Why do companies so hard to have Fullstack developers?

There have already been written many articles about who is such a Fullstack, what are its pros and cons, in which projects it makes sense to hire such developers, and where it is not. I will proceed from the idea that you understand what Fullstack is and what it is eaten with.

The idea that I would like to express is this: “Why, even large outsourcing and grocery companies, want to hire Fullstack and / or develop their employees in this direction?”.

The question, in the context of the article, is interesting, but I don’t want to answer it, I just want to speculate on this topic.

Take the manager of a large company, say more than 500 people, who received the following summary from management: “We need to recruit 20 developers for our future products / orders”.
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The management does not care whether it will be BE or FE or Fullstack - they need to deliver an order on time or release a product. The manager, who has read many articles on Fullstack, thinks: “This is the solution!” And starts to recruit Fullstack, based on the idea that you can recruit 15 such developers and close all vacancies and save money, because the salaries of such developers rarely exceed the salaries more highly specialized developers.

But, after some time, problems begin, not in a month, but in a year. It turns out that the product / application is not able to withstand the load or adding new features has become time consuming and inefficient.

This does not always happen with everyone, but it happens more and more often. Why is that? Because, the first thing that needs to be done after the approval of the MVP (minimum working product) is to make sure that everything has fallen into place and the further development of the product will go as predicted as possible with the minimum possible number of errors. And, as a rule, only a qualified specialist can predict the future path of the application / product.

I am in no way against Fullstack as a phenomenon, because the effectiveness of such developers is proven in certain cases, but I am very concerned about the emerging trends towards the development of current narrow specialists in Fullstack for any products, regardless of whether you need it or not.

This is one of the oldest disputes: "Wide profile from narrow?".

We all know very well that now, hiring an intelligent specialist is a big job and sometimes an impossible task.
Judging from the personal experience of conducting more than a hundred interviews, mostly with guys from the EU and the CIS, it is often necessary to make concessions to the management and hire at least a little professional in terms of fire in the eyes, hoping that he will still benefit and become “Rock Star. Increasingly, you see “Senior Dev / Senior Fullstack Dev”, with a billion years of experience that FizzBuzz cannot solve, calculate the sum of Fibonacci numbers or write an example of recursion.

Now it is difficult to be in the top, at least in one direction, be it FE in the Web, Android, iOs, game development or BE in
the same game development, Data Science, Big Query, DB analyst, etc. In order to be really useful, it is necessary that not only the “cooking pot”, but also know all the trends and have a baggage of practical experience, and this can be achieved only by learning something new every day.

I agree that any developer should know the basics of programming, have algorithmic training, know and understand the difference of patterns and understand, in general terms, how FE and BE work. But, as before, I believe that an intelligent specialist in their particular field will do everything faster and better than a general specialist.

And, think for yourself, with whom would you like to work and study - with Fullstack or wise gray hair, FE, BE, GameDev, DevOps gurus?

PS There are a certain number of gifted children who are able to work and keep up with everything they do, be it FE, BE, etc. But they are even smaller than intelligent narrow-minded specialists, and, alas, they will not be able to close all the necessary vacancies and market needs. I’m just glad if a person changed his occupation and moved to another area, but he will still be busy in one area, and not in a dozen areas.