>It's like HR and technical recruiters are making designs to pay you less ... This is not an accurate description of the primary reason the term "front end dev

>It's like HR and technical recruiters are making designs to pay you less ... This is not an accurate description of the primary reason the term "front end developer" exists, and moreover is an unfortunate example of the unhelpful us-vs-them conspiracy theorizing that seems so prevalent lately. The term "front end developer" exists, like the term "backend developer" to denote a particular specialization. If I need to improve the look and feel of my web app, someone with a strong design sensibility and a lot of experience in the latest web development technologies (i.e., a front end developer) is who I want -- not someone with a lot of experience doing low-level memory management in C for a graphics engine. The latter might be a great programmer, but won't be as helpful, as quickly, as the former. In any case, frontend developers, as a class, bear no less "responsibility" than others (after all, the frontend is how the user experiences the product), and I think most frontend developers would tell you there are plenty of challenging problems to be solved there, rivaling anything else you'll find elsewhere in the stack. What sets the price of frontend dev expertise is the same thing that sets the price of every other good and service in the known universe, barring weird regulatory interference: supply and demand. The calculus for a hiring manager is not "how can I pay X class of people less than others", it's "how can I minimize the amount of $$ I have to pay while maximizing the value I obtain?" In an individual case, it's "what's the least I can pay this particular individual in order to get him/her to do what I want"?