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Regarding your last point, yes I used to believe backend engineers deserved more pay. Usually they had higher education, and were solving more complex problems

Regarding your last point, yes I used to believe backend engineers deserved more pay. Usually they had higher education, and were solving more complex problems with all kinds of dependencies and integrations. Frontend, 10 years ago, was about knowing jQuery, how to make an XMLHttpRequest maybe, and a little bit of domain knowledge on browser bugs and using floats to implement your layout. Back then you weren't even doing responsive layouts on all projects. People usually filling these roles were not required to have the same amount of domain knowledge as a backend engineer - no way. Nowadays it's a different kettle of fish. The tooling is insane. The dependency tree is insane. The amount of granular optimisations and obscure browser APIs you need to know to work on big-tech frontends is nuts. So yes, I used to think this was the case. Not anymore.

GrumpyNl 7y ago
It still boils down to css and html,but we are champs at complicating things.
rumanator 7y ago
> Nowadays it's a different kettle of fish. The tooling is insane. The dependency tree is insane. That sounds like a self inflicted problem. Is there any problem that the javascript-driven approach to frontends actually solves that justifies the added complexity?
J5892 7y ago
I've definitely had to fight, as a frontend engineer, to prove that my job is just as demanding (and in many cases more so) as any other engineer. I have the education, knowledge, and problem solving skills required for backend engineering; I just find the front end much more interesting. Building a complex, intuitive user interface for an application/website is a huge challenge.