Is Full Stack Developer a Myth? - Growth Mindset Ep. 11

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Hello and welcome to the Growth Mindset Show

My name is Mahesh Chand. I'm a founder of C Sharp Corner. I see we have a lot of people joined today looks like this is a good topic today to start welcome

welcome to the show guys good morning Raj Rishabh good morning Shubish, Shoheb, good morning Kunal

Praful everybody good morning looks like we have a good number of audience today

we are going to have a fun show today today we are not going to talk about growth mindset what

we are going to talk about is full stack development and full stack developer and

the reason this topic came to the picture is recently one of our you know key members and

advisors and also mvp david mccarter he is also part of our core team he wrote an article on c

sharp corner that is full stack developer is really a a some a it's like is it even real like

is there people are they're calling themselves full stack developer so what are they so today's

goal is we are going to talk about what are these uh full stack developers are what they do what

their roles are are they real or they're not real and uh today i have changed the format of the show

little bit today we are going to have more like a tv debate so you guys ready for that one side is

going to say yes there are full stack developers and they exist and yes and then other side we have

another guest who's also a good friend um also microsoft mvp uh he is he runs uh his own dev team

He has been a full stack developer himself. Andy Schwamm. Andy Schwamm also runs his own show

So yeah, before, you know, we jump in too much into that, let's invite our guests

Hey, Andy. Hey, David. Welcome to the show. Hey, everybody. Hello. So where you guys are, you know, right now, where are you joining us from and how are things going with COVID situation

I know it's growing like crazy in the U.S. Well, I'll go first

David, you go ahead. Most everybody knows me. I'm David McCarter, Donna Dave, and I live in San Diego, California

And, you know, the COVID is not doing good here. You know, yesterday our governor issued a three-week lockdown for the state

so we're all supposed to stay home and not go anywhere unless we absolutely have to for the

next three weeks and so you know we're going into a difficult time you know like a lot of other

states are in or going to be in very soon so. Andy? Yeah so hi by the way I'm Andy Schwamm for

those of you that don't know me you can find me on Twitter at Schwammie and I put that in my

name there down below. As far as COVID stuff goes, it's hard. This is brutal

I'm home today with my kids at home, like probably many people that are watching, and I'm kind of

hoping that they don't come walking in. This is the new normal. The funny thing is at work, when I say at work, when we're

working, we're past the point of worrying about kids coming into the calls and things like that, because it's just the new normal now

On the flip side, it does make certain things easier, like these kind of streaming situations

It's really elevated streaming, I think, and the value of live streams and live events

I don't want to play up the benefits of COVID. That sounds a little

kind of going the wrong way. We'll all be really happy when it's over. It's been

it's been really rough you know well i agree i agree right kovid you know some people are actually

taking advantage of situation they're learning a lot because they have more time some people are

they started their own streaming some are i need i know some guys are writing books some guys are

learning certification so all of you guys watching i understand there's a lot of problems going on

outside but you know on positive side you can also think like hey you know what at least i

have more time now let me just learn and grow in my career right that's all at least we can do

on a positive side so you know as a human being we're always looking for positive side you know

there's always going to be problems but you look at the positive side and try to utilize your time

such as this show we started and imagine if we have live you know work going on every day nine

to five whatever we do it will be hard for us to even come join here yeah so all right guys uh good

morning everybody looks like we have more people joining us and I see some people they are our

regular frequent visitors welcome everybody to the show today I have here guests Andy Schwamm

and David McCarter Andy Schwamm is in local in Philadelphia area you are close to me

David McCarter is on west coast I know David's probably 7 a.m. where you are

a Victor is here Victor is from West Coast that a good to see you Victor I hope things are going with your new startup Yeah he one of my friends

I've known Victor for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good guy, really

My favorite at some point. We're going to meet him in person. I want to bring him on the show too, actually

He's working on a lot of good stuff, like really blockchain and cool stuff

That's awesome. Okay, guys. So let's kick off a little bit. Before we kick off the debate, I want David to start with a little bit about your show

You have a show coming up tomorrow. And then you're also writing articles on C Sharp Corner

You want to spend a minute, let everybody know about it? Sure. Yeah

My show is back tomorrow. We took a little vacation because of the holidays

And so we're back tomorrow, 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. I don't know what time that is in India

And it's called Rocking the Code World with .NET Dave. And every week I have a guest on, like a big popular person in the .NET world or the programming world, really

And I interview them for an hour. And so far, you know, the interviews have gone better than I could have expected

And I'm really enjoying the show. And I love it. And I can't wait to be back tomorrow

So tomorrow, my guest is someone I've known actually since the 90s, you know, back in the, you know, the CompuServe days

Some of you are old enough to remember CompuServe. You know, her and I, I think, worked in CompuServe forums and also her and I collaborated together

If I remember correctly, we collaborated together for a magazine article for the Visual Basic Programmer's Journal way back in the 90s

And so that's how long I've known Kathleen. So tomorrow, my really, really good friend, Kathleen Dollar, is going to be on

And she used to be just like you and me, you know, Microsoft MVP

And I got to see her every year when I went to Microsoft. But now she works at Microsoft

