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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?

#131

Post by faster »

kristopolous wrote: post #108
jkingsbery wrote: post #48

As many others have said, books are the best things I've spent money on, but let me say more: Do books sometimes say things that are obvious? Yes. For example, when I first read Martin Fowler's book Refactoring, I had been renaming variables and moving methods from one class to another for years. But he gave a new framework for thinking about something that obvious. I've found the idea of separating out my coding flo…

> A typical industry book is $40-$50, and a typical text book is $100-$150. If this is out of some people's budgets, check eBay. Also some thrift store chains have certain locations that are book focused. You can get older edition textbooks for practically free. It's not like Claude Shannon's equations have changed. The old editions are effectively just as good. I've picked up plenty of classic books, HBR, Drucker, C…

I have gotten a lot of books via alibris.com (no affiliation, just a happy customer), a marketplace for used booksellers. I got a brand new $170 statistics textbook for about $35 because it was intended for another country; thinner paper and crappier binding, but the same book. I've also gotten used books that were indistinguishable from new books.

Not as cheap as ebay, but an enormous selection with pretty reliable quality ratings.

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

#132

Post by adenadel »

My master's degree. I did a relatively unique (and affordable) program at the University of Oregon that focuses on professional development for scientists and includes a 9 month internship. The program and my internship have completely shaped my professional interests and I think that the program does a really good job of preparing STEM undergrads for careers in industry.

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

#133

Post by npsimons »

acomjean wrote: post #36

If you aren’t great with your toolset spending time learning your editor/ide . I spent some time a decade ago learning better emacs skills (macros on the fly). Also getting better with jet brains IDEs. Made me more productive and my work more enjoyable. I also read some of the “Unix power tools” book from oreilly, to help my command line skills. Thirdly I had to learn symfony so I signed up for symfonycasts video tut…

> I spent some time a decade ago learning better emacs skills (macros on the fly).

This. I spent a week in 2000 focusing on learning Emacs. To this day, I'll use downtime to browse through packages, forums and documentation looking for new (to me) things to tweak Emacs with, or new (mostly CLI) tools. I just discovered the various rainbow modes last month, and life is so much better.

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

#134

Post by jtms »

marinhero wrote: post #99
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…

+1 on the IDE front. I used to do everything on vim and will always find silly errors that an IDE would have found immediately. I switched to rubymine and not only me but everyone on my team appreciates it!

I am glad switching to an IDE worked for you, but for me a well extended and configured Vim setup is the best IDE on earth. Anything an IDE can do, Vim can typically do as well given the right plugin.

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

#135

Post by nolok »

shireboy wrote: post #126
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.

Agreed and when I open intellij, it's clear mentally that I'm "working", while ss code makes me mentally feel like "I'm just doing a quick edit", even after 5 hours of coding. It's juste the perfect amount of lightweight but with just all the features I need to be productive.

But at the end of the day there are always those 10+ people projects, or hard debugging case, where a heavy computing-intensive IDE figguring stuff out for you is worth every cent.

Anyway my general point is make sure your tool suits you, if you spend more than 5 minutes fighting against it every day it doesn't, you either need training on it or to change it.

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

#136

Post by nolok »

jtms wrote: post #134
marinhero wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on the IDE front. I used to do everything on vim and will always find silly errors that an IDE would have found immediately. I switched to rubymine and not only me but everyone on my team appreciates it!

I am glad switching to an IDE worked for you, but for me a well extended and configured Vim setup is the best IDE on earth. Anything an IDE can do, Vim can typically do as well given the right plugin.

The general point was not "use this", but "make sure you check all sides of the dice to find which one is actually the best suited for you".

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

#137

Post by orzig »

gtf21 wrote: post #67

As a founder / CTO the best money I have spent is on a really good coach. My coach (my cofounder's too, and now some of our leadership team) doesn't have particular expertise in founding or leading companies, but works with many founders, and she's not technical, but the things I think I have found hardest to learn are mostly around people management and leadership, which I think are underrated skills that require se…

I've also struggled with finding the right coach. It's a tricky evaluation problem: The first meeting shouldn't feel perfectly comfortable, the whole point is that they're going to bring in viewpoints that stress you out. But incorrect viewpoints also stress me out. I'd love to demand scientific evidence behind all of their assertions, but have (kicking and screaming) come to realize that many important things in life simply don't/can't have studies at my preferred level of rigor.

An idea: Hire a coach with the expressed goal of finding another coach. Like an interim CEO who understands they are not being considered for the permanent position. I tried this once, with friend-of-a-friend coach, and she couldn't really break out of her reflexive attempts to fix me directly, but that's n=1 and a convenience sample at that, so I think there's still potential in the idea. Let me know if it works for you!

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

#138

Post by michjedi »

Books.

I read about 30-100 work-related books a year and have seen salary double every few years.

I try to alternate books between different areas, more or less from these sections:

Technical(on currently used technology)

Technical(unused tech vaguely related and may be useful)

Management

Domain(scientific textbooks, best to search from related university course reading lists)

Biographies/accounts/events of typical and super users

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