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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?

#381

Post by jjoonathan »

azinman2 wrote: post #359
equality_1138 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. In particular, I've come to recognize the growing confluence of woke politics and tech management as major impediment on my ability to do my job well. Reading up on career coaching and psychology has certainly helped, but can also serve to overcomplicate the situation. My therapist provides highly personal and much more practical guidance in accepting the bs.

How do “woke politics” prevent you from doing your job well?

Remember the time those two new fathers were overheard making dongle jokes at a conference and the twitter outrage mob got them fired for it? Things like that worry me. They don't prevent me from doing my job, but I could understand how someone prone to anxiety might get hung up on it.

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

#382

Post by RankingMember »

Solvitieg wrote: post #368
locochef wrote: post #204

The single best thing I did for professional development was see a therapist. In tech, our jobs are knowledge-based. You can't hammer a nail into a board while you're sitting on the couch with your child, but you can certainly think about software architecture. I've found that my job bleeds into my personal life, and vice versa, and I believe it is far more common than most people realize. Stress piles up and it affe…

In Canada, therapy is very expensive. About $150/h in the major cities. Meanwhile all my American friends get free therapy. Weird how that breaks the narrative about US healthcare.

Please tell us more about these American friends. I'm an American and this "free therapy" is completely foreign to me. More and more therapists aren't in-network because dealing with insurance is a pain in the ass, so even if you've got insurance you end up paying out-of-network which might cover $50 of that $150 session.

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

#383

Post by p0nce »

Singing lessons were immensely valuable to me for an unexpected reasons: to really make progress in singing you need to forego a lot of older habits and rearrange your neurons, a process that was apparently well understood by the teacher, and that tilted all my subsequent learning endeavours into "finding eigenvalues".

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

#384

Post by issa »

I would suggest spending any extra time and money you have on doing something fun and helpful. For example, learning to play poker, or chess. Both of those things will tangentially help you in your professional life, but are also enjoyable hobbies. I don't mean to limit it to strategy games. Almost anything that involves some learning will end up being beneficial at some level even if it is not technically professional development.

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

#385

Post by velcrovan »

Solvitieg wrote: post #368
locochef wrote: post #204

The single best thing I did for professional development was see a therapist. In tech, our jobs are knowledge-based. You can't hammer a nail into a board while you're sitting on the couch with your child, but you can certainly think about software architecture. I've found that my job bleeds into my personal life, and vice versa, and I believe it is far more common than most people realize. Stress piles up and it affe…

In Canada, therapy is very expensive. About $150/h in the major cities. Meanwhile all my American friends get free therapy. Weird how that breaks the narrative about US healthcare.

How does that work?? As an American, I must know.

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

#386

Post by busrf »

orzig wrote: post #171
paulgb wrote: post #17

I've enjoyed having an O'Reilly Safari subscription for random access to books. In particular, the Pragmatic Programmer and Designing Data-Intensive Applications. I've also had good experiences with SCPD courses from Stanford, if your budget would cover those (they are at the other end of the price spectrum).

I frequently muse about whether Safari, which is valuable, is worth the $399/y Pro: I like being able to sample the same topic from many prospectives (one chapter from each of 3-5 books) Cons: I wouldn't spend /that/ much on books in a year, the quality of the videos is widely variable, the search (including quality filtering) is _terrible_, and the inability to bookmark specific talks within a conference is infuriat…

If you get an ACM membership, which costs $99/yr, you get access to Safari as a membership benefit.

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

#387

Post by rc_hackernews »

miguendes wrote: post #89
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.

Very interesting, can you elaborate more on what was the impact on your professional life? I wish I had that money now or my company could pay for me.

Not a super big impact professionally. Creating and maintaining distributed systems is hard. And even harder when business requirements, stakeholders, etc. get involved.

One major take away I got from the course is to limit the more RPC-driven services I typically saw up to that point (and still see in current microservices examples to this day).

He also gave a lecture on the different types of coupling, which I had never even heard of prior to the course.

He also has a few talks on YouTube as well as others that work at Particular Software. I'd highly recommend checking out all of them.

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

#388

Post by x87678r »

drampelt wrote: post #259
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…

Does anyone have any tips or resources for getting more out of the Jetbrains IDEs? I've been using them for years but I still feel like there's so much I'm not taking advantage of.

Jetbrains has a lot of videos on youtube. eg this Intellij one has a bunch of stuff I never knew existed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AMcN-wkspU

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

#389

Post by issa »

somurzakov wrote: post #142
athenot wrote: post #130

Earlier 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

100%. There are lots of small dealers that will be super happy to go pick up a car at auction for you. I highly recommend this if you want the best price. If you don't really care, it is significantly faster and easier to just go to a dealership.

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

#390

Post by maccard »

conductr wrote: post #322
rdtwo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve tried that and they wouldn’t budge. I got rock bottom and I offered to do financing if they would go lower but the incentive structure of the individual sales person didn’t match that of the dealership so no go

You showed too much commitment. In either situation they knew your were going to buy. The trick is to keep one foot out the door until you're locked in on price.

I had the same experience. The dealer knew I was ready to walk, but it was as simple as "computer says no lower". I sold them a car, and saw it listed the following day. My napkin math said that the margin was close to 0 on the car in the first place,once they had paid £30 to tax it and a salesperson an hour to talk to someone and take their details.
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