Soooooo sozzled... That is all. Good night

It's not even beer o'clock yet here!

(and I'll have to brave the pouring rain to go to the offy -- we only have a couple of beers each in right now!)

I've got two of these in https://www.flyingdog.com/beers/truth/ -- might go and get a couple more 6-packs of that 🙂

måning

Morning

Bore da

When did 'full-stack developer' become a synonym for 'I write JS'? Was that always the meaning & I missed the memo?

Heh

it's a node+browser world @agile_geek - it's probably a statistically reasonable assertion

Ops+backend+js+html/css+know how to use whitespace = full stack

But yeah at the (now) old place the full-stack engineers on the assignment board were the ones who had done non trivial backend and non trivial js work

So as a rule of thumb that's what we actually used for assembling teams

It works because a lot of engineers are sniffy about JS and if I'm assembling a team where there is no alternative ™️ then I need a hard and fast rule for who can drop in and be productive and happy there

*no alternative to using a lot of js, that is, e.g. a mobile feeling PWA

I think my point is it's become a devalued term, somewhat similar to Scrum Master or Agile!

Nah kind of the opposite I think

I probably saw between 500 and 1k CVs in the last year and if you say it and don't evidence it, you don't even make the phone screen :)

However if you can comfortably move betwixt the two, then step right up because you're like, at best 1in3 engineers and I need more like you

It used to be possible to be fullstack maybe 10-7 years ago

Now that I see an ad for fullstack I think “unicorn, and can do UX/design as well, ’cos we’re cheap”

I do data in limited capacity, scheduler/backend/api, website backend, and dip into occasional JS (react) edits, and I wouldn’t call myself fullstack.

(Partly because I don’t feel like I have an equal amount of expertise in every layer, partly because as I said, my personal connotation of fullstack is cheap and shoddy on every layer)

i dunno - i think some combinations of fullstack are reasonable - we're cljs client-side and async clj server-side, and it seems easy enough to move across the whole stack

Depends how deeply you need to understand all interfaces. Most people don't need to understand the full details of http to do 99% of their job. Same for css, with frameworks.

Random core function of the day: frequencies “Returns a map from distinct items in coll to the number of times they appear.”

because it’s soooo useful for ad hoc data analysis at the REPL

Re: full stack, I think it mostly depends on what people mean by it. I mostly look at it like the whole, "devops" thing. Originally it was intended as more of a process / mindset. Now days though, you see job ads for, "devops engineer", and this strikes me as fairly meaningless. Usually the actual spec describes an ops person, thus demonstrating that the company doesn't actually have a "devops" philosophy. Same thing with "full stack". In a sense I see "full stack" and "devops" as almost synonymous. What it means (or what it should mean), is that we have a single tech team who share collective responsibility for the entirety of the development, and deployment of our software. If you join the company as an engineer, then front end, back end and operations are all "your problem", along with your team mates. Of course there will be people who specialise more in one area or the other, but these specialists do not take on sole responsibility for the part they specialise in. Taken like this, as a culture rather than a role, it not only makes sense, but is a wonderfully good thing. Unfortunately, recruitment agents don't understand this stuff.... and so fuck up all the concepts and terms.

Incidentally, I think the above applies even if you are not a mono-tech company. Companies with JS in the browser, Java on the server, CLJ for some machine learning work, and some Python based lambdas can still have a "full stack" culture. It simply means that you will be expected to roll your sleeves up a bit and learn about some of the techs you might initially be less familiar with, and can't say, "well, I just work on the JS stuff". Let's face it... if you are a half decent developer in any given language, you can get at least productive in more or less any other language in a relatively short space of time. Learning the ecosystem can take years, learning the language... days, weeks at most.

I don’t think learning the language is the problem people have with JS. I think it’s the fear of tainting one’s reputation. Frontend has reputation as “easy” (see also: “not a real programmer”) so people are afraid to touch it so that they don’t get pigeonholed as low skilled personnel. You can see this in other contexts, eg Python programmers refusing to learn how to update PHP code, or whatever-language programmers avoiding support, and legacy maintenance jobs. In non-programming contexts, people avoid caretaking activities like making coffee, taking notes, and organising parties.

(I do agree re: ecosystem, and that’s why I don’t think of myself as frontend-enabled as it were: I’m no longer up to date with frontend ecosystem)

Frontend is also apparently taught at boot camps as “the easy bit”

Possibly related, or possibly tinfoil hat: frontend used to be the most heavily populated by women specialisation (due to cross training of designers I think; these days data science may be competing with it due to influx of women with non-CS PhDs), and also https://hbr.org/2018/07/why-women-volunteer-for-tasks-that-dont-lead-to-promotions

This makes me sad because it's probably true (re the gender bias in role allocation)

Slightly off topic (please carry on with discussions above) but has anyone used https://superhuman.com/ yet?

Also, coming back to the gender issue, have you seen this Pixar short yet? https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/pixar-purl-workplace-gender-inequality/

@lady3janepl That escalated quickly 🙂. On the point about front-end having a reputation as being "easy", you are right and I have never understood it. Front end development is (imo) at least an order of magnitude more complicated than backend work. A lot of this is down to the trickiness of the ecosystem, browser inconsistencies, the crazy box of frogs known as CSS, the fact that users are a whole bunch more unpredictable than data streams etc etc. I definitely focus more on backend work, but that's really because it scares me a lot less.

I also assume that bootcamps that label FE work as, "the easy bit", do not contain a module entitled, "making the browser back button work intuitively and consistently in a single page application", as one of many examples.

@yogidevbear That short takes on a interesting dynamic in the context of recent revelations about the culture at Pixar I think.

Dunno, I learned that (bootcamps) from a larger discussion where a CSS specialist was annoyed about people assuming CSS was easy, and which touched on the perception of FE/easy. I’ll see if I can dig up the article.

My point is, people are not rational decision makers, and are influenced by much more than just whether something is easy to do or not. Professional reputation is one such factor. Fear of becoming the go-to person for (perceived) shit tasks is another.

Ahh yes, this: https://css-tricks.com/the-great-divide/

Also this, which they link to: https://css-tricks.com/tales-of-a-non-unicorn-a-story-about-the-trouble-with-job-titles-and-descriptions/

(That’s even a further divide: between people who write JS and people who don’t.)

I consider CSS to be really tricky and I'm glad we have an expert in the company that I can turn to for help (or, usually, for them to fix my mess). I consider JS to be similarly tricky -- I don't know how folks manage to work with such a weird language and a crazy ecosystem. Respect.