HACKER Q&A
📣 Red_Tarsius

Should I spend the next two years learning Magento 2?


Long story short, I'm eligible to join a state funded program on web/e-commerce development. It features over a thousand hours of training (and internship), over half of them being about the Magento 2 platform. It wouldn't cost me anything but it's a major commitment time-wise. It seems an interesting opportunity but I worry about overspecialization. Despite dabbling in programming and being on HN for 8 years, I don't come from a technical background so I can't fully understand the reliability of the platform and the future payoff of such training. I asked around my trusted dev friends irl, but I'd like to hear the opinion of HN users as well, especially the ones who had to deal with Magento 2.

  👤 markozivanovic Accepted Answer ✓
Based on my personal experience, learning the ins and outs of the Magento platform can be quite a lucrative long-term investment, especially if you plan to do some consulting later. There's no shortage of open positions for Magento experts. Certificates play a significant role here, so you might want to look into that later if you decide to go down this path.

I'm talking about the situation in Europe, so I don't know if it's also true in the US. Nevertheless, by everyone working remotely now, you could work for a European company and get some pretty sick rates as a Magento consultant, easily over 100EUR/hr.

It's built on PHP, and elements of ZF (which is not actually that hot anymore), so it will give you a good intro to the whole PHP ecosystem. Shopware is also pretty popular now, and once you get a hold of Magento, the switch shouldn't be that hard if you decide to learn more e-commerce solutions.

1000 hours does seem a lot, but I guess you will spend a lot of those hours building custom extensions, etc., and building on the skills you've learned at the beginning of the training. Also, 1000 hours translates to roughly six months, so don't worry about overspecialization! :)

It all boils down if that's something you find interesting, but money-wise, it's definitely not the worst idea.

👤 codingdave
No tech stack should take up two years of time to learn. Two years sounds fine for a large program with internships... but it should have a much broader curriculum rather than focusing on one platform, especially one that is not a leading platform in the industry.