I was once doing good work at a dysfunctional company. We had a good application backend with a poor frontend. Another team, rivals, came in with a great frontend and barely enough backend to support it. They won so much support and mindshare with their prettier UI that our project was canceled, and they years working on backend features we had from the beginning.

To most people, the UI is the application.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-user-interface-is-the-appl...

That is the ratio thank you! From the 5+ years experience I have, BE tasks always consume less time than FE tasks. One of the reasons for it is that, BE works get commented by technical people and technical people easy to get along well and understand each other and the decisions. However FE works get commented by a larger audience either technical or non-technical. Each comment delays the acceptance of the work done. And mostly it is harder to persuade a non-tech person about the limitations of the current technology.

Totally agree.

This has also been my experience having recently transitioned from FE to BE.

Even if FE is easier to demo, there's less appreciation for the underlying complexity.