dev
Young devs, listen up: the term “Full Stack Developer” is being used as a hustle. It sounds awesome—“I do front-end, back-end, DevOps, DBs… I’m the unicorn.” But in reality? It’s often a shortcut for companies to squeeze more work out of you for less pay and zero depth. This ain’t empowerment—it’s exploitation.
Md Abu Taher puts it bluntly: “Full stack developer is a scam term ↗.” He shows that despite juggling React, CI/CD, AWS, backend, and frontend, full-stack devs earn less than their specialist counterparts. Paysa data cited: backend avg $90K, frontend $88K, but full-stack just $76K—ouch. Worse at the 75th percentile: backend $104K vs full-stack $90K—serving more, getting less.
A dev in r/csharp ↗ spells it out: “Jack of all trades, master of none.” They point out how full-stack becomes a “we don’t want to hire two specialists” move, instead leaning on a single dev to do triple duty. And yeah, you can handle a little CSS, back-end, and server config—but no one's being fooled that you’ll nail every layer like a pro (╥﹏╥).
On r/webdev ↗, someone highlights the salary hit and ever-shifting expectations:
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“I probably make 40-50% less than others in my position would get elsewhere”
Andy Shora ↗ pulls the covers off: the “full-stack” label is just fluff. The real value is knowing what you’re actually good at—not tossing web frameworks and backend logic into one vague bucket. He says the demand for full-stack often stems from small startups trying to stretch every dollar—but don’t let that make you a jack-of-all label with nothing to show for it.
“Full-stack” often equates to being the catch-all: ducks to feed, plates to spin, and little respect or compensation. The thirst for specialization isn’t elitist—it’s realistic. Young devs, your power is in depth, not breadth. Specialize. Demand your worth. And don’t let a catchy title fool you into overextending for crumbs.
And stop acting like doing parkour from speciality to another will land you a job :3