It’s surprisingly rare for things to split like that. At most companies people will be more skilled at front end or back end work, but it’s rarely a clean separation with front end vs back end teams.

That’s an outgrowth of most projects being quite small. Paying a team or 20+ people to work on one thing is freaking expensive to the point where it needs major benefit or huge company to be worth it. On the other hand maintaining lots of little projects that all automated something can easily pay for a single developer at even fairly small companies. Across tends of thousands of small and midsized companies you get a lot of such teams which grow and shrink, split off and merge over time.

> It’s surprisingly rare for things to split like that.

THIS. The product is blended and so must the teams be. Among all the full-stack developers I've worked with, the "frontend" or "backend" designators tended to describe preference or strength, rather than limitation.

Those are pretty strong assertions with no statistics to back them up. It doesn’t reflect the ecosystem I work in.

I think you underestimate the number of huge companies that see major benefit from large teams working large development efforts.

I don’t know where you would even look for that kind of statistics for companies that might use Java. That said, America has:

1,829,875 companies with 5-9 employees 779,922 companies with 10-19 employees 467,634 companies with 20 - 49 employees 170,749 companies with 50 - 99 employees

Of that a few are pure software companies, but it’s far more common to want to automate something. Which often means outsourcing it, but then they simply can’t afford these kinds of large projects.

At the other end only 23,553 companies have 1,000+ employees. Yet even at that scale it’s not guaranteed to have large development teams in house, a single hospital can have 1000+ employees and use mostly 3rd party software with a few generalists to stitch everything together.

Clearly you’re not going to arrive at a good answer starting from first principles. Industry research groups have the numbers, but they’re locked behind paywalls.

Starting from the other end, the Stackoverflow survey has 50% of devs identifying as full-stack. Most surveys have Java as the #2 programming language, where it’s been for the last 20 years. That says nothing about how those devs are organized among teams, but I don’t think it points to such arrangements being “rare”.

Their 2020 survey has: “About 55% of respondents identify as full-stack developers, and about 20% consider themselves mobile developers.”

I always took that kind of a breakdown to mean most website developers where full stack with embedded etc being their own categories. With majority full stack teams including various specialists as needed, which fits my experience over the last 20 years.

However, Android is Java and is frequently used as a front end. As things grow I normally see teams split by system, so I can see mobile being split off as their own team becoming more common even if it’s the still the minority. That said, it’s teams managing the backend teams which would be considering Java vs NodeJS and based on that 55% I think most teams are familiar with JavaScript.