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Backend almost always get's more respect and pay. There is simply a much greater depth and breadth of knowledge required, business processes, databases, queues,

by flukus 10y ago

Backend almost always get's more respect and pay. There is simply a much greater depth and breadth of knowledge required, business processes, databases, queues, concurrency, security, deployments, the list goes on and more often than not includes a fair share of front end knowledge as well. IME when you need someone to analyze user requirements and build an efficient UI it falls to the backend guys as well, because sorting out requirements is also part of our job. More often than not the front end devs I've worked with have been focused on making things pretty, making sure all the fonts match and the colors look nice rather than focus on true usability, often this is all they're empowered to do, they industry (sadly) makes little distinction between UX and UI. Of course these are gross generalizations and I've seen exceptions to all the above points.

scalesolved 10y ago
From my perspective pay has trended marginally higher for backend developers and technical respect is usually also marginally higher for backend work. However I feel that front end developer has a clear advantage in that their work can be played with, viewed and commented on by non technical managers and product owners. Also other external praise is usually along the lines of 'this looks great', 'the ui is so smooth' than direct praise of what for the most part is unseen backend work. Many backend quality improvements for products can be deployed without a product owner ever realising yet a front end and crucially visual change is obvious. The product owner can go play with the new slick drop down menu, they however can't go and easily play with the additional resiliency that you've added to the internal message infrastructure for example. Like you mentioned though these are generalisations and I too have seen exceptions :)
- sotojuan 10y ago
  > However I feel that front end developer has a clear advantage in that their work can be played with, viewed and commented on by non technical managers and product owners. The downside of this is that you get a lot more "can you add this or change that? Should be easy :-)". Non-technical folks think that because they can see frontend work they know more about it. Maybe I've had bad experiences but I consider the fact that the backend's work can't be easily seen by the business people an advantage.
  - scalesolved 10y ago
    You make a good point! Non-technical folks are certainly less likely to suggest how to tackle a backend problem. I think though the backend really suffers in the sense that is not seen and not heard unless there is an emergency in many cases.

by flukus 10y ago

scalesolved 10y ago

From my perspective pay has trended marginally higher for backend developers and technical respect is usually also marginally higher for backend work. However I feel that front end developer has a clear advantage in that their work can be played with, viewed and commented on by non technical managers and product owners. Also other external praise is usually along the lines of 'this looks great', 'the ui is so smooth' than direct praise of what for the most part is unseen backend work. Many backend quality improvements for products can be deployed without a product owner ever realising yet a front end and crucially visual change is obvious. The product owner can go play with the new slick drop down menu, they however can't go and easily play with the additional resiliency that you've added to the internal message infrastructure for example. Like you mentioned though these are generalisations and I too have seen exceptions :)

sotojuan 10y ago
> However I feel that front end developer has a clear advantage in that their work can be played with, viewed and commented on by non technical managers and product owners. The downside of this is that you get a lot more "can you add this or change that? Should be easy :-)". Non-technical folks think that because they can see frontend work they know more about it. Maybe I've had bad experiences but I consider the fact that the backend's work can't be easily seen by the business people an advantage.
- scalesolved 10y ago
  You make a good point! Non-technical folks are certainly less likely to suggest how to tackle a backend problem. I think though the backend really suffers in the sense that is not seen and not heard unless there is an emergency in many cases.