Ask HN: Laid off by not being 'cross-functional'

[ordirobo]

My team manager told me that our floor manager will not continue with me for I was not being 'cross-functional'.

I was shocked because my performance is very good and I had no problem of team integration. My team manager is equally surprised by this decision, and he raised an argument for me by showing the floor manager my github & jira stats which proved to be 'outstanding' (343 contributions & 6380 lines of code for last 3.5 months).

Background about my job: I was hired as front-end developer, and my contributions have been focused on company's front-end projects. One month ago the floor manager asked me the idea about 'cross-functional', I answered that the modern web apps are very complex both on front-end and on back-end, and is hard to master both sides at same time. Instead of doing a little bit everything, one should be professional at one side and contribute the best of his knowledge.

I am not saying that I will never take a look at back-end, I sometimes checked our Java codebase to understand related bugs. But I don't understand the definition of 'cross-functional': should one pick up a front-end story today, dive to back-end one tomorrow, and deliver both master quality? Am I wrong about my career goals (which is become a master of Web and focus more on front-end)?

[FLGMwt]

Yeah, that's some nonsense. Full-stack (your team manager's "cross-functional") today is mostly a delusion. Sure, you should be able to read some code on both sides to tackle the trivial parts of either, but I wouldn't expect every developer to have semantic understanding nor constant involvement on both sides.

Sorry for your recent misfortune and I hope you find a more reasonable next gig (cough next manager cough).

[Cozumel]

> I answered that the modern web apps are very complex both on front-end and on back-end, and is hard to master both sides at same time. Instead of doing a little bit everything, one should be professional at one side and contribute the best of his knowledge.

You do need to be 'cross functional', you might prefer front end development, but you also need to be able to do back end development, and vice versa.

When you understand both, it will make you a much better developer.

And to quote Bill Gates, 'Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight'

I'm sorry you lost your job but look at this as an opportunity to improve yourself and your skill set.