I don't believe "engineering" as a full-time employee is a good career track and this is the beginning of the end. Look at houses - when you hire builders to bu

I don't believe "engineering" as a full-time employee is a good career track and this is the beginning of the end. Look at houses - when you hire builders to build a house, do you keep paying the builders once the house is built and you live in it? No. You may occasionally need someone for maintenance, but you will never need the same amount of people that were required to initially build the house. Engineering (whether FE or BE) exists to solve a business problem and drive profit. The free VC money raining down in the last decade made some people forget that and even created perverse incentives where complexity was sometimes seen as an asset (to solicit more VC money) - it made it possible (and normal) to keep the "builders" around and intentionally make the house more and more complex so it's intentionally never finished and the builders have a justification to remain there and pocket part of said VC money. The free VC money has now dried up. Businesses are back at chasing profit (those who can't will go out of business altogether) and are cutting back anything they can. All the "builders" were suddenly let go and the FE market is now saturated, which is why you're seeing so many issues with finding a role (the leetcode thing is just a symptom of this problem - LC gives them a solution to filter through the hundreds of resumes they're getting - it's not a good solution, but it's cheaper than manual review). Your issues with job search have little to do with "respect" and more with the market being saturated. The Leetcode test you said you completed successfully in another comment and then got ghosted? Someone else completed it just as well, but was a better talker (or bullshitter) during the actual interview. The frontend market might be the first hit, but eventually the same will apply to other verticals. I suspect cloud-focused DevOps might be the next hit as businesses finally get tired of paying 100x margins into Jeff Bezos' pocket. Retraining to backend or whatever field you feel is more respected now might buy you some time but ultimately the same outcome will happen. This doesn't mean frontend experience isn't valuable, but you should stop seeing it as "frontend" vs "backend" and start seeing it in terms of what business value you can contribute because that's ultimately the only thing businesses want to be paying for. A lot of solutions however definitely will include a backend component so gaining some experience there would be beneficial and would put you in a good position to deliver end-to-end solutions.