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Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#121

Post by wittjeff »

d3nj4l wrote: post #94
_wldu wrote: post #47

Spend $9,000 US dollars to get a MS in CS, Data Science or Cyber Security from Georgia Tech. It's a solid top 10 CS program. It will take a few years, but it is definitely a great investment. If you don't already have an undergrad degree and/or want a quicker program, look at some of the reputable code/security academies that partner with major state universities. They cost a bit more 15K to 20K but are shorter (typi…

You make it seem like getting into the MSCS program at Georgia Tech is just a matter of money!

If you take some of their online courses or a MicroMasters program and do well in them, they'll probably admit you to the online Masters program. Note: I work at edX.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#123

Post by orzig »

nolok wrote: post #26

I found that (for me !) it was less useful to invest in learning to do new things, as opposed to investing in being more efficient and / or having my work time more pleasant. Make your work feel like pleasure and there is no limit to what you can achieve. So maybe don't only think "what can I be better at ?" but also "how can my life be better while I work ?". Software: A proper training session with a high level deb…

I'd be thrilled to spend $1,000 on any of these if I knew for sure they'd work, but the Expected Value of a tool (or any other investment) falls very fast when I consider how little hard evidence I have to go on /for my particular context/.

For books, the dollar cost is so low that I can buy it, invest 15 minutes in evaluating it, and not feel bad walking away. At least 25% of books are worth the time and cost, which is plenty.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#124

Post by clavalle »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #4

I'm a big fan of pluralsight.com (no association). It's only $29 / month USD. I always go back to it when I want to brush up on something or learn something completely new. Not all videos / instructors are created equally of course, but their content has been the most consistent IMO.

Pluralsight is great. But the courses that stand out to me are the ones that have labs, specificially Quiklabs, embedded in them. I wish they'd highlight those somehow so I can find them

Nothing like hands on keyboard to get something new to click!

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#125

Post by npsimons »

miguendes wrote: post #92
guiambros wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$99/year via an ACM subscription [1]. And you get the printed copies of ACM magazines shipped to you every month. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22799753

Is it still worth to get it from ACM? I remember that they have recently restricted a bunch of sfuff on the ACM subscription. Examples: live online trainings, katacoda, notebooks, sandboxes and certifications.

> Examples: live online trainings, katacoda, notebooks, sandboxes and certifications.

To some of us, we don't learn very well from those things. Books tend to have a higher knowledge value and other advantages. For a discount, I'd be willing to give those things up, assuming I wasn't already getting access to Safari through work and didn't already have a reading list of purchased books a mile long.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#126

Post by shireboy »

nolok wrote: post #26

I found that (for me !) it was less useful to invest in learning to do new things, as opposed to investing in being more efficient and / or having my work time more pleasant. Make your work feel like pleasure and there is no limit to what you can achieve. So maybe don't only think "what can I be better at ?" but also "how can my life be better while I work ?". Software: A proper training session with a high level deb…

All good points, but chiming in that I'm actually going the opposite direction on VSCode. I've used VS Professional for 70% of my dev up until recently, but more and more and finding I can do the same things "lighter" with VSCode+appropriate extensions.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#128

Post by paulie_a »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #103

If your budget is a few hundred, an IntelliJ Ultimate license. For me it's a force multiplier. Built-in highlights of things that can be improved (e.g. linting) is a bonus. In the end, things like VS Code are just text editors. I mean, you can't get a warning that the `[]` syntax isn't available in your old codebase's flavor of PHP (5.2) in VS Code. I think. Alternatively: Take time off. If you have enough money to l…

I've been using jetbrains products for years and just bought the personal ultimate license this weekend. Their products are great and their support his excellent!

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#129

Post by nolok »

orzig wrote: post #123
nolok wrote: post #26

I found that (for me !) it was less useful to invest in learning to do new things, as opposed to investing in being more efficient and / or having my work time more pleasant. Make your work feel like pleasure and there is no limit to what you can achieve. So maybe don't only think "what can I be better at ?" but also "how can my life be better while I work ?". Software: A proper training session with a high level deb…

I'd be thrilled to spend $1,000 on any of these if I knew for sure they'd work, but the Expected Value of a tool (or any other investment) falls very fast when I consider how little hard evidence I have to go on /for my particular context/. For books, the dollar cost is so low that I can buy it, invest 15 minutes in evaluating it, and not feel bad walking away. At least 25% of books are worth the time and cost, which…

I absolutely understand, which is also why I waited way too long to buy them.

Which one do you doubt and what are your questions ? I would be happy to provide more about my experience so you can decide if it matches your need.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#130

Post by athenot »

roland35 wrote: post #114
ThePhysicist wrote: post #58

I once did a two-day workshop on negotiation techniques, which covered not only methods but also helped me to become more comfortable dealing with the psychological stress that's induced in many negotiation situations. So far I'd say the course (which was free as I won it as a prize in a business plan competition) is directly responsible for at least 50-100.000 € of additional revenue that I made in the last years, s…

When I was purchasing a car this helped a lot too! Salesmen are much more experienced than me since they negotiate every day, but even accounting for that it is easy to see what they are doing with other customers and easy to see through the attempts they make on myself. The most common one of course is the "time limited" deal... As if I just happened to show up on the only day there is a sale...

The fun part is you can turn that technique against them and it works like a charm.

I've repeated this a few times now: dedicate a day to car buying and call 10 of them up telling them I'm buying a car TODAY, with these precise specs. No upsells entertained. And I let them in on the fact that I'm calling all the others and expect to make a decision by a set time. Always remain super polite but stay firm. In a way I suspect many appreciate this because I'm not wasting their time, it's a quick decision on how eager they are to fill their quota. But it's fun to see how much the "final price" evolves over the course of a few hours…

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