> If you don't care about the user in the UI, you probably don't care about the user in the backend either.

Not necessarily. I hate frontend tasks not because I don’t care about the user, but because I don’t have decent graphic skills. I can code but I don’t have a good istinct for colors, size, font styles, or other frontend issues that feel more art than science.

I’m honest about it, and luckily my job doesn’t involve frontend tasks, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the users. In fact, you could say that I avoid frontend tasks precisely because I care about users and I don’t want them to be tormented by my awful UI choices :)

> Frontend problems are just easier to see — bad UI, confusing views, ugly design. Everyone notices. Backend problems are hidden — slow API response, bad errors, hard to manage code

That’s one way to see it. Another way is that frontend problems are subjective. The same UI could be confusing for someone and reasonable in someone else’s eyes. What’s ugly? “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, as the saying goes.

Backend problems can be hidden and random but they are objective. If an API returns 500, there is something wrong. It may do so only when a plane passes by or when a cosmic ray happen to flip a bit, but everyone can agree that a 500 is not supposed to happen (unless your API intentionally returns 500 for success…). The root cause may be obscure, but the existence of an issue is objective.