[terra_t]

Personally I like doing "back-end" development a lot -- you can be more productive that way, because a lot of the BS in software development comes from the requirements and testing issues that come from UI work.

That said, success at web apps requires somebody have a holistic understanding of "how it all works". The most common antipattern I've seen in commercial web software is that some guys who wrote

* mainframe apps * command like UNIX apps * applications people telnet into, or * Windows GUI apps

want to "move a product to the web" and end up copying the way they did things before -- and not understanding the holistic properties of the environment (for instance, don't bind a cookie-based 'session' to a long-running process in the background if you can at all help it) they make products that suck.

Now, there are a lot of companies out there doing exciting things that involve exciting back-end work, so I say go out and find it.

There certainly are products that need making: personally I know I'll need to get off Mysql at some point because it doesn't have a future, but the current "NoSQL" products are a joke. I could really use something that's like an RDF store on heavy doses of steroids, written by people who don't believe in the RDF religion... Kind of CycL for the next generation.