During the recent Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Meeting, there was a lot of discussion around the idea of a Full Stack Engineer. The idea of full stack professionals has been around for a few years now. Seeing this label applied to networking and network professionals seems only natural. But it’s a step in the wrong direction.

Short Stack

Full stack means having knowledge of the many different pieces of a given area. Full stack programmers know all about development, project management, databases, and other aspects of their environment. Likewise, full stack engineers are expected to know about the network, the servers attached to it, and the applications running on top of those servers.

Full stack is a great way to illustrate how specialized things are becoming in the industry. For years we’ve talked about how hard networking can be and how we need to make certain aspects of it easier for beginners to understand. QoS, routing protocols, and even configuration management are critical items that need to be decoded for anyone in the networking team to have a chance of success. But networking isn’t the only area where that complexity resides.

Server teams have their own jargon. Their language doesn’t include routing or ASICs. They tend to talk about resource pools and patches and provisioning. They might talk about VLANs or latency, but only insofar as it applies to getting communications going to their servers. Likewise, the applications teams don’t talk about any of the above. They are concerned with databases and application behaviors. The only time the hardware below them becomes a concern is when something isn’t working properly. Then it becomes a race to figure out which team is responsible for the problem.

The concept of being a full stack anything is great in theory. You want someone that can understand how things work together and identify areas that need to be improved. The term “big picture” definitely comes to mind. Think of a general practitioner doctor. This person understands enough about basic medical knowledge to be able to fix a great many issues and help you understand how your body works. There are quiet a few general doctors that do well in the medical field. But we all know that they aren’t the only kinds of doctors around.

Silver Dollar Stacks

Generalists are great people. They’ve spent a great deal of time learning many things to know a little bit about everything. I like to say that these people have mud puddle knowledge about a topic. It covers are broad area, but only a few inches deep. It can form quickly and evaporates in the same amount of time. Contrast this with a lake or an ocean, which covers a much deeper area but takes years or decades to create.

Let’s go back to our doctor example. General practitioners are great for a large percentage of simple problems. But when they are faced with a very specific issue they often call out to a specialist doctor. Specialists have made their career out of learning all about a particular part of the body. Podiatrists, cardiologists, and brain surgeons are all specialists. They are the kinds of doctors you want to talk to when you have a problem with that part of your body. They will never see the high traffic of a general doctor, but they more than make up for it in their own area of expertise.

Networking has a lot of people that cover the basics. There are also a lot of people that cover the more specific things, like MPLS or routing. Those specialists are very good a what they do because they have spent the time to hone those skills. They may not be able to create VLANs or provision ports as fast as a generalist, but imagine the amount of time saved when turning up a new MPLS VPN or troubleshooting a routing loop? That money translates into real savings or reduced downtime.

Tom’s Take

The people that claim that networking needs to have full stack knowledge are the kinds of folks further up the stack that get irritated when they have to explain what they want. Server admins don’t like knowing the networking jargon to ask for VLANs. Application developers want you to know what they mean when they say everything is slow. Full stack is just code for “learn about my job so I don’t have to learn about yours”.

It’s important to know about how other roles in the stack work in order to understand how changes can impact the entire organization. But that knowledge needs to be shared across everyone up and down the stack. People need to have basic knowledge to understand what they are asking and how you can help.

The next time someone tells you that you need to be a full stack person, ask them to come do your job for a day while you learn about theirs. Or offer to do their job for one week to learn about their part of the stack. If they don’t recoil in horror at the thought of you doing it, chance are they really want you to have a greater understanding of things. More likely they just want you to know how hard they work and why you’re so difficult to understand. Stop telling us that we need full stack knowledge and start making the stacks easier to understand.