I've seen this trend forming over the last 3-4 years. Backend technology now has a vast wealth of frameworks, tools and hosted services to choose from. People still bicker over Django vs Rails or even Spring, but regardless any of these are so vastly superior to what we were working with 10 years ago. Cloud hosting has been another huge disruptor. We still have plenty of work, but on a typical web project nowadays, client-side development has seen increasing demands and slower uptake of new technology thus shifting the project bottlenecks form backend to front. Expectations are higher since the capabilities are there, but we've only just passed the hump of supporting IE6 and now we have to worry about phones.