Software Development Is Changing (StackOverflow Survey Breakdown)

The StackOverflow survey always comes with some fascinating insights, and this year is no exception. The shift away from frontend and backend devs and towards fullstack is unexpected and massive.

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[miscbits]

I dropped out of college because I couldn't maintain my scholarship and I didnt wanna take out private loans. The place that I was interning at (through my college) offered to hire me full time if I decided to drop out and I took the opportunity. I do wish I could have finished schooling, but I was absolutely 100% vindicated in my decision to not take private loans for the last 2 years. I have an amazing career and have learned so much in and out of school. Maybe someday I will go back for the piece of paper, but it will be with financial security.

[Toronto_Luddite]

The problem I'm finding with billing myself as a full-stack instead of just front-end is that typically I will see companies looking for the depth of someone who's specialized in everything at a fancy level, rather than having a mix of capabilities. In the last job I had, which was well over a year ago now, the backend guy was clearly a backend guy who could dip into frontend a bit, which is clearly what you'd expect or vice versa. He basically had 7 years of writing Django endpoints and a bit of exposure to React, whereas I can jump into probably any insane JavaScript codebase and reason enough about Django. But to be doing both at the same depth is asking for two specialists in one

[designgears]

Full Stack dev here, I love being able to deal with a problem at any level. I'd go insane being stuck in just front-end or back-end.

[voidmind]

21:16. I don't know why the survey splits Linux in distos. If you add all the Linux together, it comes up to 57.3% on pro usage

[emeraldbonsai]

Most "Full stacks" i know are frontend and the rare backend "full stack" ive met just know like how to do something super basic but is mostly backend. generally i see it as a made up term meant to abuse devs. one of the reasons i avoid at all costs being "full stack" Keeping up with Networking, System admin, aws, gcp, azure. devops, cicd, go, rust, python, nodejs, terraform, salt and ansible, databases, security and reverse engineering. is already enough without having to keep up with Front end as well moves as fast or faster then everything else combined

[last.journey]

Next step fullstack, mobile dev, ai specialist, data science all in one pakage

[ivanmaglica]

I think more people identifying as full-stack is an effect of moving from pure react to next.

[username]

I got started in UI programming with Windows 3.1 and the Windows API. I've done Delphi, MFC, OWL, WinForms and a bunch of other UI libraries before pretty much all user interfaces work has become web. The very idea of "front-end" vs "full-stack" is foreign to me. You develop the application as a whole. If you have a network jump to the browser doesn't mean you can skip part of it. This is an implementation detail! Customers don't run just half an application, the whole thing has to work together.

[johannes.evol.]

I like you theo. Thanks for all this amazing free content. Greetings from a Full Stack Web Dev from Portugal. Just started my first project with the T3 Stack and it's amazing!

[voidreact]

I'm currently working as fullstack, and being able to debug a problem through the whole stack is liberating. Not having to wait for a backend dev to fix some endpoint is very valuable as well.

[IqmalNazlan]

Had applied for a Back-End role. It evolved into a Full-Stack role and part of it was due to the need for a project to have someone setup video calling with WebRTC (Without using a 3rd party service) on the front end and Back-End. Knowing the tech you’re working with on both side of the equation I feel is very important with these sort of implementation. In my case, it was also an opportunity to deep dive into a topic I’ve always been curious about 😄 Which might be a similar reasoning for most to want to transition towards Full-Stack, an opportunity to work with cool tech

[aivarelis]

Being a "full-stack dev" for me is all about being able to write code in one of the frontend & backend languages at the same time. However, you usually are better at one than the other. Being a "back-end dev" is not all about being able to write code in one certain backend language only, but it's also about being able to write and understand ci/cd, devops stuff, security etc. This in my opinion explains the salary gap between a back-end dev and a full-stack dev

[SirCorrino]

@39:30 Drops in salary can also be from increased responses from outside the US where software salaries are generally much lower than in the US.

[JegErNrsk]

im dissapointed that they again didnt ask whether their degree/study was relevant to their job

[unhandledexception]

love the way the biases and skews of this survey are outlined right up front :-)

[victorgxn]

Full Stack dev here, i think it's also a position for companies where the IT department is small and people need to be "all-rounders". I don't think it's for everyone as the tasks are so different it can saturate a lot of people but if you like creating things from 0-100 it's your thing :).

[Charity-mcog]

you have a great knack for making complex topics fun! ‍♂️

[conceptsound]

To answer why MySql more popular when regards to learning databases. MySQL is strictly a relational database whilst PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) meaning it's easier to teach students about database on a simpler level

[AGeekTragedy]

The relevant proportions of full-stack, back-end and front-end are kind of interesting, but the really wild thing to me is how small the proportion of devs *not* working on web apps is. I've been programming desktop and/or embedded software for a decade and I forget how weird that makes me.

[dmytro-skh]

also I think that growth with FS dev related to Next.js and now a lot of FE devs thinks that they are FS dev if they are working with server-side rendering