And she's actually in charge of – she's a PM for the Visual Studio team

And since I'm big – Keep that some for tomorrow too. Otherwise, you'll give everything today

Andy, you want to talk a little bit about what you do, your show, and your work, what you do

Sure, I'd love to talk about that. So thanks again for having me on the show today. It's great to be with everybody

So, yeah, I am also a Microsoft MVP. I've been an MVP for over 10 years

And I do a whole bunch of stuff, you know, sort of community-based. you know, I'm involved in the .NET community, as I would like to say, or the development

programming community. I'm a speaker and, you know, I've done a lot of different things. I help

run a conference that we have once a year and hopefully we're back this year in October. It's

called Tech Bash. I also have a live stream and that is Wednesday nights, Wednesday evenings at

8.30 p.m. Eastern. It's called the Dev Talk Show. And it's with Chris Gomez and Rich Ross, who maybe

some of the viewers know. And we're on Twitch and YouTube talking about all kinds of things that

developers talk about. Sometimes it's topics just like this, right? Sometimes it's just a

conversation-based show. Sometimes we have code samples, we have guests, and we interview people

It's sort of like all things development. We're not like just doing code. We talk about things

that matter to developers. And we do code and we do a whole bunch of stuff

Great. And you can find me on Twitter. I do want to say one thing to David

I appreciate, this is more of a compliment for David's show. I appreciate you saying Kathleen Dollard

was a regular person like us, but Kathleen Dollard is not a regular person like us

Kathleen Dollard is really, okay. So let's just, you know, I like to be included in that company

but I wish, you know, just good. So it's a great guest you have

That's true. Great. I've always looked up to Kathleen. So you're right

She's on a higher level than I am for sure. That's great

That's great, guys. Okay. Welcome to the show, guys. We have more people join us

Everybody, welcome to the show. Today on this growth mindset show, we're talking about full stack development and who are full stack developers

If you want to become one, what you have to do to become a full stack developer

so a little background on that full stack development if you look at the number of job

openings at least in the u.s there are a lot more job openings now for full stack development and i

believe the full stack development started recently it's because the way software development has

changed and if you look at the you know you go back like we are all 20 plus years experience in

software development when we go back there used to be different teams let's start with there used

to be like they're still there like data guys right they dbas in database administrators

they usually manage the databases their job was okay you sit in a room where all you are handling

managing all databases so every time we need to update the database create a new database add a

new you know store procedure add queries or make sure the databases are running performance indexing

and all that the database guys all dbas do that and then there is a you know front-end developers

front-end developers are usually they build user interfaces how your software application looks

like right it could be a i i'm i am from windows background so i used to write a lot of win forms

and visual c++ applications and then now move to you know win forms and then wpf and uwp

and then now every you know these days everybody's building web interfaces websites right web pages

or apps so when you look at front end these are the developers who are building these front ends

and there is in between like we sometimes call them back-end developers back-end developers

are actually programmers they write code but they write code that plug plug in between the database

or data sources and UI. So that's kind of we break down this whole software development

you know, like how people work in different parts as a team

But now recently, what happens is, especially if you look at cloud native architecture

in cloud native architecture where one person owns the full stack, means UI, the middle tier, the libraries, the services

and as well as the data. So that's where it's growing more. So companies are saying, listen, guys, we don't have time to deal with UI guys talking to back-end guys taking too much time

So before I go more into details, and I want Andy, you start with that, and then David, you finish with that

What's your perspective on your background and now on this full-stack development in general

Well, I consider myself and have considered myself for years the full stack developer

The thing is just because I believe that it a valuable thing it good to have full stack developers But I want to contrast something you said I still think it very valuable on teams to say wait hang on let split this up

And let's have someone focus on the UI. Let's have someone focus on the middle tier

Maybe someone focuses on the database if that's the way you want to break things down

There's not a one size fits all situation is what I really want to say

um yep i think it's i think it's important to be well-rounded these days um because a lot of times

some of the projects aren't necessarily big enough to have someone to do each one of those parts

i think you really need to look at it as um as a manager like myself is what's the best situation

for this particular team or for this particular uh product or this particular project and uh and

weigh things out that way. David, you want to add that to what Andy said? And obviously

then I'm going to have more questions specific on one of these, you know

Yeah, well, you know, I, you know, when I wrote this article, because I actually worked on it for

a while. And, you know, I started the article because I was looking for a job, I was looking

for a new contract. And I was, you know, every morning or every other morning, I was on LinkedIn

you know, looking at the job postings. And there's all these full stack, full stack, full stack

full stack developers all the time. And then, you know, the list of requirements, you know

and I put them in my article because I, you know, I got one from like one of the movie companies here

in California. And, you know, what they're looking for is a full stack developer. And if you look at

the details, which is in the article, you know, they're actually looking, and I say this in the

article, it sounds like they're looking for the God programmer, right? The programmer who can do

everything and he's perfect at it, right? Yes. Yes. And so that's what the job, you know, posting

sounds like, right? Now, I think we've all been in this business long enough that we know that

that's not what they're really looking for, right? They just spew all this stuff into job posting

hoping they get somebody who has some of it, right? And so my thing, especially with the article

is that software development these days, whether you're doing it in the cloud or not in the cloud

there's so many pieces to it, right? And it's really hard for one person

to be good at all of it, right? And that's why a lot of teams these days have broken down into, you know, this group does this, this group does that

