What in the world is a Full² Stack Engineer/Developer?

Yep I'm doing the thing...

Why?

Well, I've been seeing a pattern recently.

Some companies like to hire software engineers that cover breadth (in this context, a large variety of complicated software responsibilities) vs depth (a lot of experience in a specialized software stack) and often have a hard time finding the perfect dev for the job. For example, Company A has very few engineers and a lot of "stack" to build from nothing. During this search, they may filter for folks that have experience in the front-end, back-end, mobile development, infrastructure, etc. They start to notice that these candidates sometimes call themselves Full Stack (Engineers/Developers). Some cold-calls (more like emails, hopefully) are sent out to these Full Stack folk and the responses are all over the place! Many of these leads have front-end and back-end experience, but Company A has a product that also needs an iPhone/Android app and Firmware capable of running Machine Learning on their custom hardware. Company A is conflicted because they can't take on multiple software engineers at this point, and they need a proof of concept out to market to investors ASAP. If only they could filter more granularly to find that swiss knife software engineer.

Company B, on the other hand, is well established and is looking to form a new team to tackle a moonshot idea. They're looking to hire three engineers, one that can handle the Front and Back-End, another for Data Science and the last for QA purposes. They are more than willing to take on a Full² Stack (Engineer/Developer) but will happily settle for one that does not have mobile-app/firmware/machine learning development experience.

Am I a Full² [Full Full] Stack (Engineer/Developer)?

Quite frankly, these are goal posts that will move over time.

The obvious prerequisite is Front/Back-end experience with a sprinkle of DevOps (infrastructure)/QA, as that's what is most often expected of a Full Stack Engineer in the first place. In my opinion, once you are also working in at least two of the following, you are likely justified in calling yourself a Full² Stack (Engineer/Developer).

• Machine Learning
• Embedded Development
• Native Mobile Development (React Native, Ionic/CapacitorJS, PWA are all cheating in this context)
• Infrastructure (beyond build automation)
• Software Security
• Reliability Engineering
• Systems Integration (Hardware-Hardware, Hardware-Software, Software-Software)
• If it's not on this list and isn't HTML/CSS/SQL/(CI/CD), it should probably be included.

Again, apologies in advance if this catches on. Thank you for entertaining this brain dump!