As a fullstack developer I don’t appreciate you calling me out like this. Write an efficient SQL query you framework monkeys.
But also, this is very true.
DROP TABLE
That seems like a pretty efficient query!
I see you’ve met my boy Bobby
I hope you’ve learned to sanitize your inputs
Where’s my trusty CASCADE?
Not understanding SQL (and in some cases NoSQL DBs) and the underlying database are a reason that so many full stack devs suck. Just because they use an ORM, they think the database work is magically solved, until they realize it’s just doing what they’re telling it to do and their lack of DB understanding has created an awful database structure. And then a DBA comes in, and then the entire ORM layer has to be scrapped because it’s trash, so on and so forth. A full stack engineer doesn’t have to be a DBA, but they sure as hell need to know what the ORM is doing to their data they are CRUDing
And then a DBA comes in
I’m convinced that’s a mythical being. In my 20+ years of experience I’ve never encountered one.
They don’t write sql they just use some god awful orm or cram it all into a nosql db.
Backend Requirements: “When x,y goes in, I want x+y to come out!” - Okay
Frontend Requirements: “Well it needs to be more user-friendly, and have this rockstar wow effect” - Yea wtf are you even talking about? You want me to add random glitter explosions, because I found a script for that, that’s pretty ‘wow effect’ right?
Real back-end requirements: when x, y goes in (in JSON-as-an-XML-CDATA-block because historical reasons), I want you to output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.
æ will require you yo compile x+y in CSV, email it to Jenny, who will email back the answer. She doesn’t quite know how to export excel sheets though so you’d better build a robust validator. No, we don’t know what æ is supposed to look like, Rob from Frontend knows but he’s on vacation for the next 8 months.
The request must be processed under 100 ms as the frontend team won’t be able to prioritize asynchronous loading for another 10 sprints and we don’t want the webpage to freeze.
And why does your API return a 400 when I send a picture of my feet? Please fix urgently, these errors are polluting my monitoring dashboard and we have KPIs on monitoring alerts.
Clearly fake. No task ever includes anything but the happy path. Loading or failure states are a myth
output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.
I’m sure there’s an npm module for that.
Yea, fair enough. My point was mostly: backend requirements are usually at least objective. “Json xml comes in”, “CSV goes out by email”, “The request must be processed under 100 ms”, “API should not return 400 on feetpics” - these are still mostly objective requirements.
Frontend requirements can be very subjective “The user should have a great user experience with the frontend”
Hahaha that’s what frontend devs think, but the backend requirements are just as vague: “Just make this button work”. In my example all the requirements would actually be figured out bit by bit over months, nevermind the prescience required to foresee future architecture-breaking features or scaling requirements. At least you can make a mockup and get instant feedback, flawed as it is.
On either side it takes experienced engineers to suss out actual requirements from customers/PMs. The main difference is that the backend (especially on the infra/devops side) is only accountable to itself if everything goes well, but ironically that means no-one knows or cares about the amount of engineering that goes into keeping PMs blissfully ignorant of the risks and complexity.
Hahaha that’s what frontend devs think
Hahah, well as a primarily backend developer, that’s what I think as well.
“Just make this button work”
If that button doesn’t work, that sounds like a frontend problem to me… ;)
But yea, as you mentioned, it probably comes down to experience. As the meme from this post depicts. When I dabble in frontend and make a WinForm for my devtool, people just look at me and are like “Uhhh, can you make it better?”
No sir, clearly I can not. And I have no idea what you mean with “better”.
twitches
This is fine.
I am fine with this.
Actually the front end stuff is more like “we need to make the ‘sign in’ button bigger. No one can click it because it’s tiny, and it’s in German.”
I spent years as a mobile developer and the thing that always drove me the most nuts was being handed a software design with lots of tiny buttons that were nearly impossible to tap with a finger. I generally implemented the UI by increasing the size of the tappable regions (without increasing the apparent size of the buttons) making it actually usable, but one time the designer discovered that I was doing this and went apeshit and convinced the project manager to order me to undo all this and make the tappable regions the same size as the buttons. The grounds for this was that implementing the larger tappable regions would take too much extra time - despite the fact that this had already been done and it took additional time to undo it.
So wait you actually had to undo it all? What kind of designer would make mobile buttons small?
I usually just do what they requested and when they come to complain I just tell them “well, you’re the one who requested this” and pull up receipts. My DM to myself on Slack is filled with screenshots and links to confirmations for bullshit requests that the product team made.
