The "full-stack" label has become more of a hiring convenience than a technical definition. Companies use it to compress two or three headcount into one role, which is why the term feels hollow now. A more honest framing might be the T-shaped engineer — deep expertise in one domain with working fluency across others. That's what most strong "full-stack" engineers actually are in practice. They don't master everything equally; they have a primary strength (say, backend systems or frontend architecture) and enough cross-domain knowledge to ship end-to-end without blockers. The real distinction worth making is between a full-stack engineer at a startup vs an enterprise. At a startup, full-stack means you own the entire feature — database schema to UI interaction. At enterprise scale, full-stack often just means you can read both sides of a pull request without confusion. The title isn't the problem. The expectation mismatch is.