Engineering video
8:16 · 12 September 2025
In the speaker’s explanation, frontend engineers often earn substantially less than backend engineers due to a larger supply of frontend talent, the perception that backend systems are more critical to business data and authentication, and the higher financial cost of backend mistakes.
Hear it at 0:00 →In the speaker’s explanation, aI models have become surprisingly better at frontend coding than backend coding because security issues and distributed systems are harder for AI to understand, and there is significantly more public frontend code available for training data.
Hear it at 3:53 →In the speaker’s explanation, frontend developers can increase their salaries by becoming insanely good at frontend and working for consumer-facing or SaaS companies where the UI serves as a critical competitive advantage.
Hear it at 5:10 →In the speaker’s explanation, developers can move up the stack by starting close to what they already know—such as the API layer with GraphQL—before gradually expanding into deployment, databases, and software architecture.
Hear it at 6:28 →So at this point in time, it's pretty obvious that front end engineers earn substantially less than backend engineers. And depending on the website you're looking at and of course your location and seniority, we're talking about at least 20 to 40k. Now they both work 8 hours. And I've seen many cases where the front engineer had more years of experience than the backend one, but still the backend engineer was earning more. And when you beg to ask the question why people will say of course backend it's it's more complex right which is why backend developers should earn more but I feel like this idea of
backend being more complex comes from the past where most applications were very backend heavy in the last few years with frameworks like react and more recently with AI being ser via chatbooks via interfaces it feels like front engineers are also doing a very important job because no matter how good your your software ware or your app is the UI, the front end. It's in many cases the only way the user can actually extract value out of the software which actually makes front end engineers a core piece to any company. So in this video I wanted to dive a bit deeper and really understand why do backend
engineers earn more than front end ones and I will give you two ways to work around it as a front engineer because here's the good news just because you work on the front end you don't have to be earning less. And the first point is that there are more front end engineers in the market and there's a reason why because learning front end it's a lot easier than back end. uh you know you have a lot more material if you go to YouTube or make voices or any kind of platform right we all know that I cited in the front end Bon started in the in the front and actually a lot of the developers you probably know started in
the front end because it's easier the front end also provides a quicker feedback loop right so you do something and you see it popping up in the screen which makes it a lot more accessible for beginners who might need quick feedback for them to to stay motivated also many boot camps start front end only and finally Septo devs are more likely to avoid back end because algorithms, data structures, databases are a bit more abstract. Again, going back to the to the feedback loop and to the UI being something visual, which can be intimidating. So these days, you see most people who are trying to learn how
to code, they're going straight for the front end. And by the way, folks, my name is Drago. I'm a self-taught JavaScript engineer. And together with my brother Ben here in the picture, we built the senior dev where we help JavaScript engineers level up to senior and beyond. and of course become irreplaceable in the current job market. If you want to learn more about what we do and how we could help you, then check the links below. On to the second argument why backend engineers make more than front engineers, it's back end is more critical. And if you talk to most company founders, product managers,
product owners, you will realize they do have the impression that backend devs are more critical, right? Specifically on the business side. And that's because usually back end engineers deal with a lot more sensitive business data things like customer data authentication. And while it's true that front end engineers might also handle this kind of data, it's the back end that usually makes sure that this data is handled and stored properly. And as you can imagine, data is very important for a business.
Meaning that if someone mishandles or made mistakes in the back end, it's going to cost the company a lot more. Which is the second point here. Back inbox can cost the company a lot more than front end ones. So for example, if for certain part of the UI it's stuck or not working is not the same as people being unable to pay because the payment services fail. And finally a lot of big enterprises hire more backend engineers than front ends. And what usually happens with these big companies who can hire more backend engineers is they can also pay people more in general everybody. So if you look at average
numbers, you will see back-end engineers earning more than front end just because there's more backend engineers working for bigger companies. And the third point would be that AI is slightly better at front end. And this is something that most of us did not anticipate it. So mainstream opinion was that back end might be easier for AI than front end because LLMs can digest, right, to structure data way easier than mockups or UI state. What happened? It turned out that security issues and things like distributed systems are way harder for AI to understand simply because of the nature of those systems.
And finally, there's also way more front-end code to train AI on. Right? So with backend being more critical, companies don't want to expose their backend code, but they are a lot more likely to expose the front-end code, which generates a lot more training data for the AI, leading to AI being actually better in the front end than the back end, which again was counterintuitive. And if you look at open AI website in the latest GP5, they actually specifically mentioned that the model excels at front-end coding. And while I do believe that these structural factors that I mentioned on why front engineers
earn less than back end engineers at the same time I believe there's a lot of stuff you can do as a front engineer to increase your salary and that's what we're going to talk about next. What can you do as a front end engineer? And the first thing you can do is to stay in the front end and on your mountain on your heel. Meaning that one strategy to very quickly increase your salary as a front end engineer is to just get insanely good at the front end and switch jobs to companies who depend a lot on their UIs, right? So companies where the front end it's adding a lot of value to the product. Usually those companies are
consumerfacing companies and it doesn't always have to be B2C. Those can be e-commerce companies, SAS companies where the UI it's the way for the user to extract value from the software. But any kind of company where the front end is critical and even if you check companies like OpenAI, you will see they pay their front engineers very very well because for them the UI the front end it's a competitive advantage. models are becoming a commodity and that's where companies are trying to differentiate to better UI, more intuitive UI in order to get more users. So that's the first strategy. Get insanely good at the front
end self and you have to go deep. You have to go into web performance. You have to go into accessibility testing front architecture. If you don't know exactly what skills you might be lacking, there is a tingle assessment in the comments. You just invest 10 minutes and you will get a full analysis of your tingle gaps. And the second strategy is if you cannot beat them, join them. Right? And the idea is that you as a front engineer, you can move up the stack into the full stack and finally into the back end. This is actually the journey that many of us went through where you spend your first 3 to 5 years
in the front end. Uh you you get very good at the front end, but you also start getting better at programming in general. And then little by little, you move towards the API layer. Maybe add a bit of GraphQL. Then you get into deployment, databases and then finally software architecture, microservices, distributed systems. Now a lot of the front engineers we met that try to make this transition towards a full stack struggle with one bump into one huge challenge which is hey uh the full stack is so wide there's so many different things I can get my hands on. there's infrastructure, you know, Terraform,
AWS, Azure, then there's backend self, you know, HTTP, REST APIs. So, where should I start? And there's never an easy answer to that. But the simplest way to solve that, it's by starting with what you already know or what's closer to you, right? So, if you're a front engineer and you spend most of your life working with React or Vue, just try to get closer to the API layer, right? Don't don't jump straight into databases, don't jump straight into infrastructure. You will get there. Uh but always try to stay close to your base as you try to expand your let's say circle of competence. That's the best
advice I can give you. And in this way you make sure that you don't go too far from what you know but you're also expanding what you know at the same time. And finally, of course, if you'd like Bogdan and I to help you go to this transition towards a more full stack, more senior developer who's not afraid of layoffs, afraid of AI, then check the link in comments and see how our premium mentorship program can help you get X.
