Web development, design, or data: how to choose what to learn

People ask which one pays the most. It is the wrong question, and we understand completely why it is the one they ask.

The right question is which one you will still be doing in eighteen months. All three of these pay enough to change somebody's life in Nigeria, and all three pay roughly nothing for the first several months while you are not yet any good. What decides the outcome is whether you can stand the work on a bad day.

So here is what each one is actually like.

Building websites

The day to day: you are given a design, or a half-idea, and you make it exist in a browser. Most of your time is not writing new things. It is making something that nearly works, work — on a phone, on a laptop, on somebody's ancient tablet, on a connection that keeps dropping.

What it feels like when it is going well: you change something, you refresh, and it is right. That feedback loop is the fastest in any of these three, which is why people get addicted to it.

What it feels like when it is going badly: something is broken, nothing in the error message resembles the actual problem, and you will spend two hours finding out it was a typo. This happens every week to everybody, including people with ten years of experience. If that story fills you with rage rather than curiosity, be honest with yourself now.

Who tends to be happy here: people who like puzzles with definite answers. There is a right answer. It either works or it does not. Some people find that reassuring and some find it relentless.

Roughly how long before somebody pays you: three to six months of serious work to build something simple and real for a small business. Longer than the bootcamp adverts say, shorter than you fear.

Designing

The day to day: deciding what things look like and, much more importantly, what goes where and why. Moving a button. Moving it back. Explaining to somebody why the thing they asked for will confuse their customers.

What it feels like when it is going well: somebody uses the thing you designed and does not notice it, because nothing got in their way. That is the whole job and almost nobody thanks you for it.

What it feels like when it is going badly: you produce something good and the client wants it changed for a reason that has nothing to do with whether it works — they do not like green, their wife preferred the other one. You will do this a lot. Design is the only one of these three where being right is not enough; you also have to persuade.

Who tends to be happy here: people who are genuinely interested in other people. The best designers we have trained were not the best illustrators. They were the ones who kept asking who is going to use this and what are they trying to do.

Roughly how long: you can produce usable work in a couple of months. Being trusted with a brand takes considerably longer, because that is about judgement rather than tools.

Analysing data

The day to day: somebody has a spreadsheet and a question. You spend most of your time discovering that the spreadsheet is a mess, cleaning it, and only then answering the question — which frequently turns out not to be the question they needed answered.

What it feels like when it is going well: you show somebody a number they did not know about their own business and you watch them change their mind. That is a real feeling and it does not get old.

What it feels like when it is going badly: four hours of cleaning to produce a chart that says what everybody already assumed. The cleaning is not a failure of your setup. It is the job.

Who tends to be happy here: people who are suspicious. Who see an average and want to know what is hiding behind it. If you have ever been annoyed by a statistic in a headline, that instinct is the whole skill.

Roughly how long: quicker than people expect to be useful, because most small businesses are starting from no analysis at all. Spreadsheets and clear thinking will take you further than people assume before you need anything heavier.

The honest comparisons

Which is easiest to start? Design, because you can see what you made immediately and judge it yourself. Development has a brutal first fortnight where nothing makes sense and then it suddenly does.

Which is easiest to get paid for in Nigeria right now? In our experience, building and maintaining websites for small businesses — especially with WordPress — because the demand is broad, boring and constant. Every business needs one, most of them need it fixed, and that work does not require you to be exceptional. It requires you to be reliable, which is rarer.

Which has the highest ceiling? All three, and it is not about the skill. The ceiling is set by whether you can talk to clients, scope work honestly and deliver when you said you would. We have seen a mediocre developer who answers messages out-earn a brilliant one who does not, repeatedly.

Which should you pick if you genuinely cannot decide? Learn HTML and CSS first, whatever you intend to end up doing. Designers who understand what is cheap and expensive to build produce better designs and are easier to work with. Analysts who can put a result on a web page get listened to more. It is the most transferable of the three and the fastest to show somebody.

The thing that actually decides it

Not the subject. Whether you finish.

Every one of these is learnable by an ordinary person with an ordinary laptop and no special aptitude. What stops people is not that web development turned out to be too hard. It is week six, when the novelty is gone, nobody is expecting anything, and there is something else to do that evening.

Pick the one whose bad days you can tolerate. Then arrange for somebody to notice whether you showed up.

Read one before you decide

We publish a full lesson from every module of every course, free and without an account. Read the first lesson of each and notice which one you want to keep reading. That instinct is better evidence than any article, including this one.