I don't want to be a full-fullstack developer
I am a Ruby Developer. I am a fullstack web dev. And I am tired of being one. I am also tired of being a business analyst and a manual QA at times. As years go by the industry is going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of developer-focused engineering process and developers go on to combine more and more responsibilities beneath the surface of single cranium.
我是一个 Ruby 开发者。我是一个全栈web开发者。但是，我已经厌倦这样的工作角色了。有时，业务分析师和手动测试工程师的工作，也令我倍感厌倦。随着时间的推移，这一行业正在越来越深地陷入了以开发人员为中心的工程流程，开发人员一人承担越来越多的责任。
Long time ago in the prehistoric Internet
There were DBAs long time ago, you are quite rare to find a beast like that in the shadows of cubicles nowadays. Indeed.com search yields 7k results on the term fullstack web developer and 40k for just web developer. The separate roles of UX Engineer and Frontend Developer are also slowly being blended together on the premise of working on essentially the same thing. More and more agencies are looking for people who can do both frontend and backend, also participating in the business requirement development, writing unit and integration tests, being everywhere and doing everything.
很久以前就有DBA了，但是现在你很难在小隔间里看到他们了。在 Indeed.com 上对这些术语进行检索，会发现全栈工程师大约有7k条检索结果，web开发者大约有40k条结果。UE和FE的角色也慢慢的混杂在一起，前提是他们本质上在做同样的事情。越来越多的代理在寻找那些前后端都可以做的人，他们需要参与业务需求开发，写单元/集成测试，他们会出现在任何地方，并且做任何事情。
Cut the cost, take the rest
That seems like a great idea at first, a person knows and does everything needed from scratch to shipped feature, controlling the whole process. It is easier for the business: you need to check with one person and process of development does not get too complicated with ‘who does what’ issues, it also cuts the costs making a little tradeoff with quality and development time. Communication and context switching also don’t influence the people anymore as they go through the whole process rather than picking it up from where their successor in the chain left off. That seems like a nice enhancement… …if you don’t know a thing about how those professionals you crammed into one person actually work.
这起初看来是个好主意，有这么一个人了解需求而且从零开始完成所需的一切功能，能够控制整个流程。对于企业来说，这是更加容易的：企业只需要与一个人进行核实，且开发流程不会再出现"那是谁做的"复杂的问题，在质量和开发时间做权衡的成本也能降低。而且，由于他们经历了整个过程，而不是从前任留下的工作开始，因此交流和环境变换也不会给他们带来什么影响，这看上去似乎是一个很好的增强做法……如果你对那些专业人员一无所知，那你就会把这些专业人员的角色都塞到一个人身上。
Complexity strikes back
Backend development is a complex field, including understanding of network layer, the way servers work overall, deployment, AWS/Google/Azure services(they are vital to modern web applications), specifics of server application language and framework, protocols used, authentication, database connectivity and setup and a lot of other things. Frontend includes solid knowledge of web standards, quirks and oddities of particular browsers, ES5, ES6, CSS, HTML, frameworks, preprocessors, transpilers, build tools, UX, UI, networking from the browser perspective, browser storages, sometimes even specifics of mobile apps with Flutter, Ionic and React Native. Don’t even get me started on business analyst and QA roles for they are completely different bowls or rice.
后端开发是一个复杂的领域，包括理解网络层，服务器的整体工作方式，部署，AWS/Google/Azure服务(对于现在流行的web应用来说他们是至关重要的)，特定的服务语言和框架，使用的协议，认证，数据库连接，设置以及其他的事情。FE包括扎实的web标准知识、特定浏览器的怪癖和古怪之处、ES5、ES6、CSS、HTML、框架、预处理程序、转置器、构建工具、UX、UI、从浏览器角度的网络、浏览器存储，有时甚至还包括与 Flutter、Ionic 和 React Native 有关的移动应用的细节。不要让我讨论业务分析师和测试工程师的角色，因为对我来说这俩是完全不同的领域。
Each of this roles has its own learning curve and essential skills to master. You can’t just expect a person to read a few articles or a book, write a sample app and start bringing a good result. The result will always be somehow substandard. If you hire a fullstack web developer, you don’t hire an equivalent of two half-time specialists at once, you hire one normal and one impaired(in the best case, you may as well get the equivalent of two so-so half-time devs). It requires devotion and motivation to keep track and stay relevant and brilliant even in one field, put aside two or more. Time is finite. You cannot succeed in two unless you have no personal life and time for yourself.
每个角色都有自己的学习曲线和需要掌握的基本技能。你不能奢望一个人只阅读几篇文章或者一本书，编写一个应用程序示例，然后就可以给你带来好结果。但你要知道，结果总是不尽如人意。如果你雇佣了全栈 Web 开发工程师，那么你就不会同时雇佣相当于两个半职专家的人员，而是会同时雇佣一个熟练的工程师和一个不熟练的工程师（在最好的情况下，你也可以得到相当于两个还说得过去的半职开发工程师）。即使在一个领域，也需要投入和动力，以保持相关性和卓越性，而不是投入两个或更多的领域上。因为时间是有限的。除非你放弃了自己的个人生活和时间，否则你不可能会在这些领域都获得成功。
下面的明天接着看...
Wider or deeper?
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is good to widen up the field of knowledge and employ understanding of your parts surrounding to do a better job on your section, but making developers be Jacks of all trades directly influences code quality, choice of solutions and the future of the project developed. Space in our heads is finite. We may fill it in with either deeper and better knowledge of one or a few fields or start chewing information on the multitude of domains resulting in superficial knowledge of everything. This knowledge creates a bubble of confidence that unfortunately does not justify itself, resulting in worse solutions and reinventing the wheel/employing wrong technique/banging the nails with a microscope.
Not all cuts are equally healthy
Fullstack is interesting because is seems to be almost unique to the software engineering field. Other fields mostly have more division of labour, you don’t expect the dentist to cure your heart and neurosurgeon to fix your hemorrhoids. The reason it is employed in software engineering seems for to be the fact of virtual and failsafe nature of the field. Your code quality does not directly influence the outcomes visible for users, so you can hack around with patchy solutions long enough before the thing falls apart(and frequently it does when you are not around anymore). Also, that idea seems appealing on the intuitive level for money spending, hiring person with broader skills(no matter quality) may look like doing more for the same cost.
We get mediocre solutions created by people who don’t have enough expertise in the particular field to see the better way, with a sketchy knowledge filled with Stackoverflow answers and copy-paste. We get people who stay stale in their improvements, having to keep up with too many topics. We get the professionals that don’t create amazing things because they don’t have time to dig in enough time to actually create some value to the field. We get substandard products by lower development price that fades off after the bugs and lost customers come in because of issues the projects inevitably face when developed in such the fashion. Fullstack may be worth it from the short-term economical perspective, but it is harmful for the industry overall and for the projects we build.
原文：https://artur-martsinkovskyi.github.io/2019/i-dont-want-to-be-fullstack/