“Fullstack” Modern Day Slavery

Many loves to be called as Fullstack developer, where they can do both frontend and backend and there is no problem with having skills on both. But the problem lies on the shiny title “Fullstack” then couple it with Rockstar to make it more enticing for developers being used by recruiters and ignorant HR managers and then exploited by some companies.

The reality is;

So why is Fullstack a myth, in a development and production environment, there is no such thing as one man team, it is like saying that sex and giving birth is done by one person, where you do the humping and at the same time being humped and give birth after 9 months on your own. Development have different players on it, a infrastructure guy, frontend, backend, quality assurance and so on. You can’t let one player to do the same function at the same time because that won’t be efficient and it will be very prone to erratic and buggy output.

Though today we already have docker, kubernetes and or containerization of application with an aim to deliver it with zero to no problem ideally on production. But that is not true as the environment to load and run them is needed to be setup as well, and considering that it will be in production somehow you need to secure it and the weight of it can’t be given to your frontend developers, and your backend is not fully responsible to it, but your deployment engineer and infrastructure guy should compliment the safeguards to your application on both frontend and backend.

But where the problem lies here is the use of “fullstack” a shiny title of misunderstanding in IT Workforce Management is when they think that you as the developer should do everything, solve every problem that plagues your application and even configure servers which is honestly in all normal circumstance should not always be handled by one person but the whole team for proper escalation and management. And if you mean whole team, it is composed of functional team members with their own functions and specialization.

Perception and expectations on those having “fullstack” title leads to modern day slavery specially to companies and teams that believes that they should know and solve everything from development to production. Where developers only realize when they are already burned out and can’t deliver as expected which can be a psychological torture. It is like being in a team with no team because you are being exploited just merely carrying that title. Which should change and must not be tolerated, and first step is to kill the “fullstack” title and identify the components of your team based on their specialization and specific function.

Though it is not bad to have skills and knowledge on every aspect of the development because it will help you work with a team of dynamic functions, you can easily understand and work with them and if you are the lead then you can easily understand the challenges and be part of the solution. But if it becomes your ego feeder that is the time that you become a slave of your own perception and vulnerable to exploit by people around you, and you can only feel that when you are already being burned up, because remember having so much function entails responsibility specially in IT.

For companies and headhunters, stop using the ego feeding slavery potent “fullstack” term when looking for a developer because it builds a perception that enables exploitation to our IT workforce. And it is more efficient to work with different specialist in a team, as they can dynamically build together your application or project.

Anyhow if you are a growing developer grow and know as much then specialized on something. Also you can’t build without an environment so learn basics on building your development server which you will definitely encounter along the way when choosing the stacks of technologies that you will be using.

Again stop the exploitation, slavery and let our IT Workforce healthy, sane and efficient.