Is only backend “real engineering” and not frontend?

Yash Pratap — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:52:20 +0000

The fact is that engineering is engineering, but the economy doesn’t cater to every form of engineering equally when it comes to growth in India.

Frontend has legitimate engineering problems — Virtual List, Dynamic List, rendering, performance optimisation, compilation, Rust-based tooling, etc. But many of these areas have relatively lower demand than backend engineering.

Backend has higher demand largely because companies need to scale things — infrastructure, data pipelines, models, services, etc. AI is also, to a large extent, a backend game.

But this makes me think about something bigger:

Is backend considered “real engineering” in the Urban India psyche because economic value gets converted into status?

The chain becomes:
More demand → higher income → more prestige → “real engineering.”

But we rarely ask:

Why is backend in greater demand? Why don’t we own more frontend frameworks? What kind of engineering does our economy actually reward, and why?

An economic difference gets converted into a hierarchy of engineering itself.

There is a similar distinction between work and career.

A plumber is working.
An electrician is working.

But we don’t necessarily call it a “career” in the same way we call software engineering a career.

Because the economy rewards different forms of work differently.
What provides enough income, security, social mobility and status becomes a “career.”

And in Urban India, “career growth” often means much more than professional growth. It means being able to afford housing, education, security, consumption, lifestyle and social position.

This also explains why people may want to go abroad.

They may not simply want a better job, they may want an economy where career + income + housing + quality of life + social mobility work better for the life they want.

So perhaps :

The economy creates differences in reward → society converts those rewards into status → status creates hierarchy → hierarchy defines what we consider “real,” “successful,” “respectable,” or “better.”

Backend becomes “real engineering.”

A certain job becomes a “good career.”

An iPhone becomes a “good phone.”

And we stop asking why.

DEV Community: Yash Pratap

Is only backend “real engineering” and not frontend?