Backend almost always get's more respect and pay. There is simply a much greater depth and breadth of knowledge required, business processes, databases, queues, concurrency, security, deployments, the list goes on and more often than not includes a fair share of front end knowledge as well.<p>IME when you need someone to analyze user requirements and build an efficient UI it falls to the backend guys as well, because sorting out requirements is also part of our job. More often than not the front end devs I've worked with have been focused on making things pretty, making sure all the fonts match and the colors look nice rather than focus on true usability, often this is all they're empowered to do, they industry (sadly) makes little distinction between UX and UI.<p>Of course these are gross generalizations and I've seen exceptions to all the above points.
Most places I've been, FrontEnd was perceived as a place for more junior developers. "We'd rather they mess up something visually than corrupt the data" was the reasoning at the time.<p>Note that I'm not saying I agree with the sentiment!
in my previous companies, backend got much more respect and i believe rightfully so. think of the hardest back end problem: its Google scale requiring lots of PhDs to tackle it.<p>now think of the hardest front end problem. most likely its not even close.