Through my company I have the opportunity to get a graduate degree (or another degree idk) for free. Is it worth the time investment and if so what would be best long term?
I’m a mid level dev with about 5 years profesh, 15 years (!) messing with WP as a hobbyist. I have almost no skills outside of WP, I know that doesn’t have a lot of prestige in the tech world but I don’t give a shit, I love the project and am passionate about it. Because I focused on Gutenberg early, I have niche skills that are very hard to replace, I get paid well and am happy.
However, I don’t know what things will look like in 20 years with changing technologies… should I get a CS degree or something of that nature? I really want to get something useless and fun, like art-related, to be honest. Random people are always telling me web developers will eventually be obsolete and we’ll all have to learn to be AI programmers but that just sounds soooooooo boring.
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I would get something related to IT architecture. What would elevate your skills to a higher paying role? What would be sustainable in a changing world?
This people telling you web dev will be obsolete are idiots. I generally don’t like the idea of getting a degree to learn a new skill. Degrees are credentials first skills later. Forget the credentials and just focus on the skills which you can either find the information online yourself or pay someone to mentor you.
Having a niche skill like this is fantastic to pair with literally anything else. So go learn something interesting and maybe combine two niches together. You’ll have the knowledge from your new skill and the ability to create usable resources online for people interested in that niche. You may end up being one of very few people in the world with those two combined skills.
Gosh, it’s hard to say right now. I’m a WordPress developer with 15 years of experience who works freelance now, used to work for agencies before I went off on my own. I have a Masters in publishing and writing, and a BA in English.
I’m not one for hype, but I have been following and using for example Stable Diffusion since the beginning of last year, and that’s only 1/4th of the AI stuff that is happening right now (image, sound, text, video). The progress I’ve seen and what I’ve been able to do with SD has left me speechless. I have no doubt that continued progress will soon render the technical aspect of my job obsolete, and I’ll only be able to get by as a strategic partner for clients once products like Devin mature enough to generate both the design and dev for brochureware, and then eventually more sophisticated sites. You know as a hobbyist how websites are a combination of many disparate languages and considerations, but I don’t see that as a hurdle in the long run. Consider the progress of video generation, from SD stringing together images to Runway to Sora, in less than a year. The same is happening on the LLM side. We’re in for a wild ride that will fundamentally change our jobs.
All that being said: I don’t think anyone can forecast what degree will be helpful in the future. The advent of AI is coming for white collar jobs first, for sure. But the innovations that will result from it will be as unpredictable as its first arrival in the tech scene. The obvious answer is machine learning, but the people at the top who study that are getting way more than a Masters, or don’t need a degree because they’re well-paid geniuses.
I guess my advice is take up something that interests you and that you can become a knowledge expert in, requiring social engagement with other people, whether as a strategist or consultant, rather than something that you imagine being easily automated.
There’s nothing at all wrong about only knowing WordPress. Sure, maybe it’s “low prestige” in computer science, but as I like to say HVAC is “low prestige” in aeronautical engineering but HVAC isn’t going anywhere either. (Not to mention that *both* WordPress *and* HVAC are continuously being re-engineered, enhanced, streamlined, etc.)
If it was me and I could get a masters in the current environment I’d look first at an MBA with an intention to focus on managing the impact of new technology on business. AI is going to hit white-collar work as hard as PCs did back in the 1980s. It’s likely to eliminate huge chunks of the tech and managerial sector the way computers took huge chunks out of typists and clerks. It’s always possible that you’ll be able to ask Stable Diffusion, Devin, or even ChatGPT to just cough out a fully-designed, coded, debugged, and deployed membership site with integrated WooCommerce and event manager plus ticketing. It’s even likely.
But it’s likely you’ll still need people to make decisions about how to manage it, which platforms to deploy to, etc. And like them or not, MBAs actually train to surf those kinds of waves.
If you’re looking for a full-time office job, a graduate degree looks good on a resume. If you want to freelance, it doesn’t matter much.