And even in my team at work. So on the product that I work on for a Fortune 25 company, which we released in May, you know, we really only have three developers

And so we have, I'm the architect and developer. And then I have a junior person who helps me with more of the back end things, you know, the services and the database and all that kind of stuff

And then we have a front end developer who does all the website stuff

And that's what he does. And we really don't touch that. And he doesn't really touch our piece right now

Right. Because we're so busy, you know, we just can't cross help things

Right. So even in small teams, this is where things are going

And so, you know, so anyway, to end with, it's just that, you know, the full stack developer

term for some reason bothers me. And I wrote the article and I was hoping the article would help me

discover why it bothers me. And it didn't really. But the good thing is it caused a lot of

comments and postings and people thinking about it. And that's really the point of the article

right? Well, it's one of those things where we all know that there is not, I mean

full stack if you ask me and i want to take your take on andy right in your team you hire i want

you to bring some of your points when you hire this developer what's your team look like what

they do but i work with a lot of developers you know i work in the teams i'm managing teams

different projects i'm managing but in reality i you cannot have a developer who is expert in

everything that's not possible unless you are one of the guys who've been working at it 20 years

and like us who can call ourselves tech because we know the database we know the data we know

how to build apis not just build we also know the best practices we also know the most efficient and

high performance way to build those right and also we know the ui obviously we don't build the ui but

if you ask me I don't ever ever code HTML but at least I understand a little bit like okay I want

this component to be here I want my new project to be in React or is it a Blazor I know that but

I don't really code that so do you think that Andy before you know you start do you all also

think that full stack developers are canned or lead developers they are not like a developer who

one or two years experience because in reality they cannot really be there

Yeah, I think you make some really good points. First of all, I think one thing we can probably

all agree on, I don't think it's possible to be sort of like what we would call a junior

full stack developer, right? Because there just hasn't been enough time. I mean no disrespect to

junior developers who are dabbling in all kinds of different things. But the whole concept that a

a full stack developer. And David's article talks a lot about being proficient in all these things

That's a lot to expect from anyone at like a junior level. That's just too much

So when I hire people, one of the things I noticed, by the way, and this plays right along

with this, is that the interview process is getting longer and longer and longer. I don't

mean the process like it takes months. What I mean is the interview itself used to be 30 minutes

and then it went to 45 minutes, an hour, and an hour and a half, because there's so much

to talk about these days. It's really hard. Mahesh, I think what you were hinting on

is sort of the full stack architect, meaning that you're saying you know all these basic areas. You

don't code in HTML, you said, right? But you are familiar with it enough, and you might make certain

decisions about what frameworks to use and things like that. And maybe we can consider that's the

other end of the spectrum. You know, we can say that, again, no disrespect that a junior developer

can't really be full stack. It's just a lot to expect. But an architect can be somewhat of a

full stack architect. Now, then we get into the middle. And I think that's where the that's where

things get complicated. We do hire what I would consider full stack developers, we expect them to

be pretty good at, you know, .NET and the, you know, middle layer, understanding APIs

and understanding you know building applications building the business logic in C That the language that we use right Then we expect them to know the database we don expect them to be proficient at database not like a dba level but writing your own sql writing your

own queries and those kind of things and building uh structures in sql and we uh we do expect them

to know um some of the uh you know front-end technologies as well whether that be mvc or

or Angular or something like that. So we do hire full stack developers

but the tricky thing is managing your expectations of how great you expect them to be

And to be fair, we don't generally hire what I would consider someone at the junior level

Again, that's not a knock on juniors, it's basically the situation we're in

hiring full stack people, you can't hire junior people, right? And that's a problem there too, by the way

I recognize that. and even in my article you know the the posting that i put in the article you know they wanted

you know the god programmer with five years experience right yes and and pay and pay is

probably really low right right well actually i put the pay on there it was one cent yeah so yeah

so let's yeah so i think you know sometimes in i'm sure you have heard those terms mean and lean

You know, mean is, you know, start with MongoDB Express and, you know, Angular and Node.js, right

So that's kind of mean stack. So when, you know, I work with the startups, right

I work with the startup. I work on a small project. So in a startup, you know, you don't really have three kinds of programmers

It's usually one guy start and he does everything, right? to start from your little bit database, little bit of APIs or direct calls, your code direct

node.js and build the Angular or React UI, right? So that's where this came from, a lot of this full stack development, because they expect

you to know everything about this whole mean stack. And there is a question somebody asked, what is full stack

So the full stack, let's start with that quick. David, you start quick, like briefly

Can you briefly explain to people what Fullstack is? And then, Andy, you can finish that

Well, to me, Fullstack means the different layers of programming that we do

And I've written about this a lot on C Sharp Corner. And, you know, the layers are basically, you know, the back end database layer

And then you have a, you know, you have a business layer, communications layer, presentation layer

So I kind of look at the full stack developer as those layers that I've been teaching for 25 years

