
Ask HN: Hire full stack engineer or not? - cakeinblue
When you hire developers for your team. Do you prefer hire engineers who can work at either back-end or front-end to make your team a full stack team, or prefer hire full stack developer who can work on both front-end and back-end.
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zer00eyz
Jack of all trades, master of none!

It can be a good thing or a bad thing. Young organizations need generalists
who can get things done. Late stage organizations need specialization, due to
volume of work and complexity of issues.

I know a solid front end guy, who is great on the design side, he also happens
to dabble in the back end and does well for him self there. I don't think I
would leave him alone in a scalability crisis, and he shouldn't be the one
setting up servers and dealing with security. Would he make a good early hire?
He sure would, but if you business is growing then your going to out grow him
pretty quickly!

I am more of a back end developer and my career has been built around
companies that are falling to scale. At some point you need people focused on
care and feeding of all that server code, it has to be fast and play nice with
the infrastructure that your running, or need to run. Most of the time these
situations are a fire (scalability isn't sexy, and it isn't paid much
attention till its a big problem) and I frankly enjoy that aspect of it.

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cauterized
Engineers who are capable of both give you far more flexibility. This is more
important on a small team than a large engineering department. Note that they
don't have to be equally strong in both, just capable of contributing good
code if you have an imbalance of work on one side or the other for a few
sprints or if the person who's stronger on the other end is on vacation or
busy firefighting or whatever.

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ryanlm
I mean, most people don't want to specialize. I just turned down a chance to
interview, but after finding out this was some specialized role, I declined
because specialization isn't the best for my career.

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wreath
I prefer to hire full stack engineers who are more comfortable/knowledgable
with either ends. This really depends on the project though.

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fagnerbrack
Full stack, always, that makes us care more about fundamentals, not tools
specific to web.

