Who is a full-stack developer and is it worth studying to become one?

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Chumba, do you remember how we talked about frontend and backend in native format on the TeachMeSkills school channel? If you haven't watched it, be sure to bake some buns, pour some tea, and join in — it'll be fun. Today we'll dig deeper into the topic and reveal all the details about the work of a full-stack developer.

A small explanation — the foreign term FullStack in the IT world is applied only to the web. Of course, you can say that you can make applications for Android and iOS at once, but the position of "full-stack mobile developer" itself will not be on portals like Glassdoor. The fact that such a definition appeared is dictated by the market — it needs people who can write a server, and make up for the UI, and eat fish.


Full-stack development — what is it?

Web development is somewhat reminiscent of the universe of the cartoon "Avatar", only there are two people here, but they also once lived in the world. I mean, 20 years ago, specialists were not divided into back-end and front-end developers. There were just "web developers", who over time began to be classified into experts in the client and server parts, for the sake of managing large projects.

A full-stack developer is the reincarnation of the many-armed Hindu god Shiva, who knows how to write turnkey websites and applications, like an avid repairman. Among his main tools are JavaScript and TypeScript from the front, as well as languages ​​like Java, Python, PHP and C# from the back. The developer must also be proficient in popular frameworks/libraries - a la Angular, React and Vue.js.


What do full-stack developers do

Let's imagine that you need to write a simple website - for a local store where the finalist of the "Leather Ball" tournament Gennady Bukin sells shoes. It is worth involving several specialists at once - from a designer ready to draw mockups to a business analyst capable of conducting research. It is also necessary to invite several developers to the team - front and back.

Gennady Bukin does not have much money, and social media marketing service therefore he wants to save money. Gennady hires a specialist who covers two positions at once, even if for the sake of the opportunity to scale the future portal. The developer becomes such an expert - he creates both the "server" (the part of the program that thinks and remembers everything the user clicked on) and the "client" (the external shell with menus, buttons and pictures).
— Pavel, does it mean that a full-stack can be entrusted with all the work related to website creation — from research to testing?

— “No, that’s not quite true. When you’re looking for a full-stack, you mean a programmer who can write a “server” and make a beautiful UI. Everything else depends on the level of the specialist being hired. A junior can code a little, a middle can solve problems with vague requirements, and a senior, for example, can draw up requirements after communicating with the customer.

Asking a programmer to find bugs is almost an insult. If you say that we need a person who will write everything and test everything — not a single high-level employee will respond to the vacancy. The same is true for design — such work is never entrusted to developers,” — Pavel Lvov, teacher of the “FullStack C# Developer” course at TMS.

Key skills of a full-stack developer

You can understand what skills a full-stack developer has using job aggregator sites. The direction is complex and comprehensive - applicants must have a good understanding of the subject area, as well as understand how their colleagues from a related direction (front or back, respectively) cope with tasks.

Among the main skills of a full-stack developer:

JavaScript and TypeScript - no one can call themselves full-stack if they don't know JS;
any of the popular backend languages ​​- from PHP, Java and C# to Python, Ruby and Golang;
frameworks and libraries for each area - for example, Angular or React from the front and Spring from the back (if you work with Java).

If you look at the other side and not at vacancies, but at applicants' resumes, you will notice that full stack developers often supplement their profiles with descriptions of the technologies they have encountered. Payment systems, Azure cloud portals, Amazon S3 object storage - all of this can become part of the work of a FullStack developer.

— Pavel, what about soft skills — do full stacks need them and is it worth paying attention to their development?

— “Soft skills become more important as the position grows. For juniors, they are secondary, and a middle already needs to periodically discuss something and clearly communicate with the team. Seniors not only write code, but also communicate with other experts within the project — maintain contact with testers and business analysts, obtain information and convey it to people.



If you become a lead or go in this direction, requests for soft skills begin to prevail. However, this matrix of requirements is universal for any direction — frontend, backend, C-sharp, Java or mobile development. The higher the position, the more soft skills are required of you,” — Pavel Lvov, teacher of the “FullStack C# Developer” course at TMS.
Salary and career growth

Let's move on to the most interesting part - the salary of full-stack developers. As a data source, we will take Glassdoor, with a sample relevant for mid-January 2024:

for the query "FullStack" - 2,723 vacancies;
Salaries offered range from $74,000 to $185,000 per year;
the most popular areas are finance and management consulting;
95% of companies are looking for full-time specialists;
2,205 vacancies (80.98%) are for guys who consider themselves middles.

We've sorted out Europe, we're moving to Belarus. According to the online publication devby.io, the average full-stack developer earns $1,200-3,000 monthly.
— I graduated, became a full-stack developer and worked there for 2-3 years. What is my future career path?

— In 2-3 years, you will learn how to make superficial websites, with a bad design and a weak server part, but completely alone. Then there are a huge number of gaps that you can start filling. Develop as a front-end developer — learn about complex things like component lifetime and optimization. Get into UX — understand the toolkit, color combinations and page nesting levels.

You can go to the back-end — learn about multithreading, DevOps work, mirrors, clouds and databases. No one is stopping you from looking at something from neighboring areas — scooping up business analysis, load tests and other things that are important for architects. All this will take years,” — Pavel Lvov, teacher of the “FullStack C# Developer” course at TMS.