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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?

#271

Post by animesh »

rc_hackernews wrote: post #5

Udi Dahan's "Learn Advanced Distributed Systems Design" course. https://particular.net/adsd At one point, I was considering paying out of pocket to attend the course. Fortunately, the company I was working for at the time wanted to send people to it and I got selected. After taking the course, even if I did have to pay myself, I wouldn't have been upset. That course is outstanding.

Around April/May, they ran this course for free for 60 days. I progressed to few lessons, but had to stop as I had to focus on some critical stuff at work. I can tell it was good as far I went. I wish I convince my company next year to put us through this course.

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

#272

Post by kube-system »

parliament32 wrote: post #246
JackFr wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I keep hearing "they make money on financing" but I don't see how that's possible. I've bought three new cars financed, and every time the finance person puts my info in and gets finance "offers" from 4-5 big banks plus their in-house financing, and just lets me pick the one with the best rate -- usually most of the finance offers are under 5%, with the best one being under 1%. One time I went to one of the offering…

Getting a higher rate directly from the bank does not necessarily mean that the dealer is not making any money on your loan. It is likely that the bank just offers better rates through their dealer partners because: 1. it's less hassle than dealing with retail customers, and 2. the dealer market for loans is more competitive.

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

#273

Post by billfruit »

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 actually was wondering if clion is worth the money..

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

#274

Post by evo_9 »

Online learning resources such as PluralSight, Udemy, Coursera.

I use to buy courses that were long/complete but rarely finished them; too much basic stuff was covered and/or gone into detail that was a waste of time.

I now buy courses that are 4-5 hours tops and really dig into a topic I want to learn about.

I used this technique to retool my skillset after having a few setbacks in row job-wise; it's incredible the effect of this change in approach has had for me.

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

#275

Post by cl42 »

Professional CEO coach. I spent 3 years working with him and it was the best personal development I could have committed to. I learned that leadership is a trainable skillset, and that interpersonal dynamics are also something you can practice and improve upon.

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

#276

Post by MaxBarraclough »

cashewchoo wrote: post #224

A $5 DigitalOcean droplet/VPS. There's so much packed in there. A public, static IP and just enough RAM and disk to do anything you could possibly want to. And the relatively low RAM and disk limits does make you think about memory and disk consumption in a way that you're seldom otherwise incentivized to think about it while you're in undergrad. It's also a gateway to developing working proficiency with linux, which…

My habit, when I'm playing with a new language, or other command-line-friendly gadget, is to spin up a new GNU/Linux VM on a cloud somewhere, dabble on there, then delete the VM once I'm done. If I've got any files worth keeping I put them on GitHub.

Don't have to worry about filling my own machine with rubbish, I can load the VM without it impacting my own machine, and I can generally be fearless (and incautious) in the knowledge the machine is of no real consequence. It's also a good way to try out an unfamiliar distro, or an unfamiliar Unix.

> It's also a gateway to developing working proficiency with linux

And also with cloud computing. It's a good excuse to play about with EC2 firewalls, for instance.

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

#277

Post by woahAcademia »

snarkypixel wrote: post #71
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…

Adding to that, even if you don't like negotiating, it's helpful to understand the tactics used by the other person so you can counter them (or at least be aware of it). For instance, my favorite tactic when someone is pushing hard to sell me something or negotiate is the "Appeal to the authority" (i.e. "Let me first talk about it to my wife (or co-founder) about it." Another popular negotiation tactic is to get aske…

Appeal to the Authority

Is different than

Appeal to Authority

Wow that's crazy.

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

#278

Post by vishnugupta »

Not exactly “development” category, buying high quality tools that I use on a daily basis has been hugely beneficial. JetBrains developer pack in particular, I don’t know the exact name but you get their whole suite of developer tools. I can’t live without two of them at the moment, DataGrip and WebStorm.

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

#279

Post by x87678r »

melenaboija wrote: post #248
vb6sp6 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expensive workstation and cheap laptops as a front end This has worked really well for me too. Desktop is xeon with 64gb ram and I can take advantage of that power from anywhere.

Same here, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 64gb. I just realized I don't need that when I am seating in front of tv or while traveling, and as long as I can connect two external monitors to my laptop is enough. Something "similar" to this in MacBook world is 4k, and you end up with a portable device with worst battery performance and always suffering that you are about to loose your life. VS Code was definitely something that…

I've always wanted to do this but do you run IDE on laptop or XWindows/VNC/RDP?

Also big screen laptops now are more expensive than smaller ones which is the opposite of 10 years ago.

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

#280

Post by x87678r »

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 hate the idea but someone else said, every professional athlete has a coach.
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