But in my article, I do basically roll them up into three

There's the backend developer, which I consider myself mostly a backend developer now, even though I am full stack, but I really focus on the backend

And then there's the front end developer, right, who does all the UI and the apps and stuff like that

And then there's the middleware developer who does, you know, you know, more of the communication pieces and maybe things like that

So so I kind of laid them out in the article. But full stack to me means, yeah, everything, you know, including identity, identity

And yeah. Yep. Andy, you want to add that? Yeah, I can add a little bit to that. I certainly agree with that with that definition

I would expand upon it a little bit, which is to say that I think it's important for a full stack developer to understand the platform that these column services are hosted on and things like that

So if it's on Windows, if it's in Azure, they do need to understand those platforms and maybe not to be an admin level knowledge on those things, but certainly to be able to do the basic troubleshooting and to help out with that

And, you know, I'm going to complicate this even more and say DevOps, maybe DevOps fits into the full stack developer, right? Full stack developer on small teams is working with pipelines and CICD and those aspects as well. And so I'm actually expanding it out even a little broader than David. And I, you know, I still believe in it

yeah so let's you know so when you think of a full stack developer what is your minimum

years of experience like roughly i'm not saying exact obviously somebody will learn faster than

others so if you have to look at the developer say okay resume comes to you and this person has

that many you know if you have that many years experience you're like this guy cannot be a full

sectoral firm. Do you ever look at that? I don't know. I try to be pretty careful with

things about like years. Certainly there are some minimums, right? And as I said earlier

it's pretty hard to hire someone that we want to have experience in all these different areas

that's got two, three years of experience. It happens, right? And it can be there

I think what's important to me is passion and desire. And so if someone wants to be a full stack developer on the team and they're really good at some of the aspects of it, which is usually the case, people have like their strong sides

Then we say, well, do they have that passion? Are they really interested in learning these other parts? Right

And how does that how does that balance out the team? So if we have, let's say there's three developers on the team and they happen to be really good at UI, but they're full stack developers, but their strengths are UI

And then we have another person comes in who's maybe looking for a position and they are not quite full stack developer, but their strength is UI

Then that's not really going to complement the team really well. On the flip side, if we said, wow, this person's really good at like backend stuff and they haven't really done UI, but they want to get into the UI, there's an opportunity

There's a fit where everybody can learn from each other and everybody can work together. And so I think there's a gray area when you look at it's not always a decision based on a single person, but the needs of the team

But in general, we'd be looking for someone who has, you know, a few years experience

Usually we're looking for developers with around the five-year mark. And again, we don't put the word proficient in there, David, right

But we're looking for five years with experience in – I mean, I'm not proficient at anything, I don't think

I don't know. You know, some of the terms, resumes are – we could just spend hours bashing how resume – not resume, sorry, not resumes, job postings

anything that they ask for is you know that's just classic stuff you know i hope that all right so

looks looks like we have a good comment here that kind of summarizes it so um guys what we will do

is uh we're going to take a minute or two two minutes break and we will be back and we will

continue to talk about full stack development and how to become a full stack developer or

pretend to become a full stack developer you don't need to be at least you need to know

and what are other tips, other things you need to look for when you are applying for a job that's so-called full stack developer

Obviously, as David said, full stack developer is like a superman. You know, he knows he can do everything, but all those people exist there, right

Or this is just a hoax. So we're going to continue to talk about this after this break

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Welcome back to the growth mindset show. go ahead David you go ahead let's do it it's out of tune yeah yeah welcome to the show guys uh today

we are talking about full stack development if you are joining us first time this uh this growth

mindset show is every uh friday 10 a.m eastern um again this show is actually for you uh so our goal

is if you have any question on your mind it can be any kind of question around software development

just feel free to post a question okay there's no question it's just called bad question or

stupid question or you know just feel free to ask us any questions here today I have a guest with me

Andy Schwarm David McCarter both are very experienced guys Microsoft MVPs I would say

we all three have 20 plus years experience in software development working for different

companies. So you guys can ask any questions you have. And today, let's continue talking about this

growth in full stack development. In the meantime, David, do you have any, you want to play something

for us? No, my guitar is out of tune, but maybe while Andy's talking, I'll get a different one

Maybe that one's in tune. All right. I do want to go back just a little bit, and I would want to

say two quick things that I do talk about in the article. And one is you guys were talking earlier

and I say this at the end of the article, that if you want to say full stack architect

I'm totally cool with that, right? Because that's really what I'm at. That's what I am now

really, in reality, is a full stack architect, right? And because I've done all the stacks

you know, throughout my career. And I've been, you know, programming for close to 30 years now

And so and then the other thing is, you know, I taught at the university here for about 18 years

And, you know, and I actually got, you know, the .NET program. I was teaching .NET a year before it

came out, you know, because of me and accredited classes a year before, you know, .NET came out. But

But anyway, but, you know, in those classes, you know, especially the beginner classes, you know, students would always ask me, OK, what what classes should I take after I learn the language

Right. You know, you know, because then we have, you know, database classes and front end classes and things like that

And I told them all the time that, you know, kind of go first to the thing you're most interested in

