One thing I understand as a "backend engineer" (which my front-end/web engineer colleagues usually hold in high regard): my code does exactly what I tell it to do, good logic and bad logic.

You can have the best and cleanest JS that targets FF, and have it fall over one million ways in other browsers (I'm looking at you, Safari). There is a level of respect that is lost, so far as the expertise of understanding the lowest common denominator across browsers, and actually getting that denominator to do something useful.

Front-end is, at the end of the day, much harder than backend. I understand why us backend people get praise: algorithms, distributed systems, coherency, performance, yada yada yada. Imagine coding against a system that doesn't behave consistently. No thanks.

It really isn’t. I’m full stack and do both every day. I’ve been doing both since the days of IE5. Things have changed a lot but the challenges you face on the back-end with different technologies, distributed systems, data integrity, security etc are far more complex.

The difference is that in the backend you have control over the runtime environment. In the frontend you don't.

However, because frontend devs know that, they have build tools to support them. It started with jquery as an cross browser abstraction and has grown to a whole eco system ranging from websites like caniuse.com to editor plugins that check for features based on the current browser shares and your specific selection (e.g. browserlist) up to test-farm services like browserling.

I think what makes frontend development harder, is that standards carry a lot of legacy (you can't just redesign CORS and 3rd party cookies) and that you have a very diverse set of runtime environments with very different capabilities.

> check for features based on the current browser shares

TIL! That sounds awesome. What are these called? :D

[1] https://github.com/browserslist/browserslist [2] https://github.com/amilajack/eslint-plugin-compat