I've been a "full-stack" developer at large tech companies, and my experience is there at least it means "frontend developer who can put together a basic API server". My fellow full-stack developers and I would spend most of our time building out frontends, which was generally regarded by others as challenging and specialized work, and maybe 20% of the time adding API endpoints to fetch or update some data, which was considered straightforward.[0]
Not having to wait for some other engineer to make the backends made us a lot more efficient. It definitely was rewarding to be able to complete products end-to-end.
Hiring standards and pay were the same as for any engineer, at least in FAANG.
[0] Yeah, occasionally we had to optimize some SQL queries or whatever but we're competent engineers, we can figure it out even if it's not what we do every day.
Not having to wait for some other engineer to make the backends made us a lot more efficient. It definitely was rewarding to be able to complete products end-to-end.
Hiring standards and pay were the same as for any engineer, at least in FAANG.
[0] Yeah, occasionally we had to optimize some SQL queries or whatever but we're competent engineers, we can figure it out even if it's not what we do every day.