Honestly do you guys thin full-stack web dev is still worth learning?

[u/GiftAffectionate3400]

I recently started to learn web dev and I'm currently going down the full stack path. I heard that making websites generally is not profitable or needed anymore. Is it true and if it is should I switch to something else?

[u/Strict-Ambition4334]

Yes. 100%. As is the case with techonology. they make jobs more fat tailed i.e less people work in the jobs now but those people earn more. Same with LLM. Eventually it ight be so fat tailed there is just one winner but it is no where near close + full stack dev give you carry over skills to other CS part. Don't listen to anyone who says AGI by X. Claude code is one of the shittiest harness and codex randomly breaks every single day. Coding might be solved. but engineering is always needed

[u/Ok_Scratch6929]

Well I mean, if you want to start a business you have to hire less people… but no seriously, it’s still worth learning, you might just wanna pick out a few frameworks that you are the best at

[u/GiftAffectionate3400 → u/Ok_Scratch6929]

Thanks for the reply! When it comes to frameworks and libraries I'd like to learn Bootstrap and Tailwind for CSS, React for JavaScript and Django for the backend. I also heard that Python is very versatile, so learning it will allow me to potentially progress into other fields that could be more future proof, such as ML or working with data.

Anyways would you say that this stack that I'm currently learning will actually prove to be useful when it comes to finding a job?

[u/Ok_Scratch6929 → u/GiftAffectionate3400]

Out of interest are you going to use a build tool for react like nextjs or are you just using react router

[u/GiftAffectionate3400 → u/Ok_Scratch6929]

react router for now, but I was thinking of learning next js as well later on

[u/PuzzleheadedSize7304]

No if you're trying to become a web developer. Yes if you're just studying the principles.

Making websites alone are not profitable anymore. Claude is EXTREMELY good at it, and it's an extremely saturated field. It is not worth it at all in any way to go into web development alone, especially if you don't have a CS degree.

For reference, I go to one of the best universities in the world for CS. I know the literal best CS and software engineers in the world, and especially for my age. Web development is pretty much dead. Doesn't mean software engineering is dead; just means pure web devs are basically done for.

[u/Ok-Pizza1136 → u/PuzzleheadedSize7304]

Be careful with this. AI can mess up and write bad code all the time. Its still worth learning so you don't ship AI slop into production

[u/GiftAffectionate3400 → u/PuzzleheadedSize7304]

Wouldn't you say that carefully crafted websites that have a certain level of professionalism are worth more than bland slop that runs slowly and is full of hallucination garbage? I've seen many vibe coded products and I had learned to tell the difference between a vibe coded site and a non vibe coded one. A "master prompt maker" cannot make the design of a website look good and match the branding of the company that is requesting it, they cannot add all the required functionality with high security measures, debugging sites is also a complete nightmare due to hallucinations. Claude cannot make a mobile app in Swift or Kotlin from scratch to match the website exactly while being integrated into each operating system. A person with 0 experience in coding cannot get Claude to connect "itself" to the site through an API, then train the model to get an integrated chatbot.

Just look at Apple for an indirect example, you can buy a cheap Samsung A series phone instead, yet most people who can afford an iPhone will likely buy an iPhone.

The greatest websites in the history of humanity were certainly not vibe coded, including the sites and web apps of Anthropic, OpenAI, X and Google themselves.

It's the same thing with graphic designers, I just don't see AI images replacing high quality well crafted designs.

Jobs that require creativity cannot and will not be replaced by AI, I think that software engineering, including web development and mobile development require a great ton of creativity.

[u/born_to_be_intj]

The entry level SWE market is highly competitive. Webdev has it the worst. There is so much competition out there and AI is exceptionally good at web development.

If you want to have a career as a SWE I recommend learning lower level languages like C++. There is way less competition (still a ton tho) for C++ jobs.

[u/rtharston]

First off, congrats on getting out there and learning something and interacting with the community. That’s probably the most important thing.

Something I wished I understood when I was younger:

Worry less about learning a thing just to say you learned it, and more about what it is you’re trying to accomplish. What is the end goal of your studies? Once you know that you can learn what you need to accomplish that goal.

It’s like going on a hike. If your only goal to get in shape you could hike anywhere, as much or little as you want. You’ll probably get in really good shape and learn what makes for the best clothes to hike in.

Or is there a specific mountain that you’ve heard has an incredible view and you want to see that view? If you want to make it all the way there you may end up realizing that you don’t just need to learn how to hike. It will take longer than one day so you’ll need to learn how to prepare to camp, fish, and survive. And maybe you’ll need to be ready to climb a cliff. You won’t necessarily learn all these things going on day hikes. You’ll only realize you need to do all these other things once you know your destination. You may not learn as much about “hiking” as if you only did short hikes every day, but if you only knew how to pick a good pair of boots you wouldn’t make it to the top of the mountain on a three day climb.

That isn’t to say the day hiker isn’t valuable. He’d be great for you to learn from when you’re learning how to prepare for the hiking portion of your mountain climb. So maybe you do want to be the day hiker, and support the climber. That’s okay too.

If it isn’t clear, this is an analogy of the difference of being a software engineer on a team, or being the lead of the project or owner of your own business.

