Fuck, I only need to hire ONE fullstack developer who fucking knows what he's talking about and not trying to weasel their way into this job. I tell them that there are no annoying managers, no KPI, no bullshit, I thought this is kinda valuable, but no

How hard can it be?

I think the candidate pool is full of a lot of people that aren't that good. Makes sense really, the good ones interview and get an offer. The not so good ones interview a few times before they get an offer. The bad ones float around for ages bothering everyone.

Depends on location, but hiring decent fullstack devs is *very* hard in many places unless you're paying real top dollar.

Besides, no-one will likely believe you when you say there's no annoying managers, no bullshit, etc. - *every* company says that to some extent, regardless as to whether it's true.

Yeah the demand for these positions is insane. Being part of the limited supply myself, every time I'm considering another opportunity is due to multiple "talent acquisitors" trying to snatch me away from my current employer. I can literally negotiate huge raises by pitting their offers against eachother.

I'm definitely not a 10x'er, probably a 0.8 - 1.5x'er depending on the day.

@AlmondSauce it’s literally only me and no one else to contact

@kiki That comes with its own set of problems though - if someone doesn't get on with you, then there's no "escape", and there's no career progression. It's also a bit too "personal" sometimes, and there's a greater chance you'll ways be on weekend support or overtime when there's no one else around.

Not saying that would be the case, but a lot of devs I know explicitly don't want to work in tiny companies for that reason.

@atheist well, yes and no. Some people take a while based on location, bad situations, having a bad resume, and being shit at interviewing (by being shit at interviewing I mean not really knowing how to sell yourself. If youre constantly failing simple fizz bizz exams or you’re a “web developer” and you don’t know what a REST api is, that’s a different kind of “shit at interviewing” where you’re just incompetent). I used to take a long time and got lucky to even have my skills assessed until boom got in with a great company, salary, and did a kick as job there. Then again, as I said, if the reason someone is still searching is due to failing simple fizz bizz tech exams that could be different-that person probably isn’t cut out in this.

I joined a company that hired me as a full stack and somehow that stack included salesforce development and another wanted NI Labview. They were all like, “ree how do you not know these I thought you were full stack”.

I can do a lot of general purpose tasks. As soon as you throw in some snowflake framework or tool it will take me as long as anyone else to learn. I am not interested in specialization because I am a full stack developer.

No I’m not going to learn NI Labview or outsystems and do it for the next 20 years like the last guy. That isn’t what “full stack” means.

Mhh pay/hours/project focus may be a discriminant, are they on-pit with other similar companies?

I'm the best fucking fullstack d you've ever seen. Fortran only.

Full stack is kind of a unicorn. Most guys I’ve seen suck at both front and back if they are full stack.

Better to hire one backend and one front end.

@chovy This is my experience too. I've seen great frontend and great backend devs, but I don't think I'd ever seen a fullstack guy who I'd say was truly *great* at both those things. It's always a compromise.

@AlmondSauce Yeah. I’m a good full stack dev but the thing i am weakest at is wrangling is the stupid CSS when the team decided not to use a front end library.

@irene I admire any frontend devs tbh, I'm pretty useless at it. I don't really enjoy it either.

But yeah, there's so much to frontend and backend as separate disciplines that it's really hard to be a true expert at both. I'm firmly in the backend only category and damn, even I struggle to keep up with the best practices, relevant tools and libraries in just a couple of similar languages. I can't imagine doing that for frontend too. I'm sure there's some geniuses out there, but I haven't met any as of yet.

@AlmondSauce yeah I mean I can do backend but I’m way better at front end. I prefer to just say I’m a front end developer. I never saw the point if doing two jobs for the price of one.

@irene I hate css frameworks
But I put in the time to learn it. And I enjoy it.

Interview:

- We use state of the art version control

Reality:

*Proceed to send patches by email*

Prove it. You've got to buy the good candidate's attention, and it works both ways. Make a video, other content.

It won't ever be easy...

If you’re talented you should excel at either “end” bc writing clean and maintainable code plus problem solving ability is the hard part to master, but that’s my POV

"Fullstack Developer"
"Knows what they're doing"
pick one

@chovy CSS frameworks just have a bunch of convenience classes. They seem pretty easy to use.

The CSS I hate is when another dev has set up scss and they haven’t documented anything. (sass docs suck for scss) you have hybrid spacing using flex and little margins everywhere. You have a bunch of css coming from a component library in react. Then the UI designer has super specific requirements like the label for the form input must be inside the form field. 🙄

@Maer this real or satire?

@webketje I've worked in places like that.

@irene Labview? *barf* What kind of professional company use that?

@Maer oh you heard state of the art? Sorry we meant to say "straight outta the arse".

@PepeTheFrog It is used widely in aerospace, military, semiconductors, electronics, and energy sectors.

An engineering team builds systems to build a widget to specs (widget machines). Widget machines are built/maintained by a different team than the widget designers. NI sells hardware to build widget machines and a way to wire the hardware like an electrical diagram. Most of those widget machine engineers come from mechanical and electrical engineering so they like to see circuit-like diagrams instead of code. When one needs to maintain the widget machine the operations team can swap-in off-the-shelf NI parts. When one needs to duplicate the widget machine the widget machine engineers can buy a collection of off the shelf parts and stick them together to duplicate the widget machine.

So NI provides a solution that is cheaper and more modular than custom fabricated widget machines.