I've been pondering this conundrum lately. Building an effective UI is very hard and having one probably has a greater bearing on whether your product is succes

I've been pondering this conundrum lately. Building an effective UI is very hard and having one probably has a greater bearing on whether your product is successful in the market place. Yet front-end development is looked down upon. Why is that? Here're some of the explanations I came up with: 1. Back-end code runs on expensive software whereas front-end code runs on free software. People associate cost with importance. 2. Activities of back-end code are often not directly observable. People are conditioned to regard the mysterious with the sacred. 3. Front-end code operates in an uncontrolled environment. That makes development more difficult. In human society, however, control implies power and those with power sit higher in the hierarchy. 4. Front-end programmers often find themselves deferring to the opinion of UX designers. A variation of reason 3: Not being a decider is associated with lower social standings. 5. Front-end technologies change more rapidly than back-end ones. Again, that raises the difficulty of front-end development. Yet it means investment into front-end code wouldn't hold its value as well as investment back-end code. People are loss-adverse. It's an uncomfortable thought losing a critical part of a project to obsolescence. 6. Back-end programming is less exciting than front-end programming. People's sense of justice lead them to reward--rightly or wrongly--back-end programmers with greater regard.