Front and back end have re-diverged. Years ago we had event driven UI and OS provided widget toolkits. It was less artistic but more efficient than the web for

Front and back end have re-diverged. Years ago we had event driven UI and OS provided widget toolkits. It was less artistic but more efficient than the web for the longest time. Front end development wasn't a position. Instead, companies had designers for advertisements. Until recently you needed a decent amount of artistic skills to style a website and make it look nice. This is where front end work was important. Now we have many standard toolkit UI libraries to choose from like bootstrap, foundation, electron etc... It's taken a lot of the artistic side out of making websites, but websites are more like programs now and economics dictate that function is more important than looking cool. However, since the web also replaced advertising, companies have totally split their sites between WebApp and advertising site now. The frontend dev is still in demand for the advertising side where a unique look is important. These jobs are mostly WordPress. The front and back end dev jobs will continue to merge as the frameworks get better and the chasm between WebApp and website grows. Front end has become a designer job for advertising platform sites, that's why more and more jobs are "full stack". I doubt your assertion that front end devs are more productive, especially because the technologies being used there now are so similar to back end work. For anyone using Node they're the same.