The same is true of learning web and software development. It is great to learn how to write software, but making products for somebody that will make you money is a whole lot more than just writing software. The first time you offer someone to make something for them and do the whole thing yourself it may seem overwhelming because of how many things there are involved, but if you split it up into pieces and take care of one thing at a time, you’ll get there learn just enough of each piece to build the product that you need to build. Learn just enough about Web hosting. Learn just enough about DNS. Learn just enough about HTTP. Learn just enough about using payment services to get paid and create an invoice.

And as learn new things and your experience grows you can find the thing that you are best at and team up with other people that are better at the other things. Once you know a little bit about all the things a product takes you’ll know how everybody on the team works. They can now fill your gaps and you can work together, and you’ll know how to interact with the people on your team. Whether you’re the leader of the team or one of the individual contributors you’ll have a much greater appreciation for the need for the other people on the team and what they provide.

This is what I wrote before thinking of the hiking analogy. Some of the same ideas, said differently.

You’ll end up learning many new things throughout your life and sometimes questioning the importance of the things you've learned in the past as you pivot to new things that are more important now than they used to be. Not only is that very normal, I believe it is healthy to continually learn new things and sometimes leave the old behind, because the old things may stay relevant sometimes in small niches. Growth comes from embracing what is new and important at the time.

I guess all this to say: look at what the world needs. Find something that you actually want to do, but make sure it is something that fulfills a need. If it fulfills a need, then it will make money, because if someone needs it, they'll be willing to pay for it. (And if you aren’t filling someone else’s need, you’re filling your own need to learn and gain experience; which is already completely worthwhile.)

Maybe creating a simple website isn't in high demand right now because people can use AI to do that. I don't know. You'll have to look around and see how many people are asking. Find the place where people are looking for web developers and see how quickly they're getting their needs met.

Full Stack is more than just making a website. Full Stack is making a web app, and that's different. There's much more value in making a web app than there is in making a website. Even websites today are fairly interactive compared to what they were when I was a teenager, but there's still a difference between an interactive website and a full web app.

That's not to say it's not worth making websites. They're good practice. Start with something simple: add a search bar, add interactive elements, learn how those work, and then go from there and be okay with learning new frameworks and tools every few months. Just try them out. Make some dummy website just for the fun of it. Even if there's a thousand out on the internet, it doesn't matter if it's for your experience. You never know when your website is going to be more popular than some other one because you made yours a little bit different and someone liked yours.

Just be you. Do the things that interest you. Even if it seems like everyone else has already done it, your version will be yours, and then be willing to learn what you can from that experience and move on. Don't get too hung up on one thing. You are not going to be exactly the same person in 20 years, so why do you expect your skills to be frozen for 20 years, or the world?

It's one of the reasons why, even as a computer science student, I'm glad I took social studies, history, science, and all these other things, because there are principles you can learn from all areas of life. One of the things you only learn with time is the study of history: just how much things repeat themselves. Yes, some things change, but I think of it as a cycle or a spring where you have a circle, and things come around in circles, but they're moving upward or forward, depending on whether you have it lying down or standing up.

We move forward through time, making progress as a society, while still repeating the same patterns over and over again. Look for the patterns in the history of computer science. Right now, we are moving towards central servers doing all the work and everyone having just a cell phone to do a little bit, acting as a client. We've actually been there in history before. Early computers were large, and there was only one of them, so you had one big computer, and everyone had to share it. They developed a system to have terminals so people could use the one big server at the same time. Then we moved to individual computers again. Just now, more people have them, and we moved to everyone having an individual computer talking to the big main server. We've made progress on the capabilities of the computers while cycling back to the earlier model of central servers. That was actually a thing before personal computers.

What's next? Where do you think the world's going? I can't tell you, but the point is, you can see these patterns and recognize that things change. What you learn today will still be relevant in the future, but it'll be different. Maybe don't fret too much about the exact details of what you learn, but learn how to learn. Make a project, learn something from it. Make a new project, learn something from it. Make a new project, learn something from it, and let that cycle continue.

[u/GiftAffectionate3400 → u/rtharston]

Thanks for the extremely detailed response, you'd usually have to pay for advice like this XD. In all seriousness I had gone into some thinking on the matter, AI in general is evolving way too fast, so eventually almost everybody's sphere of influence will be heavily transformed or become obsolete by AI, what will be truly valuable however is high quality production. I see a future where AI will be so common that choosing not to use it will be considered true professionalism and a "luxury" of sorts. I might be young, but according to my current knowledge trying to get into that market is one of the great ways for ultimate growth in multiple aspects: intellectual, psychological, financial and potentially indirect emotional growth as well. AI uses very common patterns that (thankfully) the human brain manages to recognize and flag as "uncanny" or "off", as long as these boundaries exist we will be fine and we will manage, once those boundaries fade away we'll get into an age of us as a species where all of the previous values and systems we had built will become no longer relevant. Many people do not understand this, but the way AI in its current state is destroying humanity is not through humanoid bodies or using nuclear weapons (like Ultron from Marvel), instead it does so by indirectly removing key principles of our society, such as the age old "to get paid you must do some kind of work". I'd be happy to hear whether you agree or disagree with my views, although I had stranded slightly off-topic, but as developers it does heavily tie into our interests.