[Novashi]

This is a good technical approach but if you get this far, your salary won't match the value delivered by your actual skillset.

Companies know this. There's not appropriate compensation for people who can get comfortable with this breadth of stuff. Fullstack is currently "exploited" because of this IMO.

[Slartie]

That is true. Your salary will most likely not reflect your actual value, but will be way below what you should actually earn.

But - if you do it right (and with a bit of luck), you can work yourself into a position in which you've got a lot of freedom to choose what you want to work on, and that freedom is worth a lot in itself. Because you're the one guy that can "get everything to work smoothly together" and that is able to deliver entire working solutions, while practically all the others may be able to get a single part into good condition, but they stumble when it comes to getting to something working in a greater context. Their solutions will inevitably be less polished than yours.

People are not indifferent to this. It takes a while, but they notice it. And you will be in high demand because your solutions have this really nice tendency to "just work". And nobody will really understand why it is that way. Which means you'll be able to largely direct what you're going to work on next, because since nobody has a real clue why your stuff "just works" all the time, they are doomed to rely on your opinion when it comes to where your specific skill set is most valuably used next.

[james_s_tayler]

This is the direction that my career is taking. Definitely the benefit is you eventually get to work on the good projects that you want to because people trust you to deliver a level of work they don't seem to get very often.

I've always felt relatively underpaid compared to what I wind up bringing to the table, but I would say there have been subtle but noticable perks in other ways and it's definitely translated to comp over time too.

It clicked for me a while back that the vast majority of devs just working on line of business applications have never and will never put together an entire enterprise grade system end to end by themselves in their career. So all you really have to do is (a) have a relatively good head on your shoulders and (b) just hack away at building out a fully fledged system end to end in your own time. A sort of reference architecture of your own. Then when you need to implement stuff at work, you've already solved the problem once before so instead of taking a day to wrap your head around how a particular part of it works, you just whizz through it relatively quickly. It looks like magic from the outside, but it's nothing more than being prepared ahead of time.