Right. So if you're more interested in data and things like that, then learn that first

Right. If you're more interested in websites, learn that first. Right. And once you become good at that, then start learning the other stacks

Right. But if you try to learn everything at one time, that's going to be really difficult

It's going to be a daunting task and you're probably going to give up. Right. And so it comes to experience

Yeah, it comes with experience. Yeah. Yeah. So that so I've been recommending that to students forever now. And and that's what I'm recommending to everybody here, too, especially if you're a junior

And even the junior person on my team who helps me with this, you know, the product that we have at this company, you know, I've talked to her about the same thing

And she told me recently, you know, when we were talking about this, that she really is is in wants to learn machine learning and data and AI and things like that

and that's what she's going to go for first is that part of the stack right yeah so that's great

um so i want to go back a little bit more um on the you know how we come as a full stack as you

said david architect right i when you say architect if you ask me i expect them to know everything

so they are automatically full stack right because they have to know that they have to make sure the

UI is done right. They have to make sure the APIs and services are done right. They have to know the

data architecture is done right because otherwise it's not going to work, right? But I think we are

here talking about the developers, which companies, businesses are expecting them to be hands-on

Not only they have to create the database table, they have to create the queries

They have to create the API or service. And also they have to create the UI

And in NDU, I want to take on that after that, because we come from a background where we used to have this, say, N tier, N layer architecture, right

You have a website. In website, you have a database, right? Database connected through DB layer

And there is a business layer where you put all business logic. And then there are UI

and in the past we would have a ui developer they are expert in ui they are good at creating visual

screens in html and css or esp.net and now there's a back-end guys will they'll write all the code to

business layer and db layer and also work direct with database sometimes they will do most database

work as well right so it's like back-end and front-end so now that's used to call like you

our architecture was you call it layered architecture or tiered architecture right here

or has hardware involved obviously but what I want to get more into it and then you can jump in here

is that you know other day we had a show on cloud we had a conference on cloud and one of the

two things came out of me you know when you look at today's architecture is one is cloud native

architecture and other ones could they there are term called microservices architecture now cloud cloud native now includes microservices and one of the

thing which Vidya he also he works for Microsoft he an architect so he basically and I agree with him how these microservices architectures work is that one person is actually responsible for all parts of that module

So, for example, if you are a developer in the team and customer module is assigned to you, you are not going to build the customer screen or the customer API, but you'll also be building the sum of the data part or data backend code for the customer as well

so that's where it becomes a tricky that and i believe they these guys have to be senior guys

they cannot be junior guys you want to start with the start with that like how to compare

these two architectures and where we going now you're asking me i think yeah you start and then

i'm going to ask david is that i have other questions for david okay really quickly i do

want to know, I'm scanning the chat and, you know, I do see a lot of questions coming by

things like, you know, well, but I'm proficient or I want to be proficient in one area

Can I have a good career at that? Certainly. Yeah. Let's take some questions. Yeah. We can

take some questions. Yeah. I just want to make sure like this is not a one size fits all solution

Right. But what we can talk about is what we see as common and, you know, certain certain paths

So you were talking about different architectures and different stacks and things like that

And where does the full stack fit in? When you're talking about microservices and you're saying that one person would be responsible for a whole component within that microservice

you could argue that that's like a full stack developer within the component, right

Because maybe within that component in the microservice, they're accessing data, they're processing data, they're, you know, who knows what kind of business logic is in there

There's probably not UI. I think that's a safe bet. But they're like full stack as well, right

I don't know that there's a – I'm trying to sort of piece apart the question you were asking and figure out if there's really – if it matters

I don't know if it matters whether it's microservices or if it's a cloud architecture

Can you be full stack? Yeah, and it's okay. Let's go. We can just jump on some questions and take questions for David

Simon, you want to put some questions up here? So that's a good question

Go ahead, David. You want to take this question? So if you have experience in desktop and web development

and you can deploy it, is that full stack? My first reaction is no

No. definitely yeah i agree yeah that's that's that's the front-end work and and deploying front-end work

um is it's not really full stack to me really but i don't know i don't know what you guys think

well i don't want to i don't want to i i don't think you meant this at all but we don't want

to discredit this person no no yeah right right i know you you know you meant that right like that's

a great developer that can take the requirements build an application uh and deploy it that still

isn't quite full stack. That's a different term, right? I don't know what that is. That's like

you know, still someone with like a variety of experiences. There's a difference between

you know, like that whole aspect of the kind of developer that can work as a solo developer

and they can take the requirement, and they can build an application, and they can test

it themselves and things like that. The stack is more about the various platforms and the various

sort of components within the application is really more the stack. I earlier mentioned

maybe I confused the topic a little bit because earlier I mentioned, like, I expect full stack

developers to be able to develop pipelines and do deployments as well. But that's just

you know, another part of the nature of like the world we're in where a full stack developer just

really does a lot of stuff um you know there's a lot of gray areas in this yeah yeah and again

when you look at even though at david you said and i want to go back to you now after this

when you are applying looking for these jobs and positions and they're saying oh we are hiring a

full stack developer if i'm hiring a full stack developer i i don't really ever post i never post

called full stack developer as in my job postings what i do is i'll say senior.net software developer

okay when i say that then i will clearly specify oh you should know blazer you should know c sharp

nine you should know this and you should know a little bit sql right if you know all that you know

sql you know.net you know how to write a you know say web api and then you can write a blazer code

