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From my perspective pay has trended marginally higher for backend developers and technical respect is usually also marginally higher for backend work. However
by scalesolved 9y 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 9y 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 9y agoYou 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.