Ever since server side javascript turned serious with node.js and "full stack developer" became a thing I have been stupefied by this. The concerns are almost orthogonal: front end gets some data which needs to be presented in a browser. Chief concerns are proper placement and appearance. Back end needs to persist data and retrieve data at speed. They absolutely have nothing to do with each other. How is this an "unnecessary division"?
Well, one is client development and the other is server application development.
Pretty big differences there even though there may be some overlap, like the server being able to render HTML which is a unique feature of web clients. I'd cluster "web client development" with iOS and Android development, not with server application development.
Too many people dump on front-end development without realizing that client development isn't easy on any platform, and they all require credentialization in apis or design patterns with major warts.
Except, it's not "just code". Front-end/back-end/ops, whatever, all have vastly different contexts. Hence the separate learning paths. You should know all three, but that doesn't mean you have to learn them at the same time or the same pace. You people are taking this chart way too literally.
I said nothing about want to. Want to and capable of are two different things. If somebody wants to just be a back end dev (or front end, or iOS, or...), by all means, go right ahead. I won't stop them. I don't want to do Android development, but I could if I needed to (after some spin-up time).
But I disagree with the idea that they are so wildly divergent that no mere mortal can grasp them. People in this thread are really selling themselves short with their knowledge, which is more transferable than they realize.
> Certainly, if and when you are ‘full stack’ you can and may do both.....but that implies both exist to begin with.
Not too long ago, both didn't exist and everyone was a web developer. And before that we were just programmers. It's a fairly recent idea.
At a smaller companies go for breadth; there's only a few of you. Larger companies prefer depth - but! at larger companies there can be more projects for you to have your fingers in.
Depending on specialisation, work can be rare but more rewarding - but you can also paint yourself into a corner with things moving out of vogue. Silverlight/flash, Ruby, VB, etc.
I've been at it since the 90s. I'm a generalist, mastered a few areas, and worked in. It gives me choices - I where to go for a web-based job, I'd call myself a web developer and not boast no much about my C knowledge.
At my current job, most the skills I provide aren't necessarily rare, but the combination of them is - where it could take 2+ people to replace me (excluding productivity).
The balance is to specialise enough in a few areas, but not be a "jack of all trades; master of none"
Like I said above, code is code. Code is just syntactic sugar around concepts, and concepts transcend languages and environments. Understand the concepts and you can pretty easily jump around just about any programming environment, from front end to back end to desktop to mobile.
It's kinda weird to me how many people think these things are so different when really they're not. Yes, every language will have its quirks and every context will have domain specific knowledge and tooling. But they are more similar than they are different, and once you grok the similarities, the differences become easy to recognize.
I've seen so many things (languages, toolkits, environments, etc) come and go over the years that I refuse to be pigeonholed into one specialty because they always change, often without warning. Ask a Flash developer how they feel about that today - in one day (the day the iPhone was released) that whole industry collapsed. The great thing about being a generalist is that you can move on, jump in and do the work that needs to be done, no matter what that work is or where it is.
Every so often something genuinely new will come along, that requires some learning and understanding. The container ecosystem are a good fairly recent example of that. But as a generalist, it doesn't look hard or magical to you because it's just something you haven't learned yet. You're prepared for that and you have the understanding to know what you need to know. You also know your limits, and the things that do (or don't) interest you and can adjust the arc of your career appropriately.
I routinely work back and forth between front and backend every day. That is a normal day for me, I love it and and I would not change it. Occasionally I'll lend a hand on an iOS app (that we're about to migrate to React Native as it happens) and maintain some internal Mac apps as well as writing my own Mac apps for fun. I've also run a side consulting business for several years to keep my skills fresh where I tackle everything from DevOps/server maintenance/cloud migrations to frontend/backend to desktop and mobile development. Basically whatever itch I'm feeling at the time.
Concepts translate pretty easily and, where they are different, as a generalist you accumulate enough experience to know what those differences are. And if companies want to divide their jobs into "front end" and "back end," that's fine, because you have the knowledge to apply for either. :)
A lot of people in this thread are really selling themselves short. They know more than they realize and the "other side" of the stack is not some mysterious magic that requires years of intense specialization. It's just programming. Same thing we've all been doing for years.
"Specialization is for insects." - Heinlein
'There is so many things to learn I started with Python but there is this and this and that'
A language is just a language, the principles and your ability to translate problems to code is what is making you a programmer.
But will you see this comment given that you don't get notifications?
If you only have 3 developers, it doesn't make much sense to have one backend, one frontend, and one dev-ops. Are you always going to have exactly equal amounts of work for all three to do each day?
But apart from that, it also seems so much easier to divide up work by feature without stepping on anyone's toes. Like, you code search, I'll code chat. Not you code search backend, I'll code search frontend. That increases overhead and coordination.
And then, if your frontend is heavy on JavaScript, there's often a lot of similar code between frontend and backend. Validation is a classic example. A more extreme example might be a browser game using WebSockets and lockstep simulation. The browser and server might share most of their code. It would be absurd to split all the developers into frontend and backend in this case.
Generalist or polyglot developer still doesn't fully capture the broad scope of knowledge you can call on beyond cutting code and may have lost any of its negative connotations over the last 23 years.
Yup. Been doing this since 1999.
The whole "front end"/"back end" thing is an incredibly unrealistic and unnecessary division. Real life work is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I don't know of anyone, maybe outside of (as you said) huge companies, who works that way, having "picked a path" and entirely focusing on one side of the stack. Even if you are a "front end" developer, you are going to need at least passing familiarity with the other side, and vice versa.
Right now, I have back end code open in one split, front end JS in another, HTML in another, an ORM model for reference, and Paw with some API calls. All of these things go together, and I would have a hard time understanding any single part without being familiar with the others.
After you've been doing this for a few years you realize that code is code, whether it's running on a server, or in a browser, or on a desktop or mobile device. It's just code. Once you understand how to "think" like a developer (which in my experience is the biggest hurdle people face), the differences between any of them aren't nearly as large as they seem, and almost all of those things in that graphic are just abstractions over code.