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by ebiester 5056 days ago
Perhaps in silicon valley, but outside it most of us were expected to be a jack of all trades. There may be a specialized DBA, and a designer, but we were responsible for understanding the full stack. The designer worked in photoshop, and the DBA only came in on designing the tables and optimizations, but we were responsible for the real work.
2 comments
weixiyen 5056 days ago
A jack of all trades "might" work, but honestly it depends on the person. Someone who understands the full stack is usually not be someone qualified to be building scalable fault-tolerant pieces of server side infrastructure for a company.

Node.js is so easy to screw up, so difficult to debug, and little things can take down your entire application.

The combination of the language itself in addition to the type of people who typically would choose Node.js over other more proven options would make me worried that a blind choice is being made based on language alone and not proper evaluation or understanding of the other options available.

Personally I believe it is far better to be a language-agnostic company that thinks of different server side components as services, which might be in different languages instead of trying to use a tool just because they know the language already.

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lmm 5056 days ago
If anything I'd say you have it backwards; the kind of structure you describe (and the very phrase "full stack") is a very silicon valley/startup thing. It's larger, more traditional software shops that tend to slice the stack into separate vertical layers and give different people responsibility for each.

Of course there are many companies large and small that do it differently. But having someone whose responsibility includes client-side javascript but not server-side code is not by any means unusual outside the valley, at least IME.

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ebiester 5055 days ago
Perhaps I am generalizing based on my experience in Tucson, which is close enough to cross-pollinate with the bay, but most places I worked and interviewed and had friends expected everyone on the team (apart from the DBAs) to be able to touch any part of the stack.

We also tended to have companies with small teams.

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