At smaller companies, at least, my observation has been that frontend (in fact, design, even if unable to write code) seemed to have a big leg-up on positive visibility among important stakeholders, clients, owners, and managers, and to have an easier time moving up the promotion ladder than backend.
A demo of improved API response times, even if accompanied by pretty graphs (extra work purely for self-promotional purposes) just doesn't get the ooohs and aaaahs and "can we see that again?"s and "can you forward me these slides?" that a design mock-up of a prettier button can. And when back-end supports feature development, it's still the front-end that people are looking at when it's demo'd. Basically the only thing that gets a big reaction from non-tech-folks from the backend is when you manage to make a large opex number a lot smaller, and even then, no guarantee.
Requires backend-experienced folks in the right places to counterbalance this, and a lot more effort on the part of backend folks to make their naturally-hard-to-"read" and relatively-boring (to look at, anyway) work flashier and more prominent.
A demo of improved API response times, even if accompanied by pretty graphs (extra work purely for self-promotional purposes) just doesn't get the ooohs and aaaahs and "can we see that again?"s and "can you forward me these slides?" that a design mock-up of a prettier button can. And when back-end supports feature development, it's still the front-end that people are looking at when it's demo'd. Basically the only thing that gets a big reaction from non-tech-folks from the backend is when you manage to make a large opex number a lot smaller, and even then, no guarantee.
Requires backend-experienced folks in the right places to counterbalance this, and a lot more effort on the part of backend folks to make their naturally-hard-to-"read" and relatively-boring (to look at, anyway) work flashier and more prominent.