Ask HN: Hire full stack engineer or not?

Full stack, always, that makes us care more about fundamentals, not tools specific to web.

I prefer to hire full stack engineers who are more comfortable/knowledgable with either ends. This really depends on the project though.

I mean, most people don't want to specialize. I just turned down a chance to interview, but after finding out this was some specialized role, I declined because specialization isn't the best for my career.

Jack of all trades, master of none!

It can be a good thing or a bad thing. Young organizations need generalists who can get things done. Late stage organizations need specialization, due to volume of work and complexity of issues.

I know a solid front end guy, who is great on the design side, he also happens to dabble in the back end and does well for him self there. I don't think I would leave him alone in a scalability crisis, and he shouldn't be the one setting up servers and dealing with security. Would he make a good early hire? He sure would, but if you business is growing then your going to out grow him pretty quickly!

I am more of a back end developer and my career has been built around companies that are falling to scale. At some point you need people focused on care and feeding of all that server code, it has to be fast and play nice with the infrastructure that your running, or need to run. Most of the time these situations are a fire (scalability isn't sexy, and it isn't paid much attention till its a big problem) and I frankly enjoy that aspect of it.

Engineers who are capable of both give you far more flexibility. This is more important on a small team than a large engineering department. Note that they don't have to be equally strong in both, just capable of contributing good code if you have an imbalance of work on one side or the other for a few sprints or if the person who's stronger on the other end is on vacation or busy firefighting or whatever.