Is it common at all in website design to have two different companies responsible for the front and back end?

For likely obvious reasons I'm not going to name any companies here; however, I am curious at how common this practice might be.

Currently a web application is being designed for a 'customer'. One company is responsible for the front end (e.g., html, css, javascript, ui, etc), and an entirely different company is responsible for the backend (controller logic, db data structures and apis for fetching data, etc).

One big issue is that the effort does not have a lead who heads the entire effort; design issues must be argued out between the two halves of the application, and generally the loudest party wins. Being that they are two completely different companies, they do not have the same management and therefore do not really play along together all that well. Progress and communication are rather bad and the application has suffered for it. It might also be worth mentioning that this web application is not complex and doesn't really need this sort of massive division; at least, I do not see the value of it.

Is this sort of arrangement common practice at all? I would think it would be more efficient to have one company do the whole thing, perhaps with two teams working on it at most. However, both teams - if there are two teams - should have a 'benign dictator' lead who can make the tough calls if the two sides disagree on design issues.

This particular effort is unlikely to change; however I'm very curious if this multi-company approach is unorthodox or common in web design, at least for my own education.

Thanks!

Epic visual tool

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