[amirmc]

> "So basically, if someone says "full stack", they likely mean that you can develop and run the entire product, not just a part of it."

On the face of it, this sounds reasonable but it glosses over the fact that better tooling/frameworks/etc make it much easier to get started. If you use something like Parse/Heroku or their ilk, then you can get away with not having to know much about backend development (or the problems around it). In effect, when you define 'full-stack' as the ability to ship a product, then the 'stack' is actually narrowing over time.

This is just an observation and as I said elsewhere in the thread, I don't find the term particularly useful anyway.

[kohanz]

Not only is the stack narrowing, but most people who use the label "full-stack" have fixed the definition of that stack (the set of front-end and back-end components that they have experience with). So the complete definition would be "I'm a full-stack <list one or more stacks you're comfortable with> developer".

To say "I'm a full-stack developer" without that context is meaningless and will inevitably be untrue.

[ethbro]

> To say "I'm a full-stack developer" without that context is meaningless and will inevitably be untrue.

Well, couldn't one suppose that it's at least indicative of having touched the architectural groupings at each level.

Whether or not you find value in it (e.g. industry and academia being fairly divergent on this), having worked with a data store layer informs something about an ability to work with any data store layer.