As part of my new "work" which basically is looking for a new project / job, I've been doing several interviews. At one of those interviews, they were looking for a full stack profile to develop an MVP project. They basically had a budget limit and were not able to afford two developers, one for backend and one for frontend, so they basically thought on a single profile that matches both requirements.

To give a bit of context, my working experience has been focused mainly on the backend side mixed a lot with system administration, basically because I love both roles and they tied together a lot. I've done some frontend development, but it never was a big area of interest for me, at least while I'm busy improving and learning backend / devops side of the stack.

Back to the previously mentioned interview process, I was asked about how would I approach their problem to be able to deliver their MVP project in time with their budget limitation. I knew it would mean I may not get the job (in fact, that's what happended) but basically my advice was:

• It's really hard to find a full stack profile that is able to do perfectly well frontend and backend. Both sides of a project have a lot of complexity, and thus, a single person is not able to know every single issue and be up to date with all changes in both fields in a way that replaces an specific backend and an specific frontend profile. Does it mean they don't exists? No, I'm sure such profiles exist, but you will not get them at the same salary you would pay for a single backend or frontend engineer.
• You may find full stack engineers which are really good at frontend or backend and that they can do something in the other field but at some point that may cause you problems, being due to security issues they didn't consider or poor code quality or even maybe, not choosing the right tool.
• Even with what I said in previous points, for their case of preparing an MVP to be able to reach a seed state and succeed on their current preseed state, going with a full stack profile looked like the way to go.

The main reason for this advice was that they agreed that after the MVP, they may throw the MVP away and start from zero with more people on board.

They just needed something to show to some potential customers and investors, show their idea to them and reach the seed state. It doesn't matter if the application would scale properly or if it's easy to maintain or develop further. They need something visual and working, and they need it fast, so what they need was more a frontend engineer which was able to do some pretty and with basic backend knowledge to handle the basics of the application data.

As you can imagine, I was not the right person for that position, at least not at that time. The problem they had is that they interviewed me, as a backend engineer, after a couple of months looking for a full stack without success.

I hope their MVP is a success, the project was really nice!.