[andrewingram]

If a frontend employee isn't earning a comparable salary to a backend employee, you're either not hiring people of equivalent skillset, or you're underpaying your frontend people.

Where the GraphQL burden lies is largely due to who is considered to be its product owner. This varies significantly depending on whether it's an API for first or third parties.

[smt88]

You don't know enough about my products to be so certain about my payment practices.

First of all, our backend is extremely complex and our frontend isn't. Our backend devs need a lot of legal and financial training. Other companies will have an inverse situation.

Second, there's a glut of frontend devs (at least when I look for them) because bootcamps seem to produce people who are better at frontend than backend.

And third, our frontend devs just don't have as much work to do, so they're idle a lot more often.

[andrewingram]

So you’re not hiring people of equivalent skillset, that’s fair enough.

I just found it a surprising comment in isolation because most people I’ve met who’ve developed both frontend and backend skills to a senior or greater level, would argue that frontend is the more challenging of the two.

The bit about idle time is a bit confusing though, can’t you just have fewer devs if there’s not enough work to go around? Or do you always need a lot of spare resources due to unpredictable workloads?