[spamizbad]

My experience interviewing "Full-stack" developers indicates that it can be a vanity title devs assign to themselves to be more marketable. Unfortunately, I've found their skillsets to be very lop-sided.

Typically, I'd interview full-stack developers with lots of front-end experience and skills (based on their projects and code samples) with very limited backend experience or skills, or they were backend engineers who knew the ins-and-outs of robust, scalable backends, familiar with AMQP etc, but couldn't horizontally center div or modify the prototype of an object in JavaScript (let alone know that JS used prototype-based inheritance).

And then of course there's the 3rd dimension to full stack which is DevOps.

If you're just starting out you need people who can do all 3, even if they're kinda mediocre at some of the parts. But when you grow, and your product starts maturing, you need expertise in all areas to really have a polished product. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck with something that either has a really polished front-end but a dog-slow and unreliable backend or vice-versa.