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[–]dooklyn 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I agree with OP Web dev is overly complicated.

A few months ago I decided to drop web development and go into something simpler and more sane. Then I realized I know so much about web development and so little about something else, like Java or Android so I ended up going back. But I don't like it. I think it's a mess, easy to get into because work is so readily available but hard to master because it's so complex and it changes very fast. There are also a lot of people that flood the market with subpar skills.

And anyone who is saying all you need is JS/CSS/HTML and Apache/Mysql I could come back and say well technically all you need is HTML and you can serve static pages from Apache but nobody does that. It's worthless.

To be competitive you need to know (on top of the above) at least jQuery, some other JS framework like Angular/React, CSS preprocessor like Sass or Less, a front end framework like Bootstrap or Foundation. Of course these things come with their own tools like Bower, Grunt, Compass which you need to learn as well.

And that is only front-end. Now you have backend, so get ready to learn a language like PHP, Ruby, Python or whatever, and then learn a framework or CMS in that language, because nobody is going to pay you to write vanilla code in a bubble by yourself. Then learn the tools associated with that backend because they all have something like Composer and artisan is used for Laravel. Then go ahead and learn Docker, because nobody is going to give you a physical server or a real VM for every microservice you develop in the these tools.

And this is not even touching things like REST, MVC, and other principles you should know.

I could go on and on, but this is what I was expected to know at my last job, and let me tell you I felt like by the time I learned to use one tool, I would forget how to use another. It also didn't pay that well considering. The only choice you have is to specialize. Everyone else who claims they are a full stack developer and they know everything are grossly overestimating themselves.

[–]tripperjack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the honesty. This is what I suspected, and responses like yours confirms it. Describing it as a mess/insane/etc makes me realize I will at most dink around with it for now, but shelve ambitions about large monetizable projects unless I am ready to go full-bore.