Generalizing Specialists: Improving Your IT Career Skills (2003)
And I still don’t know why you think full-stack is unfortunate and mythical?
For example:
10-15 years sounds like a reasonable time to me.
Agism is rampant in the tech industry. So how long can you harvest the spoils of that kind of “investment” in the face of Don’t hire anyone over 30/Does Age Discrimination in Tech Start at 40? even if you continually update yourself?
Also there are infinite permutations of “full stacks” given that there are any number of products that can serve in each layer. The “full stacks” that made the most sense to me were .NET or Java Enterprise because that automatically constrained the compatible products. And even then a .NET full stack developer wouldn’t necessarily know both ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC, just like a JE developer wouldn’t know all the available Java web server frameworks (and the browser-based frontend skills were usually deemphasized anyway).
So beyond that the composition of the “full stack” is dictated by where you work. If you stay in the same place you simply keep up with the product changes. But the tech industry also has a high turnover rate. While moving from one snowflake full stack to another is possible, you need to maximize the overlap to reduce the ramp up time needed to become productive after changing opportunities.
So from that perspective full stack developers don’t exactly grow on trees and have a perceived short shelf life.
You are supposed to have T-shaped skills. The mythical full stack developer needs to have enough "T"s to make a good size comb.
