Front-End vs. Back-End (a few key differences)

When getting started in the engineering community one of the first questions you probably ponder from time to time is, should I focus on front-end or back-end? You may not know the answer and that’s okay. As I write this now, I myself enjoy parts of both and couldn’t say which I prefer. To try and help see which may be the best fit for you, I’ve put together some thoughts on some of the biggest differences between the two. Let’s go ahead and jump in!

A day in the Life

To start, let’s go over the basics. The typical day in the life type of stuff for both developers. First, front-end developers are typically in charge of what the user sees on the page (Mobile and Web). They also are in charge of the interactions the user may have with the site. For example, the transition of the dropdown menu, or the change to the coloring of any element as the cursor hovers. These are typical things the front-end developer will be in charge of.

Back-end development is very much tied to working with databases. When the user enters information or logins, the back-end developer is in charge of creating the code that communicates with the database that has the information, or will now be storing the information.

For a front-end developer, a typical day could have a design meeting with a project manager or head engineer about changing the look of the site. They would go over how they would like the layout to be and how they would like the user experience to look like and feel like. Now for a back-end developer, their Lead Engineer may go to them and say, we need to make sure that our site search results are doing what they need to do and we need to make the database requests are faster and more efficient. Now, these are all things a great developer should know how to do ( Or at least know where to start), but they truly define the work you will be doing.

The day in the life of a front-end and back-end engineer can be very different for these reasons.

Salary

Now let’s talk about the important stuff, money. I’ve gone ahead and looked at the average salaries for both front-end and back-end developers in the US. When you break it down, there is a clear favorite in higher pay.

Let’s start with New York City. The Big Apple!

In New York, front-end developers can expect to make close to 90,000 on average. Back-end developers can expect to make on average 115,000. I got all of these numbers from Glassdoor ( take the accuracy of that as you would like). The gap between back-end and front-end stayed relatively the same across the country as well. I took a look at Los Angeles…

And the numbers were so similar that I actually didn’t even bother to write them down. Essentially, back-end developers across the US can expect to see on average a 20 -25% higher salary. I checked in places like Dallas, Austin, Seattle, Santa Fe, and Chicago. All had a similar difference, the only change in the salary figures themselves dependant on the place of work.

There is without a doubt a trend of back-end engineers making more than front-end engineers. A lot of that comes down to the type of work and the types of things each can screw up(i.e. cost money for the company). The bottom line is a back-end engineer can mess up a lot more important stuff. Something to think about.

Technologies

Now let’s move on to technologies, the fun stuff! For a front-end developer, it’s going to be pretty straightforward. The things that they are expected to know would be HTML and CSS to start. They would also need to know a base language like Javascript or Python, and finally some type of language framework (most likely). Something like React or Angular.

Back-end developers have a little more say in what they can use. They certainly have more options in terms of what languages they can use. Most likely it will come down to personal preference or what the company itself uses. It can be anything from ruby, java, python, or c#. Next, they need to know how to work with a database. Some of the big ones out there at the moment would be MongoDB, MYSQL, or Oracle ( Plenty of others as well). The bottom line is, front-end development doesn’t have as many options when it comes to the tech it can use. Things could always change though, frameworks and libraries are fairly new additions to the back-end world, who knows what could come next.

Personality Type

Something that I think everyone should consider is which type of personality they have, and where that fits best. For this let's start with back-end developers. Back-end developers are often seen and viewed as problem solvers. The kids who loved puzzles growing up are great candidates for a future back-end developer.

They want to know how things work. They want to know the steps and the why behind the how. That’s a back-end developer.

Front-end developers are typically detail-oriented individuals. The ones that want everything to look perfect. They have an artsy side, and likely more right-brained.

Things like aesthetics and design drive their creativity. A back-end developer wants to get certain elements to work, and once they do they’re thrilled! A front-end developer wants things to look and feel right to the user, and then they can focus on making them work.

Now of course, these are just a few things I wanted to share about the differences between front-end and back-end. There are plenty of other key differences, these are simply mine, and I think they stand true. Happy Coding Everyone!