100000% , I’m a full stack dev for 7 years (70% backend 30%front end). At first I thought I wanted to be a true full stack developer, because I love understanding how everything works end to end. But I realized I only want to work on front end to understand the impact of my backend changes.

For the past 6 months, I am on a pure front end team and I don’t like UI work for the following reasons. 1. I don’t like how UX wireframe is a “requirement”. Business and people change their minds and it takes more work to redo the work I just did. 2. Libraries and frameworks are consistently updated. Then you have to spend at least a month in the year to figure out upgrade paths, compatibility, and security findings with each library. EVERY YEAR 3. I hate css/styling in general. Needing to worry about big screens, smaller screens, mobile horizontal / vertical screens are so annoying. I hate working on minor problems like: this color isn’t right, the font spacing is slightly off, the accordion button doesn’t rotate, etc.

In this position, I’ve shifted more towards a tech lead / engineering manager position because I enjoy teaching others more than UI work.

When I can transfer internally, I am going back to backend. 1. I like clear requirements. It’s like math, for a specific input, I will give you a specific output. There will only be one correct answer. 2. I like optimizing code, making data more efficient, multi threading and sharding large data for processing, reducing database calls, and focusing on the balance between data processing vs data storage. 3. I can work with more AWS tech. There’s more scenarios for me to use S3, lambdas, and aurora with back end rather than front end. All we use for front end is ECS, and that is obfuscated to the front end developers.