[waprin]

I think you were ahead of the curve. I have seen multiple companies that seem to think of front-end as "lesser" engineering, but then struggled to fill front-end roles more than any other position, and struggle to build great UIs. "Front-end" still has a stigma of taking a PSD and turning it into HTML/CSS, even though these days front-ends are getting extremely sophisticated and require tons of strong coding skills. Ultimately supply/demand work in your favor. And I wouldn't take anything a PHP expert has to say about "serious" developer roles too seriously.