Siddharth Vishvanath (Sid)

Full Stack Developer

Mar 24, 2019

I would love to do both. I am a Front end developer. I am eager to know what a backend developer does. Why is there a difference in roles of a front end and backend when there is also a role of a Full stack developer. A company just needs to hire one person who does it all. Why keep front end and a backend team separately.

Dwight Badua

Backend Developer

Mar 25, 2019

Because of the goals of each of these roles, they need to be separated.

Sure, you can hire a single person who can do the job, but this person can only focus on a single area per sprint. Otherwise, you'd end up with half thought, half baked, just for spec compliance software.

The goals of development aren't purely just making a code work. In the frontend, it also has to have a meaningful and intuitive interface. Sometimes, they need to setup A/B tests to figure out which interface converts better. It is important to note that the work done by the Frontend is the gateway to the user - and users are unpredictable. That in it sense makes it complicated. Backend on the other hand has to think about performance, scalability, and availability. They would have to plan for surges in traffic and make sure the services don't crash when these things happen.

A full stack developer (which I've always had a pet peeve on) is not a person who can do "everything". It is a person who can CODE front and back end, but not necessarily make them efficient.

Siddharth Vishvanath (Sid)

Full Stack Developer

Mar 25, 2019

Okay, now I understand. So what makes a Full Stack Developer efficient?

Sébastien Portebois

Software architect at Ubisoft

Mar 30, 2019

Why keep front end and a backend team separately.

Having people specialized doesn’t mean they need to work in different teams ;-)

Backend works is not just doing an API to query a DB and send back a payload to the frontend. There’s also scalability/performance issues, async processes (e.g. queues/workers things), offline processes (e.g. slower larger data analysis stuff) which require some expertise. On the other end, being expert on the frontend side implies you’re up to date with all the various browser idiosyncrasies, css processors, etc...

If the team is small and/or the needs are limited (e.g. simple APIs), then a jack of all trade (aka full stack) is perfect. For bigger projects, with the complexity expanding, it’s usually much better to have people specialized. That doesn’t mean the "back end guys" cannot help on the frontend part, and vice-versa. It just means that for some specific parts, some team members will be more efficient than others.

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