Forget the Fullstack

Perfect people don't exist.
Start where you are. Work with who you have. Let the teams do "team Tetris" to self assemble into functional units with all the skills they need.

The wonderful free resources from DevOps Forum are the best. Thankyou Gene Kim!

The latest resource is Fullstack Teams Not EngineersImage.

I'm so glad they called it out: Forget The Fullstack Engineer. They're unicorns. Don't wait around trying to find one, they're scarce as hens' teeth. You don't want them anyway. They're part of the hero culture, people shouldn't work alone, and they diminish the respect for others less miraculously gifted.

Start where you are. Work with who you have. Let the teams do "team Tetris" [I wish I could recall who I got that term from] to self assemble into functional units with all the skills they need.

Sure, everyone on an agile team should be multiskilled , but don't look for full stack superheroes who are good at them all. Develop people according to their need (as they and their team see it). Everyone will be the strongest in one skill. Everyone should be on a journey of mastery in at least one skill, maybe several. Shu-Ha-Ri: understand where everybody on the team is on the skills journey. They behave and we support them based on whether they are apprentice, journeyman, or master.

There are at least 2 dysfunctions that impede that:

    Assigning roles in the team rather than skills, locks people into a defined skillset and prevents fluidity. Instead of Tetris we play banging square pegs into round holes.

    And trying to standardise the "shape" of an employee ("human resource") by building up their weaknesses to meet some defined profile, just makes them miserable. Build people's strengths not their weaknesses.

There are much bigger movements at work here which we are starting to write about: the restoration of humanity to work; the reunification of truth, beauty, and goodness; the return to values over value. Don't treat people like machines: don't standardise them, don't perfect them. Embrace their diversity, and the creativity, energy, and flexibility that it brings. Help them to solve the puzzle of how they best come together to achieve results.

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