I highly recommend looking into UI/UX at least a little bit. That was the professor who got on my nerves the most in college, but the class was still one of the courses that changed how I look at things the most drastically. The mentality is definitely transferrable -- I was applying things like "consistent design language" even in my retail job far from the digital world: no, all the individual jars go to the right of the bulk throughout the store so that customers don't have to think about what to reach for, even if these couple places on the shelves look superficially better the other way around.
That's not quite what you're asking, though, is it? And to be honest, even though I work in tech, frontend dev is a very different environment than the backend libraries I write. My guess is that spending time improving HTML/CSS would give you a solid idea of the fundamentals, but would not be immediately marketable, since so much of web dev is done in JS frameworks nowdays, for better or worse. Similarly, theoretical UI/UX knowledge could likely be a very good bonus for a résumé, but I'm not sure it alone would be enough to get you a job (particularly an entry-level one, ironically) without concrete knowledge of a particular framework to put it into practice. It would almost certainly make it easier to get a second job somewhere that doesn't use the same framework as your first -- which is more relevant than you may think given that web frameworks come and go pretty quickly, and every non-web language has its own way of drawing UIs as well.
If you're only looking to learn one thing, UI/UX theory might not be the right one to choose. If you don't mind learning two things, though, the theory should definitely be one of them. And particularly with AI coming into the space, knowing where it's using sloppy UX patterns and being able to redirect it early is probably just going to become more important going forward to raw code-monkey skills.
re: @mynameistillian@plush.city
That's not quite what you're asking, though, is it? And to be honest, even though I work in tech, frontend dev is a very different environment than the backend libraries I write. My guess is that spending time improving HTML/CSS would give you a solid idea of the fundamentals, but would not be immediately marketable, since so much of web dev is done in JS frameworks nowdays, for better or worse. Similarly, theoretical UI/UX knowledge could likely be a very good bonus for a résumé, but I'm not sure it alone would be enough to get you a job (particularly an entry-level one, ironically) without concrete knowledge of a particular framework to put it into practice. It would almost certainly make it easier to get a second job somewhere that doesn't use the same framework as your first -- which is more relevant than you may think given that web frameworks come and go pretty quickly, and every non-web language has its own way of drawing UIs as well.
If you're only looking to learn one thing, UI/UX theory might not be the right one to choose. If you don't mind learning two things, though, the theory should definitely be one of them. And particularly with AI coming into the space, knowing where it's using sloppy UX patterns and being able to redirect it early is probably just going to become more important going forward to raw code-monkey skills.
re: @mynameistillian@plush.city