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by incrudible 1212 days ago
Companies are already used to hiring frontend and backend separately, it is much easier to find an expert in either than an expert in both. It is also one of the few opportunities where you can meaningfully split up work. How much of an upside that really brings, is secondary. It already happened.

I do not buy into the YAGNI or in-most-cases arguments. Most cases are interactive applications, not the overengineered listicle websites that would be crap, even if they were not SPAs. If you write an interactive application, SSR will soon make your life miserable. The scrolling document approach to application UI sucks, especially on mobile.
2 comments
vsareto 1212 days ago
I personally think full stack is more popular than separated roles. They want to hire full stack because you don't really need an expert most of the time, and full stack smashes the two jobs together while paying less. This makes management easier on the surface because you can swing the entire team towards back end or front end work. And of the more capable full stack devs, you can get them to dive into expert topics as needed (JIT expertise).
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incrudible 1212 days ago
You do not need an expert most of the time, except when you do, at which point you better have one on board. You can mix and match, but keep in mind that context switches are expensive too.
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vsareto 1211 days ago
These are all true, however businesses continue to work against their own interests.
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incrudible 1211 days ago
That is debatable. In the grand scheme of things, politics included, it probably does not really matter. Otherwise, companies not employing this pattern should be at a competitive advantage.
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arrowsmith 1212 days ago
> Companies are already used to hiring frontend and backend separately, it is much easier to find an expert in either than an expert in both.

I think this gets cause and effect the wrong way around. If companies stopped unnecessarily dividing their stack in two, we wouldn't have so many FE developers who don't know how to do anything on the BE and visa versa. I've worked with frontend "experts" who barely know how to query a database. Specialisation is unavoidable, but it makes no sense to me why we need to be that specialised.

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incrudible 1212 days ago
Yes, frontend developers often barely know how to query a database, whereas backend developers often create terrible user interfaces, whereas fullstack developers are not particularly good at either. It is a tradeoff.
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