To me, this becomes a full stack in .NET ecosystem. Yeah, that's true

And I'm sorry, what was your question again? I'm sorry. So my question was, does this make sense that if when you look at the full stack development, right, there's a job posting there

And they say, oh, we want full stack developer. And they put everything in the job requirement

That's probably the most confusing part that whoever is posting the jobs, they are putting everything in there

Right. And that's kind of what I talked about in the article is that, you know, they say full stack, but then, you know, their requirements are just kind of insane

You know, and someone called me insane in the chat. So I'm going to call job postings insane

OK, because you have to discount most of what's in there, really

And and and so I don't know who writes these job postings

I don't know if it's HR or what, but I can't believe a really good development manager writes these job postings

Right. And so and this is the confusion, I think, is with that word

And I was just thinking and maybe this is why I had to ask you the question again, is that, you know, I was thinking that, you know

I was trying to rack my brain. And so far, you know, I can't think of any company where your title is full stack developer

right? No, your title is going to be, you know, developer two or three or senior developer or lead developer

something like that. But I don't think anybody says full stack developer at their company

Right. No, no, no. I never seen that. Yeah. We were having an interesting conversation at work the other day

I say at work, but we're not really at work. But we were talking about various people on the team

and it's interesting because the title doesn't really reflect what their knowledge is

We were actually talking about there was an individual, and can an individual get promoted to, let's say, senior if they're not full-stack developer

This is actually kind of the thing. We weren't talking about full stack at the time, but when I reflect back on it, that's

what we were getting at. And it like certainly you can The job title is the job title It your level of proficiency But then we still need to know within that within our pool of talent that some people have areas of different things

I mean, one senior developer and another senior developer don't necessarily know all the same things. Right

What regardless of it? And I think the title I've never seen the title as full stack developer. Maybe there's places that work that way

Okay, so here is a question. Continue with that. Take the question as well, right

Can you look at this question and see what you think? The company told me, since I do have Angular or React, I cannot consider as full stack

I am an architect. I have 15 years experience. I have MVC and MVVM experience

I also work on Windows and Web. They said since he does have Angular, he's not full stack

That actually seems like maybe it was a typo. That seems to be the contrast

I would think if, what all the things that were listed there, that person sounds pretty full stack

I mean, again, does database fit in there? I don't know, right

So, you know, I think Victor has a question there. When you say full stack

full stack is really one of the stacks, right? You can have a .NET stack. You can have, you know

mean stack. You can have a lean, you know, lean stack, right

So depending on that, if you have mean, you expect, you know, there are four parts in that, right

MongoDB, Express, and then Angular and Node.js. Node.js is for backend, right

MongoDB is the database, Express is backend, you know, middle of JavaScript, and then you got Angular as your frontend

So it's one stack, and I expect, if you look at a full stack developer, I expect that developer to know all those things

Um, so, but I think the confusion comes is that all of us are not expert and proficient in all these things. And we can only be there more like a 80% backend, 20% UI, right

Yeah. Great. You know, and you have to play to your strengths. It's important to have strengths within that, I think

Yeah. To be proficient in all those things, I would like to be that person, but I'm not, right

And I think let's not raise up imposter syndrome in everyone that's watching this right now and thinking that, you know, some of us consider ourselves full stack and we must be so great

And maybe they think to themselves, well, I'm not that great. I'm not full stack

Let's not introduce imposter syndrome here. No one's a proficient at everything

No. Yeah. And it's important to have strengths within these areas because teams rely on that

The teams, it's nice to know that one person on the team is the person that can really help sort of tweak that DB query

Because, sure, I'm full stack, but I'm not like the most proficient in yzing the query plans and things like that

But there's one person on the team who's full stack. But, wow, I can go to them when I have that query problem

And I'm making this example up. But that's beautiful. To me, that's a beautiful situation

So that's a question for you, David, here. I hear one question. No

No, you can't. We just talked about this. You can learn about it, but you can't do it

Yeah. You can learn what full stack is, but I agree. Full stack, really, you probably have to have minimum, I would say

four or five years of experience before I consider even interviewing for a so-called full stack developer

Yeah. And one thing I want to bring up really quick is that, you know, I state this, I think, in the beginning of the article is that, you know, 20 years ago, you know, even before .NET came out, you know, we didn't have that term

But, you know, we were pretty much all of us were full stack developers

We were doing everything back then. And especially, and I write this in the article because I targeted back then startups

And so you kind of have to do that. But I also state in the article is that programming back then actually was a lot easier

You know, we didn't have so many platforms. We didn't have mobile

We didn't have smartphones back then, right? You know, we didn't have smart TVs

You know, we didn't have Apple Watches and things like that. And so nowadays, you know, trying to do an application, I mean, you know, a full end to end application with one person is really going to be difficult

