and better
I still remembered the first time i forced my way i learned about programming world especially web dev 14 years ago. I learned WordPress, why i learned it ? because it can make website really really fast, it’s high demand in my country (even today), you can make easy peasy money with it since my client doesn’t care about what tools you used as long as the website is launch and meet their requirements, & it suits for client that have very tight budget
Well nowadays i still learning how to make website & apps in proper way (like true programmer does). I admit it’s hard since i always use the easy way to cheat it, but i will made it through
Maybe next time I’ll learn how to make games since nowadays games popularity has rised so much compared way back then
Think of it more like problem solving. Plenty of jobs use software engineers just to code bespoke tools suited to exactly what they need. Someone else will tell you what it should do, you just have to translate that into code. The hard part is more figuring out what they really need/want because what they tell you isn’t always what they want.
Learn finance and bookkeeping; work for a bank. Software development is not lucrative; the high-paying jobs are fundamentally tough and cause burnout. Median employment at big software companies is maybe 2-3yrs and it will ruin your ability to relate to other humans.
You don’t need to make something unique, if your goal is to learn.
The best thing you can do is to build something that solves a problem for you, or to build something that already exists that you know well.
As for money, given that companies seem to love layoffs lately, I would say that higher salaries only matter if you are employed. It’s an employers market right now, and a lot of people are really struggling to find work again, even from large companies like Amazon and Google.
I try to keep an eye out for repetitive tasks that might make good projects. I just started a python script that’s going to download all my google photos so i can free up my cloud storage.
Be aware that learning to code is not a safe bet for making money in this market. Of course it’s better to have coding skills on your resume than nothing. Coding also complements other white collar skills well (eg. program Macros in Excel or use Jupyter for bespoke data analysis). But code alone is unlikely to get you cash, in my opinion.
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