I’m here because I feel FCC is the best place to learn with the best supporting community.
I have been learning HTML and CSS and moving on to vanilla JS soon and love it.
I know this is a common question but I’m asking this in all seriousness because I’m about to make a big decision of which direction to take my life in.
It looks like we’re slowly heading into the direction of AI and ML tools assisting developers more and eventually taking over more complicated tasks, making it easier for people to build things.
I wonder if learning web development from scratch right now is going to be worth it long term. Could the industry change so much in the coming 5-10 years that all the effort spend learning now would go to waste?
Could the web and it’s methods to build it become so automated that these jobs will start disappearing?
It depends who you listen to. Some people say most development jobs will be gone by 2030. Others say that the jobs are only going to be increasing.
Because I think there are some very smart and knowledgeable developers here, what do you think is the most likely scenario?
If you poke around on the forum you’ll see several lengthy discussions about our expectations of the future of web development.
I am not remotely worried about this. Automation is not the enemy of developers. Anything that is repetitive enough to be automated, we want to be automated. It’s stuff that’s boring to do by hand and we’re the ones who get paid to create the automation.
If you were to learn web (or any other) development now and then stop, I 100% guarantee that your skills will be irrelevant in 5-10 years. But that’s not how it works. It’s kind of like asking “Since my car will break down in 5-10 years, is it a waste of time to learn to drive?”
No. The technologies associated with web development have been consistently increasing in reach and scope. People have internet connected refrigerators for goodness’ sake.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time.
Tools, technologies, and languages will continue to emerge. Some will grow in popularity and become deeply entrenched in the software landscape. Others will fade in favor of ones that better match evolving needs. More and more things will have computers in them. A basic understanding of programming will eventually become a commonplace part of children’s education.
The idea that increased levels of automation will allow machines to take over complicated tasks.
This is a misconception of machines and AI.
The fundamentals underpinning modern AI are the same principles that existed about 50 years ago. The biggest difference today, is we now have ability to leverage large amounts of data to train models for pattern recognition. This is the “key ingredient” for modern AI, where you have so much data, if you can properly train your model, you can then use it to automate tasks related to the pattern’s its trained for. This is how you get automated driving, voice recognition, and even something like Github copilot, which can help write code for you.
But such approach have their limitations, as unless you train your models for “complex tasks”, they stand no chance at figuring them out. Furthermore, any edge-cases or situations where you need intuition, an AI will also fail.
I can see AI taking over boring or repetitive tasks, but the overall high level concepts, problems, and solutions are something only a trained human can handle.
We are on the internet, you can find almost anyone standing for any viewpoint on anything. Not all opinions are created equal. I usually refer to this link for “web developer” job outlook (its good):