Thought - Why being Full Stack is making you Unemployable (Eventually)
If you describe yourself as a “Full Stack Developer” today you are putting a target on your back. You are positioning yourself as a generalist in a world that is rapidly automating general work.
For the last ten years the industry has been obsessed with the myth of the Full Stack Engineer. Bootcamps sold the dream that you could learn React for three weeks and Node for three weeks and suddenly be a complete software engineer.
I am here to tell you that this era is ending.
If you describe yourself as a “Full Stack Developer” today you are putting a target on your back. You are positioning yourself as a generalist in a world that is rapidly automating general work. By trying to know a little bit of everything you are ensuring that you are not valuable at anything.
This is why the “Jack of All Trades” is about to become the “Master of None” and why specialization is the only safety net left.
The AI is becoming the Ultimate Junior Generalist
The primary reason the Full Stack role is dying is simple. Artificial Intelligence.
If your job consists of glueing a database to a frontend using standard frameworks you are in trouble. AI is starting to become exceptionally good at this. It can generate the boilerplate for a React form or a simple Express API in seconds.
The AI is the ultimate Full Stack Junior. It knows every framework. It knows every syntax. It can write the “glue code” faster than you ever will.
If your skillset is broad but shallow you are competing directly against a machine that works for free. The AI cannot yet debug a complex race condition in the Linux kernel. It cannot yet optimize a custom database engine for high frequency trading. But it can absolutely build a Todo App using the MERN stack. If that is your entire skillset you are a going to be replaced.
Abstraction is Career Debt
The rise of the Full Stack engineer coincided with the rise of massive abstraction. We have “Backend as a Service” and “Frontend as a Service” tools that hide all the complexity.
You use Vercel so you do not need to understand servers.
You use Supabase so you do not need to understand database administration.
You use ORMs so you do not need to understand SQL.
Every layer of abstraction you use without understanding the layer below it is Technical Debt. But it is not debt for your job. It is debt for your career.
When you rely entirely on tools to do the hard work you are leasing your skills instead of owning them. When the abstraction leaks (and it always does) you are helpless. A specialist knows what happens when the request hits the metal. A generalist only knows how to call the API.
The T Shaped Lie
We often tell engineers to be T Shaped. This means having broad knowledge across many areas (the top of the T) and deep knowledge in one specific area (the vertical line of the T).
This is good advice but most people are lying to themselves.
Most “Full Stack” engineers are not T Shaped. They are Dashes. They have a thin layer of knowledge across the top but they have no vertical depth.
They know how to use an Index but they do not know how a B Tree works.
They know how to send an HTTP request but they do not know how a TCP handshake works.
Being a Dash is dangerous. In a tight job market companies do not hire Dashes. They hire experts who can solve the expensive burning problems that the generalists caused.
The Moat is Depth
So how do you survive.
You must pick a hard problem and go deep.
Stop trying to keep up with every new JavaScript framework released this week. That is a treadmill that goes nowhere. Instead pick a foundational technology and master it.
Become a database internalist. Learn how storage engines write to disk.
Become a networking specialist. Master the flow of packets and security protocols.
Become a graphics engineer. Learn the math behind the pixels.
Depth cannot be prompted. AI relies on training data and the training data for deep complex edge cases is scarce. The generic code is abundant so the AI is good at it. The deep expert knowledge is rare so the AI is bad at it.
Your depth is your moat. Stop being Full Stack. Start being an Expert.
Loved this, very insightful
The abstraction-as-career-debt framing is spot on. What youre describing mirrors what happened when spreadsheets automated accounting clerks, then when SQL replaced manual database work. Each abstraction layer creates a cohort of people who only know the tool but not the underlying system, and that eventually collapses when the tool changes or fails. Depth really does become the only defensible position when generalist work gets commoditized.