Does it make sense to take an online course?
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To begin with, what is a course? It is a packaged collection of materials such as videos, text, tests, problems, etc. Is any of it harmful/useless? If the quality of the material is good, no. So how can a collected and wrapped collection of materials (which are not bad in and of themselves) be useless?
And so, we found that an online course is just one way of presenting material, just like a book, an article, a training video, etc. That said, we’re not asking the question “is there any point in reading books?”.
Is it possible to become a developer by taking a course? That’s a ridiculous question, just like “Can you become a developer by reading a book? Taking one unit of any material will give you one or more skills at a basic level. Open a job posting and see how many and what skills the employer expects. How you get them, from university/courses/books/hacker movies, etc., is completely indifferent to the hirer. All that matters is that you can do your job.
Does it make sense for those in the Senior/Lead position above to take online courses? In their “specialty” - probably not, since most courses are mass-produced and designed for a low entry threshold. It’s strange to see a Senior Python Developer with 6 years of experience graduate from a “Python for Beginners” course six months ago. On the other hand, if you want to roll into a new area (like Blockchain) or learn something non-core (like DevOps) then why not?