My experience is that in backend you spend 80% of your time on problems that are rightfully hard and 20% on bullshit.
In the frontend you spend 20% of your time on things that are hard because they need to and 80% on things that simply should be easier. This includes everything from browsers to desktop resolutions to needless churn in your framework.
I'm not saying one of them easier, especially in 2021 as I am a bit out of the picture in frontend but it seems it's the same type of problems in 2021 than it was 5/10/even 20 years ago.
In backend you choose your stack and who to interface with. Sure, people can write all sorts of clients to talk to you, but you are the one who decides most parameters (except amount of traffic, and for that there's rate limiting).
In frontend you are closest to the end user and are the only one who is not only speaking to machines, but that's only one end.
So personally I'd say frontend is more thankless, and you often need to know more about specific edge cases, whereas in backend you need to know more about unspecific classes of edge cases.
Also one point is that the barrier of frontend and backend has shifted. For a long time when we as backend developers worked with frontend developers that meant we did PHP/Python/Java/Ruby and some basic HTML and they did HTML/CSS/some JS.
Nowadays frontend basically means JavaScript and even the meaning of full stack has shifted.
In the frontend you spend 20% of your time on things that are hard because they need to and 80% on things that simply should be easier. This includes everything from browsers to desktop resolutions to needless churn in your framework.
I'm not saying one of them easier, especially in 2021 as I am a bit out of the picture in frontend but it seems it's the same type of problems in 2021 than it was 5/10/even 20 years ago.
In backend you choose your stack and who to interface with. Sure, people can write all sorts of clients to talk to you, but you are the one who decides most parameters (except amount of traffic, and for that there's rate limiting).
In frontend you are closest to the end user and are the only one who is not only speaking to machines, but that's only one end.
So personally I'd say frontend is more thankless, and you often need to know more about specific edge cases, whereas in backend you need to know more about unspecific classes of edge cases.
Also one point is that the barrier of frontend and backend has shifted. For a long time when we as backend developers worked with frontend developers that meant we did PHP/Python/Java/Ruby and some basic HTML and they did HTML/CSS/some JS.
Nowadays frontend basically means JavaScript and even the meaning of full stack has shifted.