Thanks for saying so. I was a front-end developer for many years, and felt both the difficulty and the persistent lack of appreciation for that difficulty. I en

Thanks for saying so. I was a front-end developer for many years, and felt both the difficulty and the persistent lack of appreciation for that difficulty. I ended up quitting and just becoming a designer, because if I'm not going to get any respect, at least I shouldn't have to keep running on the treadmill of new technologies. I have also done back-end development, and it is certainly difficult in its own way, but for the money I'd rather work on that than the front end. Having done all three, I have a mental model with two axes: appreciation and meddling. It might be appropriate to sketch it here. With design, the result of your work ends up being visual, so you get a lot of appreciation for it. Maybe too much, sometimes. On the other hand, everyone has an opinion about how you could do your job better, and they're happy to stick their fingers into your work (because it's so easy, you know?). With back-end development, nobody is going to meddle in your work except other engineers: by meddle, I mean step in and tell you how to do it better. That's because they don't know what you do at all. The other side of that opaqueness, though, is that you rarely get credit for good work. Stuff just works the way it should. Front-end development is in between the two. People will give you credit when things work the way they should, and when they look nice, and so on. But, half the time when an application is "snappy" and performant, they'll credit the designer for it (ha ha). At the same time, they'll also tell you how things "should" work, based on how other applications do it. Meanwhile, you're stuck between what the designer approved, and what the back-end supports, and you're just doing your best to make it all work.