Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS
sokoloff: It depends on what your goal is.I'm a backend guy who runs an IT department for a top 100 e-commerce site in my day job. Knowing HTML/CSS doesn't do me any practical good there.For my side projects, I know just enough HTML/CSS to be dangerous. (http://www.almamatersports.com is all programmed by me in a couple hundred hours this year, but has obvious visual bugs on several different browsers, some layout issues, etc, but that didn't stop it from pleasing the guy paying the bills.) For those kinds of things, knowing more at the start of the project would have saved me tons of time and gotten a better looking end result, but wouldn't have changed the clients satisfaction all that much. Then again, the gameplay is so much better this year than last for him that it's not a fair comparison, since for most sites that level of visual bugs would be unacceptable.When I think about my day job (which is what really pays the bills), in my experience it's much harder to find top-notch back-end developers than it is to find top-notch front end guys. Yes, the very cream of both crops is hard to find, but there's a much larger number of A players in the front-end space, so I'd recommend concentrating and developing your skills on the back-end and just getting a (relatively) tiny bit of exposure to front-end development issues and hiring that expertise out.