[devs1010]

You need to talk to your manager and bring up your concerns, there's no reason to continue being "on separate pages", you need to both get on the same page. If they are telling you to do one thing, you do another, and then get praised for it, and this is happening consistently you need to bring it up to understand exactly whats going on, either they really don't care that much and are leaving it to your discretion or there could be friction developing behind the scenes. At my current job we have weekly one on one meetings with the manager to bring any issues up and something like this would be a good topic for a one on one discussion. You don't want to get in the habit of doing more work than is needed, also, if you want to pursue UI development then consider finding a job that wants and appreciates that. The more complex the server-side coding becomes the less room there is for a "jack of all trades" so it really just depends on where you want your focus to go in your career. That said, a UI guy who has programming experience and understanding of server-side development, in my opinion, is always going to have a leg up on someone who doesn't