I would be careful to define in detail what full-stack is.

Like the author, I am quite a while in the industry now, and I can say the term was never clearly defined as far as I can remember. But when someone in 2005, 2010, 2015, or this year talks about a full-stack, then I think most people know what it roughly means. And for me, it's ok and enough to be vague there.

If full-stack would be a bad thing to use, then "web developer" should be blamed as well because it's not precise enough.

In my teams, I define someone as a full stack developer when he can work and act in the whole stack of a team. For example nodeJS, nestJS, nextJS, ReactJS, and Docker in our case. I don't count tools into like git of npm, it's common anyway. Further skills like terraform should be counted if the stack of the team contains it.

In other words, a full-stack definition is something about a team or development environment, not a general description of a single person in the field.

A full-stack developer in a DevOps team based on nodeJS and AWS is a different thing than PHP Laravel and LAMP Stack.

So when the developer would like to work in my team as a full-stack, I would think he intends to work on every part of the stack, no matter the skill level in the first place.

A full-stack dev doesn't need to be a master in every part. I have good experience of full-stacks with a focus on backend, frontend, or infrastructure, and were still able to wire their apps from one side to the other in the required quality.

I recommend taking it easy there. Titles don't make the difference in the end anyway :-)

Thanks for your post!