Absolutely. My focus is on front-end engineering (Javascript, markup, and CSS), but I've written plenty of PHP, MySQL, and C++. I can say with absolute confid

Absolutely. My focus is on front-end engineering (Javascript, markup, and CSS), but I've written plenty of PHP, MySQL, and C++. I can say with absolute confidence that back-end engineering is orders of magnitude simpler and easier than front-end. A lot of front-end engineers come to this discipline without CS degrees. Maybe they used to be designers or writers who happened to get into building web pages, and found some skill with it. There's a popular conception among front-ends that server-side coding is somehow more difficult or mysterious. That's "real" programming, they think. That idea is 100% weapons-grade balonium. Client-side coding is much more challenging. If you're a front-end engineer operating under the assumption that back-end coding is hard, start spending some time reading the code for the components that you're interacting with. Pick up a book on OOP patterns. Behind the fancy lingo, you'll see it's actually very simple by comparison.