Full Stack vs Expert: The Freelancer's Dilemma
To specialize in one area or be a generalist is one of the most important decisions to take when you start freelancing (especially web development) and it's not easy to take. When you work in a day job, you typically don't have to worry about specialization as you are given a task or milestone by your managers or leads based on your general profile or skills.
It's not your problem but theirs to ensure that your metered billing (salary) isn't wasted and your skills are used effectively, and more importantly, profitably. But when you decide to start freelancing, it is you who must take that decision. You must decide whether you want to be a back-end engineer, front-end engineer or a full stack generalist. You can even decide to specialize in a totally different area such as technical writing or software testing if you have those skills.
Everyone is free to do anything in the world of freelancing, yet it is important to take the right decision to ensure that you not only enjoy your work to your fullest potential but you also keep getting recurring projects and your desk never stays empty.
It is always recommended that you have an expertise of at least one small or micro area of your field before you jump on to full stack. In web development, that could be creating some HTML pages, getting a hand on CSS design, programming in PHP or Python, JavaScript SPA frameworks like Angular or Vue, working with MySQL database, etc. For one, the human mind struggles to learn complex skills like these, so learning many of them at once may not be a good learning experience.
More often than not, web developers simply give up and decide that web development is too hard or complex for them, and they better invest their energies elsewhere. Don't chew at all that knowledge at once, hone your skills one at a time as it will gradually take you forward on the path of becoming a full-stack engineer.
The single largest benefit of going full-stack is that your chance of getting more work increases dramatically. Freelance market is always quite volatile, new technologies, frameworks and libraries come and go quickly. Accordingly, the market adjusts itself, so you may be left out of work or flooded with lots of work depending on the fates of your skills!
And if you are an expert in only one or two skills which happen to suffer from low demand, you'll suddenly find yourself out of work. But again, it's all up to personal preference. If being an expert is what suits you, then you should go that path even if that means risking slack periods every now and then in your freelancing career.
Everyone is free to do anything in the world of freelancing, yet it is important to take the right decision to ensure that you not only enjoy your work to your fullest potential but you also keep getting recurring projects and your desk never stays empty.
It is always recommended that you have an expertise of at least one small or micro area of your field before you jump on to full stack. In web development, that could be creating some HTML pages, getting a hand on CSS design, programming in PHP or Python, JavaScript SPA frameworks like Angular or Vue, working with MySQL database, etc. For one, the human mind struggles to learn complex skills like these, so learning many of them at once may not be a good learning experience.
More often than not, web developers simply give up and decide that web development is too hard or complex for them, and they better invest their energies elsewhere. Don't chew at all that knowledge at once, hone your skills one at a time as it will gradually take you forward on the path of becoming a full-stack engineer.
The single largest benefit of going full-stack is that your chance of getting more work increases dramatically. Freelance market is always quite volatile, new technologies, frameworks and libraries come and go quickly. Accordingly, the market adjusts itself, so you may be left out of work or flooded with lots of work depending on the fates of your skills!
And if you are an expert in only one or two skills which happen to suffer from low demand, you'll suddenly find yourself out of work. But again, it's all up to personal preference. If being an expert is what suits you, then you should go that path even if that means risking slack periods every now and then in your freelancing career.
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