Errrrr… It’s a little known fact that the, uh, first NPC’s were invented by the Romans. Ya see, in the days of the gladiators, they would, uh, place random people in the colluseum to yell random stuff at the gladiators while they were fighting for their lives. The NPC wasn’t technically part of the match and you weren’t allowed to kill them, even if you really wanted to.

Canadians are like Minnesotan’s with better healthcare and the metric system.

I think there’s a benefit to having at least some “specialized” full stack devs. I happen to be one. I do mostly backend, which is technically my job, but occasionally I will pick up a front end ticket or one that incorporates back and front end.

Being able to see and understand how all the pieces fit together can be really helpful. If your entire team is made up of specialized devs, they tend to solve problems only with the tools they know. In my limited experience this frequently materializes as too much business logic in the UI or improperly implemented database integrations.

But I think the real value that full stack devs bring to these situations is not so much in the code that they can write but in the insight they can offer during the planning phases by helping the BA or whoever’s writing the tickets, clarify who’s responsible for what and how something should be implemented if it may not be clear to the dev working ticket.

Listen, a lot of people don’t understand the key to the living well in the United States. It’s really very simple. Just be rich. You’ll have the best life ever.

If you’re too stupid to be rich (or you didn’t inherit a billion dollars from your parents), blame some poor brown dude for “stealing” a shitty job that you didn’t actually want anyways because it’s worse and pays less than your shitty job. It won’t make anything better at all but at least you’ll feel like you understand why everything sucks (even though you actually don’t) and you’ll have the benefit of living in poverty AND feeling smugly superior to someone else who also lives in poverty for stupid (racist) reasons.

And if you think about it, that sense of superiority is nearly as good (it definitely isn’t) as being rich.