Is True Full Stack Developer a Myth?

Over the past years of working with agile teams, there have been talk and uncertainty about full stack developers. There are always opposing arguments. Some say that it’s possible and some say that they are simply jack of all trades, master of none.

I think the real answer is really it depends on the technologies that the business use. Some developers can be full stack at one company but not in another. I’ll take myself as an example back when I was a full time software developer.

If I worked in a company that uses PHP as the API, ReactJS or EmberJS as the front end, MySQL as the database and lastly LAMP as the stack, I would have been considered a full stack developer. However if I worked in a company that uses C# as the API then I am no longer a full stack developer.

So the next question is was I the master of everything? Or was I simply a skin deep expert of stuff? Being as honest as possible, I was more of a specialist in Javascript but I have good skills on the other technologies.

Most importantly, we should not misunderstand full stack developer as someone who can be a master of everything. It is simply not possible. There should be some specialisations with good breadth of skills. When constructing a team, we need to keep this in mind and make sure that we have different specialisations wihin the team.

Sometimes I think we forgot how we went through senior high school. Most high schools offers specialisations whether its IT, accounting, etc. When the student picked the discipline, doesn’t mean that he/she doesn’t learn anything else. For example: someone specialising in IT subjects will still do some PE or English (assuming English is the default). To some extend this is like the T shaped skills.

With this, I’d like to mention the term T shaped skills. This is a skill set where a person has a mile deep expertise and great coverage of other skills. In a sense a full stack developer should have a T shaped skill set.

On that note, it’s time that I conclude this post. The full stack developer is not some hercules demigod myth flying around in our industry. However, understand that the qualification of this term changes depending which company the developer is in. It is also important to acknowledge that a full stack developer will have some specialisations on certain technologies and inch deep coverage on others. So build the team based on those knowledge.