I agree probably 80% or more of your mundane enterprise back-end programming tasks are shuffling data to and fro to the database, batching transformations, syst

I agree probably 80% or more of your mundane enterprise back-end programming tasks are shuffling data to and fro to the database, batching transformations, system integration and on the wire data transformations. Sure there are the jobs out there where back-end developers are sequencing genomes or creating ML models but for the majority of them, if you need to use ML, you are just the guy pumping the data to some service to get the magic data results. Don't get me wrong, I do back-end dev and it is important, just highlighting that it can be pretty routine stuff. In those environments front end work can actually be the more complicated system, where a developer is trying to take a complicated manual workflow and capture it into a flow of screens that make logical sense for the user. What the author is seeing is a lack of team alignment not the division of labor, give that he is a full-stack developer I am sure he is keen to the division, but the problem is a people problem in nature. In the environments I have worked, we do not divide teams into front-end or back-end. Teams are comprised of a mix of skills that are aligned to supporting a business silo. In these team dynamics developers know the value of each of the roles, from the DB admin, to the back-end guy to the front-end guy and what we usually see is cross pollination where many of the *-end developers end up picking up skills from the other side and start working the full-stack.