The book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” by Marshall Goldsmith helped me become a better, more empathetic, teammate. It’s less than $20, but worth far more.
Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
161–170 of 553 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#162If 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!
I've only had one support interaction but it was fairly poor. Their keyboard layout support didn't correctly honour the keyboard layout in macOS that I used, and the response was "file a bug", pointing me to a public issue tracker where I found someone else had reported it 6 years previously. I think that bug has been open for 8 years now – I got an email when another poor customer found it and asked if there was any update. All the issue asks for is for their products to honour the keys the OS says are being pressed.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of a study I heard about some time back, comparing the highest performers in various trades to the average. Apparently one major predictor is that outlier performers spend more, even as a percentage of income, on their tools.
But don’t let this be an excuse to fall for the toolbox fallacy!
I assume you mean "a poor craftsman blames his tools".
Is there actually any evidence that over-focusing on tools is a common problem? I understand it could be, and we've all probably wasted an hour here and there, but I don't fear drowning in a glass of water just because I've swallowed wrong a few times
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You won’t find more than the introductory stuff for advanced subjects in math, physics and computation unless the university has someone working on that stuff. It’s been over 20 years since I was last enrolled as a student, but when I was, I had to ask for inter-library loaned books every other month because my deep interests differed from those of the faculty elders.
I don’t know what the CRUD equivalent would be, if there is one, but at the time random projections and large deviations were fringe math, and only the basic texts were available everywhere.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming they're there.
Many Librarians are more than happy to find what you are looking for on inter-library loan. If by some chance the book is still not there, you can request that they buy it with little to no fuss (at least in the US). The catalog that your local library has online is more of a starting bid. Additionally, if you have an alma mater, try looking with them. Most universities will give full library access to alumni if you…
This is true in some locations, sure.
I'm currently living near Purdue University and that's definitely the situation here.
But I'm from Puerto Rico, live in the city, graduated from the University of Puerto Rico and that's not the situation there. I can, probably, at best, get them to give me access to an old computer of theirs in the floor and access journals through there.
It just depends on the area.
But it does exist in some areas.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#166As a Visual Studio user I find the plugin FastFind to be invaluable. Insanely fast search tool.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lif…
> 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. Hm. I still haven't accepted this, perhaps it's why I think a lot of management "techniques" are bullshit or bullshit combined with obvious truisms.
Both can be true! The fuzziness gives BS a lot of space to grow. But it's objectively true that some companies do better than others, with an effect size is so large and sustained that I (at least) have trouble believing that it's just chance
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#168As 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…
Also hit charity shops near to universities at the end of the academic year.
About 15 years ago when I was utterly broke I bought 20 text books (good ones like https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/introduction-algorithms-third... ) for .50p a book (they didn't know what they had so I gave them £20 for the lot instead of £10, would have done more but I really didn't have it).
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#169Earlier 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…
I’ve heard of the same, but with email. Spec out the car you want, timeframe you are wanting to purchase, and copy dealerships on the email. Tell them the lowest price gets your business.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
There was a fascinating EconTalk episode about the economics of a car dealers.
https://www.econtalk.org/cole-on-the-market-for-new-cars/
One interesting point was letting the buyer successfully negotiate to an absolute rock bottom price, but then making back the margin on financing.