this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Opinion about full-stack web app teams? (self.experienced_devs)
submitted 1 year ago by tinker_james to c/experienced_devs
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What is your opinion about full-stack teams? I'm referring to teams where the desire is for every member to competently contribute at every point in the stack.

  • Do they work?
  • What has been your experience?
  • Does team size and/or experience level inform your opinion?
  • Do you notice an increase/decrease in quality?
  • Do you notice an increase/decrease in team and product cohesion?
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You mean people taking ages to release because the work is divided between multiple teams and each one is creating a slightly different feature?

Yes, I have seen that.

Or if you mean a team of generalists with an specialist here and there not suffering from this problem?

I have seen that too.

I have also seen people solve the specialization problem by making their own layer more general than it would technically need to be, and become about as productive as a full stack team. The interesting part is that I have only seen that done by generalists, so I really doubt a set of specialists-only teams can be really productive.

[–] tinker_james 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In your experience, is success dependent on each member (or most members) being T shaped?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's dependent on many members being T shaped. Not all, and I don't know if "most". But you need enough to handle the basic flow of the system and interact with all of the specialists.