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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?

#141

Post by cannaceo »

athenot wrote: post #130
roland35 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

A lot of car salesmen ignore buyers like this. They see it as a waste of time to get pitted against each other. I’ve gotten the best results by starting with the dealerships with the lowest prices on TrueCar and then baiting them to invest time in me. Then they’re more committed and eager to close. Show your teeth later in the negotiation.

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

#142

Post by somurzakov »

athenot wrote: post #130
roland35 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

never buy from dealership at retail prices period.

go to a smaller dealer and ask them to buy a car from wholesale auction for you and you cover their costs. that way their margin js transparent and is negotiated upfront. You will be lucky to get 5-10% discount from retail prices, but wholesale prices at Manheim can be 15-30% less than retail, even more if you are willing to buy less than perfect condition car

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

#144

Post by smt88 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #70
smt88 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get them for free at the library. No need to spend professional development money on them.

Libraries tend to have bad, outdated selections.

Libraries will get you the book you want from other libraries, or they'll buy the book for you.

Nowadays, you can get a digital copy instantly instead of waiting for another location to send the book to your library.

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

#145

Post by kristopolous »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #119
kristopolous wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If this is out of some people's budgets, check eBay. Just google "library genisis" ;)

Back in the 90s tech futurists were talking about having "the library of congress on the size of your finger nail".

Now we actually could do something in that realm (LoC is about ~10tb and there's 1tb microsd cards; we're probably talking "within 5-7 years" without any exaggeration) but there's so many courts and laws stopping it from happening, the great cambrian explosion of knowledge has been held back.

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

#146

Post by smt88 »

beagle3 wrote: post #60
smt88 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get them for free at the library. No need to spend professional development money on them.

Early in your career, yes. As you dig deeper they become available only in university libraries and then not even there. Most material is available for free on the internet, but like most open source material, you have to compile it yourself and that takes time. Good books save you the time by including important dependencies, normalizing notation, etc.

What are examples of books you can't even find at university libraries?

I've been in software for 20 years and have not yet felt like I needed to read anything that wasn't pretty mainstream.

I imagine one's professional reading is more academic when working on things like hardware or compilers, but most of us (for better or worse) are just working on CRUD apps in a marketing-adjacent space or maintaining a corporate Java monolith.

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

#147

Post by orzig »

rectang wrote: post #101

I ran a lunch-time book club at work for groups between 3 and 10 people, covering technical topics like programming languages, version control, and so on. After a management change at the company, I couldn't get budget for books or lunches any more. So I bought the books and bought the lunches. The most effective way to learn something thoroughly is to teach it, and I was the facilitator for the book club, leading al…

Having run something similar ~5y ago, an added benefit is that you end up with former 'students' at companies throughout the industry.

Specifically, a pattern I saw 5-10 times is:

1. Someone shows up at the meetings, about 3mo after being hired

2. After 2-3 sessions (to see if their serious) I invite them to lunch 1-on-1. I find out that they are really interested in my topic, and do it as maybe 10% of their role, so their manager suggested they check out my group

3. After 6mo, they invite /me/ to lunch to tell me their applying to transfer to join the team I'm on, which does is focused on the topic.

4. After 1wk, my manager tells me that they were rejected. Understandably, the reasons have to stay in the room.

5. After 2mo, they join an equivalent team at another company

6. After 1-3y, in ~50% of cases, they are senior on that team and check to see if I'm interested in a job.

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

#148

Post by draw_down »

Sublime Text, $70.

There are things I enjoy about conferences but they have to be the lowest in terms of ROI. Hundreds, maybe even $1k+ to watch some goofball get on stage and talk about the lambda calculus for the umpteenth time. “Look, all of computation can be derived from this primitive!” Yep, thanks.

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

#150

Post by jstummbillig »

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…

One of the upsides of living in the EU: As a consumer you can, by law, return any* online purchase for 14 days after delivery for a full refund and for any reason. It's pretty great.

*exemptions include event tickets and clearly personalized items

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