I think we'll see that balance itself out in time.

When you think of the ways that things can go wrong (instead of ways that things can go right) it makes a little more sense. Most of the data, the valuable stuff - is stored in the backend. This means security is constantly important as long as you have data to protect, and that means mistakes in your code can equal millions of dollars in damages, or worse outcomes than just monetary losses or damages.

On the frontend if things go horribly wrong, people may stop using your website, but it would be really hard to cause millions of dollars of damages because you coded a frontend-template in a sloppy way.

The other thing to keep in mind - if you have a web application, you can entirely replace the frontend. You can throw it out, fire the entire team, and hire a new team to build a totally different frontend (maybe for a different platform, or using different languages) but I can't imagine a company hanging onto a really good frontend and tossing out the entire backend team and code and replacing it with a new backend.

Frontend code is more disposable than backend code, no matter how complex or skilled you need to be to write it. And frontend code also doesn't carry the same business risks as backend code.

I think for these reasons, it totally makes more sense to put more money where there's more risk and value (and I'm a frontend guy saying this)

hmm I'm not sure, backend is just more "vodoo" to the customer / boss so she/he/it doesn't understand it .... but a good frontend dev is as hard to get as a good backend dev ....

Further to @chilimatic, at least in the UK, there is very little difference in salary's of the two.

I would suggest that this perception may have been true a decade ago when the "front-end" developers wasn't nearly as complex and as broad as it is today. So to say that back-end are more respected that front-end is just a silly statement.

A few years ago maybe, because not existed the term frontend developer. Nowadays with the javascript frameworks and the whole ecosystem of tools and more I think both are necesary for the industry. A nice frontend developer it's so important to make a nice UI and make things fluent.

Frontend devs handle very different problems from backend devs. Both can be difficult.

1. An application can exist without a frontend (take APIs as an example). It cannot exist without a backend.
2. I believe backends deal with more abstract concepts than frontend. Storing something in an invisible server session is very different than seeing a box on the screen.
3. A frontend doesn't face challenges like database optimization or server stability. There are challenges like screen paint time and making a UI performant, but those aren't on the same scale.