I am moving from manual testing into automation. Most tutorials I find are Selenium, but every job posting I see mentions Playwright or Cypress.
Is Selenium still worth the time, or is it legacy at this point?
✓ Accepted answer
Learn the concepts first, and pick Playwright as the vehicle.
Selenium is not legacy — it is everywhere in existing enterprise suites, and there is real, well-paid work maintaining those. But as a first tool it teaches you to fight the browser: explicit waits, stale element exceptions, and driver management are Selenium problems, not testing problems.
Playwright gives you auto-waiting, tracing, and parallelism out of the box, so you spend your learning time on what to test and why — which is the part that transfers.
Once you are comfortable, Selenium takes about a week to pick up, because by then you already understand locators and the page object pattern.
Check the job postings in your actual city rather than the global trend. In some markets Selenium plus Java is still the overwhelming majority of openings, and optimising for the tool nobody local hires for is a slow way to job hunt.
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