Frontend vs Backend - Which is easier ?

Hi, I have been working as a full stack engineer for almost 5 years now. In case you don't know, full stack development is a domain in software development industry where you focus on developing web applications. “Frontend” is the components what we see as end users of the application like forms, menu, buttons and other things. “Backend” is a terminology given to technologies used at the server side which are not visible to the user like handling form submission and saving user data somewhere in the cloud among other things.

Now we come to the crux of this blog which is - which one of the two is easier to learn ? I've seen posts on Linkedin, Reddit and on other platforms advocating why back-end engineers should be paid more since it's harder to learn, scale and implement compared to frontend. Those were sort of demeaning to the front-end developers, I couldn't help but to express my opinion on this topic through this post. Long gone are those days where Front-end was only concerned with learning elementary Javascript with HTML and CSS. These days you have a new framework in Javascript, HTML or CSS every once in a while which tries to aim at improving certain aspect of the existing frameworks. One of the principles in software industry we follow is called the DRY principle, that is - do not repeat yourself. Make use of reusable components in your app and try to minimize code duplicity. I believe over the years especially after 2015, Frontend has evolved a lot and has come a long way since then. We need ample amount of time in brainstorming when it comes to make a choice about which framework to use and how to structure the app with routing in case you plan to build a single page application in Javascript which are quite popular these days. I'd argue front-end is actually more difficult and often involves more lines of code than back-end for small to medium sized applications. Add responsiveness to it with the availability of different sized screens in the market with most of them having their fair share of usage in the market. It becomes difficult to ignore any device for an application that plans to reach to maximum users. Quite a fair amount of complexity is involved in decision making while implementing these things on the front-end which makes it almost on par with back-end in terms of learning curve. 

At the end of the day, it depends on the programmer. Some people might find front-end easier than back-end while some would find front-end more arduous than back-end. To conclude, I'd say both are challenging and demand different set of skills. For back-end you have several languages to choose from like PHP, Go, Java, Python and more. With front-end you only have one choice that is Javascript.