My DM to myself on Slack is filled with screenshots and links to confirmations for bullshit requests that the product team made.
How good does it feel when you pull out those screenshots to say, ‘no u’?
What kind of designer would make mobile buttons small?
Have you ever used a mobile app? Every commercial mobile app I’ve ever used has tons of tiny fucking buttons.
Someone who has tiny fingers
Fucking apeshit craze-balls, makes sense, business as usual.
Marketing want us to add more typos to make the site feel more “friendly”.
As a SaaS founder I’m now wondering if this actually works. Will have to talk to the front-end devs on Monday.
Plese donot
Please don’t
Isn’t our main audience German? If you wanted non German stuff you shoulda asked for regional translations. Not only is that a change request, but you’re gonna be pushing the release window by months.
But it doesn’t even say “Sign in” in German. It says “Das Bootton” because someone thought it would be funny and never changed it.
That someone was RIGHT!
Man, if only backend demands were algebraically tractable. Often they’re related to frontend demands that may or may not make backend sense, since the frontend is all users see.
Yeah if you have shitty UX people frontend will just built what they’re told. Or actually more often, you could have really talented UX people and management decisions are like “needs more buy now buttons, the 3 visible on the screen aren’t enough.” Shit flows downhill
Yeah that’s not a real back end
6 E Q U J 5 wow!
I can’t be the only person who thinks “full stack” translates to “master of nothing.” One of the best career moves I ever made was shrug off the pressure to go full stack, and dedicate myself to backend only.
Full stack means we do it because nobody else will.
I feel seen.
I might get that sentence embroidered on a pillow.
You don’t have to be a full stack dev for that to happen to you
No, but when it does happen, you’ll probably turn into one.
When it happens? That happened to me a long time ago. I’m still a backend developer. I can create UIs and I can spin up and manage docker CI infrastructure but I sure as hell don’t want to. A properly run company team should have separate professionals for UX, front end, back end, sysadmin, etc. Just because I am capable of doing those things does not mean I should.
Just because I am capable of doing those things does not mean I should.
This is the crux of why so many companies, especially smaller and medium sized ones, are a hot mess. capable of << good at, but of course it’s cheaper to just get johnny to do everything.
I think knowing about frontend is important for a senior or higher level engineer. I would expect someone at that level to be able to contribute where necessary, and know enough to make sane decisions and know when those decisions impact backend/frontend. But to be equally good at both isn’t reasonable
A backend engineer that has adequately put in the time to operate at a senior level, will more than likely have worked closely enough with FE to check those boxes. They should be familiar with technical design and processes, which if done effectively, teach an engineer to ask those questions.
“I’m capable of not making a fool of myself with UI” does not equate to “I’m a full stack developer”
As someone who likes to dip their toes into everything, I feel a bit called out by “master of nothing”.
My apologies. My intention wasn’t a dig at engineers themselves, but rather the trend of employers seeking “full stack” engineers, and the implications of them shopping for a singular engineer willing to do the job of multiple engineers-- IE be taken advantage of, and the first to be let go, because of a lack of specialized domain knowledge, etc.
No worries. Wasn’t really offended. ;)
Fuck that employer behavior, though.
The truth is that there is value in both a generalist and a specialist.
It just means he can’t do it by himself.
Yours won’t be perfect, but you can do the whole thing by yourself.
Why would I want to do it by myself, in a professional team setting?
In my case, it was to increase the number of available job opportunities rather than any genuine interest.
My company started with full stack devs only and we’ve transitioned to specialized back end and front end since we realized that 1 specialized BE Engineer and 1 specialized FE Engineer can work faster with better quality than having 2 Full Stack Engineers.
Thank goodness issues respect the FE/BE break out.
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In my experience it’s normally frontend programmers that go full stack.
Exactly, this meme is backwards
It works in either direction.
That would make sense. They’re both very different from the other.
In my experience, that bottom image is equally applicable when Front End devs go Full Stack lol
Frontend dev here, can confirm. Last week I had to look at some Java code and was instantly greeted by some AbstractFactoryBuilderImpl. Nightmare fuel if you ask me.
Yeah, it’s accurate both ways
Most disciplines get more specialized as they evolve. Full Stack goes against that trend, and this meme points at the problem with that. I don’t think it’s going to last.