Yeah. And I agree with that. If you look at the Windows applications we were writing, we were doing pretty much everything, except that sometimes maybe database was done by DBAs

Right. But we will write queries there. There was no SQL store box at that time

Or you will write SQL query direct in your code. Right. And then your business logic is there in one developer

It was pretty much kind of like a, what we call it, you know, modular approach

Every one guy was writing everything. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I had this thought during the show here

as we were talking about this, I'm going to throw out this theory. I don't know if you think. I think going back to the earlier days when I was a programmer and we had that hardcore DBA

and that DBA made all the changes to the structure of the tables and things like that

and you submitted those requests, and it took like a week. Remember those days? It took like a week. Yep

The DBA. I'm not bashing DBAs here, but, well, maybe I am. Those DBAs

I think that is where full stack development started. When people started saying, I can do the database stuff too

developers wanted to do that because they didn't want to wait a week for that change to go into the

database and that's what we used to have to deal with uh i think that is sort of the beginning of

the what we're calling full stack today where a developer said i can do that too can you let me

do that so i can make my own changes and move quicker yeah and yeah and i think there's more

databases now like mongodb they don't need you go to like really own have a heavy machine where

You have to have 250 MB of RAM running. This is not Oracle where you have to install

It's going to take three days to install. Now you just have seconds on the cloud and click button and your DB is ready

You want what? You want SQL web, Azure web. So to me, developers just now go direct and I agree with you

Work with databases. They don't need DBs at all right now, frankly speaking

Well, there's still a value of that, right? It's good to have someone. It is, it is, but let's say it might

Yeah. Application stack, it's not so important, right? In our organization, we have a DBA

and we have a whole bunch of teams of developers. And on those individual sort of teams

and in the stack that they're concerned with, a DBA isn't as necessary, right

But they may consult that one DBA that we have, but that one DBA keeps things going

and, you know, tweaks things from time to time. And I think what you talking about Mahesh is a great point It all about like abstraction and tooling And thanks to the various layers of abstraction and tooling and things like that that we have on top of things

it's made it easier for us to be able to work in all aspects of this. If it wasn't for those things

like you said, the idea of like what it used to take to set up a database and manage that database

was a full-time job. Like no question about it. We needed that

Yep. So here's a question for you, David. Good on API and learn that way. We suggest great career

Good to be good on Web API and learn it that way. Well, you know, that this I think this question kind of goes back to, you know, what I was saying before about how what I recommended to my students is that, you know, it is overwhelming

right? And that's what I stated. And so, you know, if you want to learn, you know, web API really well

you know, do that and then start learning the other stacks, right? And I do want to go back

real quick because I know we're getting close on time is that someone asked, is there always good

to have a good DBA? And my answer is 1000% yes, right? With it, especially when you're dealing

with relational databases, right? And I've written about this. I've talked about this until I'm blue in the face

And that is most developers, I'm not going to say all, but most developers should not be touching the database, right

Yeah, I mean, yes and no, right? In bigger companies and bigger applications, yes

But usually if you're working on a smaller project, keep in mind, a lot of work is just smaller websites, right

They're being built just smaller websites where you don't really, they can't even afford the DBA

The company cannot even afford to have a full-time DBA. And that's the reality

I'm not talking about the Fortune 500 companies, right? I'm talking about some small company that has, you know

few to five developers. They cannot have full-time DBA, you know what I mean? So that's where I think developers should be

They expect at least senior developer to take that role of understanding the requirement

gather the data points and create the databases. Yeah, that's true. And yes, you're totally right

You know, in smaller companies, you know, that's really hard to do. Right

But even with that, you know, with small companies, I've even helped some of my DBA friends go

into those small companies on a contract basis and fix up their database and fix their indexes

and things like that. So you can reach out to a consultant and have them, you know, fine tune your database and

things like that. So you don't have to have someone 100% on board. Yeah. Correct. So there's

another question. Let's start with that. Andy, you can take and we can chime in here. What is your

opinion on emerging tech like AngularJS and I would say React and all these new things? Sure

That's a great question, first of all. So you have to embrace new technologies. Everything we're

talking about was a new technology at some point. Let's just try to say

And there will always be new technologies. Now, AngularJS may be a bit of a stretch to call that emerging, right

I think Angular is almost like a standard at this point, is React and some of these platforms

The tricky part to me, we have to embrace these things. As developers, first of all, it's also really exciting

and it's fun to learn new things all the time. And they can make our products that we build better

The tricky part is finding a balance. I talk about this a lot with teams, is that you want to find a balance and be careful when you introduce new things

When you find the right time to introduce something new, I think it's a great thing

You want to be careful, I think, a little bit to make sure something has gotten a level of adoption, that it's been sort of becoming the real thing

And I remember, and you guys probably remember, you know, years ago, a couple of years ago when it was Angular versus React

And we weren't sure if these things were going to stick. And there was a new JavaScript framework coming out every two weeks, right

And eventually, Angular, I think, really sort of shined and grew out of that

And React, I think, if my timeline is right, came along a little bit after that, but now has totally, you know, gone on to become a huge thing

But along the way, there were these little frameworks that some of them didn't really stick