Overspecialisation can also suck eggs. Interdisciplinary research is trendy in science for the that reason. Even I occasionally read a paper and can see they’re missing some basic fact from another field or subfield that totally undercuts their result.
I sometimes wish my employer didn’t know that I can write Python code, so that I would never be assigned front-end work. I prefer to deal with programs that take lists of numbers and return lists of other numbers.
(I’m not as bad as one guy I used to work with, because at least I accept ASCII input. His backend code only took binary-encoded configuration files for no reason I can think of except maybe to punish anyone except himself who tried to use it.)
Who is using python for frontend?
Flask and django I assume
Isn’t that backed code? Unless your using templating…
You could do templating with jinja, or do some data visualization with bokeh. I think there’s also something called dash. I don’t know much about any of them though.
definitely not what people are talking about when they say front end though
If flask is frontwnd then im a full stack developer and definatly not some little code monky server raw html forms written by chatgpt with normatting.
Using streamlit works suprisingly well for frontend
There’s pytermgui for cli.
I’m terrified by this binary config file. Why?! Was he writing C and said “fuck it, memcpy”?
Edit: I suppose it would be more like “fuck it, fprintf(f, (char*)my_config_object, sizeof(my_config_object))”
I mean, python has pickle and people use that to store config. It’s a weird practice, and totally unsafe, but it works well enough. This wouldn’t be that different.
This meme is backwards
le front end not actual work amirite
This is the dumbest trope. It’s not the same kind of job, or even very coding-ish, but all the frontends I’ve made are horrifyingly ugly, and I hated making them.
If you hear ‘full stack’, run.
What I was told by a fellow student, while I was writing my thesis (paraphrased).
It may suggest the company doesn’t want to hire the appropriate amount of engineers, with the appropriate expertise, and instead want a mule. It also may suggest that product quality is a low priority.
Came here to ask if I’m the only one grossed out by the term “full stack” and its exploitative implications. Thanks for explaining why :3
Hey, maybe they make up the difference in “exposure” or something! That’s a well-loved way to ask for free/underpaid work!
I love shitting on Fullstack devs as much as the next guy. However, sometimes it really just does make sense for an (often internal) product maintained by a one-person team, and it doesn’t have to mean that the organization doesn’t value them. I’ve seen it happen.
However I would not recommend it as a career path because it’s essentially impossible to tell what you’re getting into when you get hired. Could be what I just described, could be that you inherit the full responsibility for a 20 year-old perl+php5+xhtml+angularJS mess.
I think it can only truly make sense if you work independently and get to build projects to your own quality standards, assuming you manage to find a “scope is small enough that specialization doesn’t make sense” niche. This is very hard which is why in practice “full stack” tends to mean “master of none but good enough to get a product out the door cheaply”.
As a full stack developer (more experienced in back end) working on a full stack task at work I can confirm, yes, this is very true lmao.
Both should be the bottom picture to be honest.
This is me.
I would say I’m a fairly proficient dev overall, though on this one project I had to work the frontend. It was shit. Everything was shit.
The backend was a steaming pile of crap, and all of the implications of terrible design decisions were offloaded to the frontend. The frontend became the source of every single delay as it was where all crap started to surface. They were ignoring it, so besides frontend communication was also crap. Eventually, in line with ignoring all other issues, they sacked me.
Long story short, backend devs: treat your FE devs well.
Guys I can’t do front-end! There was a time I was getting kinda good but now there’s too much CSS tricks to learn.
I’m currently making an app for the fediverse and my back-end is amazing but I need help even beginning to make something decent for the front-end!
This is a streaming app, and just developed the chat widget which looks good in OBS, that’s a start.
But the player? Responsible layout? Aaaah it seems impossible.
It’d help if the JavaScript ecosystem could pause on inventing new frameworks every five minutes and instead focus on fixing their tooling problems.
I don’t know the developer experience with React+Vite has been amazing for me!
Fast HMR, detailed stack traces, and typing support is so cool!
Same. Honestly no issues with react+vite that I haven’t been able to solve.
It’s so robust I like it a lot :)
I’d suggest finding some examples or templates that are reasonably close to what you want, and working from there. It’s much easier to adapt something existing with small tweaks than building it all yourself.
If you have any concrete questions, feel free to shoot me a DM :)
Really? That’s so cool thanks :)
Yeah, gladly! I know how opaque and difficult that whole thing can be :)
It’s always Patrick, so both are the same
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