They might have been great, but they didn't get traction. And this is something I think about as a as a manager, as an architect is like not introducing things that may become like some kind of technical debt for us

You know, a year later when, you know, it's not really popular

But oh, yeah. I'm embracing emerging technology and things like that. It's just it's fabulous

It's a great thing to do. Yeah. And to add to that, it's growing. Angular, React, even Vue is now there's more jobs coming in Vue

Those are the three. One thing you have to be careful with these new technologies

I mean, I don't call Angular and React as new emerging anymore because almost every company is building applications in Angular and React

As a matter of fact, Angular and React are now number one and number two depends on which one is as a front end web development

if you ask me all the applications now i'm building literally with five clients they're

all either angular or react right blazer blazer is coming there but i i yeah it's it's a let's see

let's see what happens to brazier i love blazer obviously i have my c-sharp background but when

you talk to companies when you talk to a real enterprises uh they're not so keen into it yet

we are as a hobby I start learning and writing that's great you know but even react is I you

know I recently I'm not a front-hand developer but I start looking at react it really you know

I'm a c-sharp guy I don't like javascript and this is like if I look at react and took me literally

15 minutes I'm like wow this is great I can literally write a component which is actually a

class and similar to c sharp and i was like wow this is this is interesting so it got me into

into web development front end development just for fun i wasn't really good building applications

um so anyway there's another question keep coming is that can you become a master full

stack development in four to five months no tech studio no i think you need several years four

five years even or more to become an expert or master in full stack development and you may that

may not be enough you know can i jump in on that i don't think yeah me i want to be really clear to

the audience and i don't want to be uh condescending to anybody but i think we should be clear at what

it means to become a master at and proficient at something because i see this a lot yeah to be

honest i don't think you can possibly become a master in any one of these things not not full

stack at any one of these things in four to five months

Because in four to five months, you haven't really lived through enough of the problems

enough of the pain points to find what worked well and what didn't work well

And to be a master at something, we're talking about a deep dive knowledge

We're talking about understanding the parts of the, let's say, the API that you haven't used yet, right

The various stress points within this framework or something like that. I think the word master here and proficient is really getting thrown around like too much

OK, yeah, I would say if you have four months experience at anything, I mean, we could talk about baking cakes

if you've been doing it for four months I say great that's four more months than me but I don't

think you're a master uh at uh at that you know you haven't a proficient skill there yet because

you just haven't lived through enough of the circumstances and that's 100 100 agree and I

think we will close that with go ahead David you have last minute and then we will do your guitar

we are running out of the time now oh my guitar is out of tune so don't worry about that I'll do

it next time. But the one thing I want to say is we have so many comments. I think we need to do

another one of these. No, that's definitely a great topic. And David has written an article

You still have more questions, go to C Sharp Corner and post comment there. He can or we all

can reply there as well Yeah And you know what I just want to say that article got over a thousand reads in the last day Yeah You know lot of people are interested in this I think No that definitely one of the fastest read articles going on

And a lot of social media is really going on there too. So that's the reason we took this show, right

Because it looks like there were a lot of questions. And if you look at it, David has a good comment here, right

here right so he's saying he has 25 years in software dev like all of us and he's mastering

none exactly and that agrees with all of us and you know andy as you said it's hard to master

anything this is not like a black belt when you go to certain degree do certain tricks and you

become a black belt right this is even you know.net guess what tomorrow there's new.net

feature coming up. You have to know that. Well, you know, I've been playing guitar for

what, 40 years more, I think. And I'm not a master. I never will be a master. But I keep trying

to be one every week, right? So because I practice and learn new songs and I write new songs all the

time. So I'm never going to be a master of that. And I've met some of the top guitarists in this

world and they would say the same thing. All right We will take one more question last question And there no more questions after this guys We running out of time So one more question for both of you Five years experience in What should you expect If you are interviewing a five years guy what do you expect from them Each of you

Yeah, I don't think we can start without talking about some basic things. Five years experience. If you're not familiar and comfortable with generics, then you should be. To me, that's almost like a gateway thing. That's one of the first things I look for

So it certainly should be experienced and have a good understanding of something like Entity Framework, which is sort of a subset of things

But I think that a lot of organizations look for that. Certainly understanding Link very well

I mean, there's so many aspects to it. Right. But I think certain ones are left out

That's the first things that come to my mind. I know we're short on time here. David, one minute. And if you're interviewing five year experience, developer.net, what would you expect

Well, I don't want to go into the language specific stuff, but I would expect a couple things

One is that they're at least experienced in the full development lifecycle, right

And they've done that multiple times. You know they released a product multiple times You know I not expecting them to be a full stack developer but at least go through that software development process multiple times and understand how that process works really

well, I think is one of the things I look for, especially in somebody with five years experience

they should know that. All right, both of you, it was a great session. We learned a lot about

full stack development. It was amazing to have you both back. And thank you so much. And you

have a great weekend and safe, actually safe weekend. Don't forget about my show tomorrow

10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. All right, guys. Thank you all. Thank you, everybody

for joining us. See you again next Friday, 10 a.m. Eastern. Bring your questions. Thank you

Thanks for having me. Thank you

Thank you