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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?

#411

Post by jldugger »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #311
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…

LowEndBox, and you can get $15/year VPSs out there.

free-for-dev lists a couple of free forever hosts -- OCI and GCP.

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

#412

Post by free_rms »

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?

It's uninclusive to put one very specific brand of politics in people's face all the time with the unstated message that if you think a little differently you had better be quiet about it.

Some people can find that to be distracting.

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

#413

Post by azinman2 »

free_rms wrote: post #412
azinman2 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's uninclusive to put one very specific brand of politics in people's face all the time with the unstated message that if you think a little differently you had better be quiet about it. Some people can find that to be distracting.

Can you be more specific? I'm not sure I understand how that's affecting you from being able to do your job well.

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

#414

Post by randcraw »

smt88 wrote: post #146
beagle3 wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

Most books on deep learning are too new or have too popular a style to be included in uni libraries. By the time they do appear, the examples no longer work because the tools have evolved.

The same goes for recent books on applied machine learning or recent tools or libraries intended for professional practitioners. I think libraries are reluctant to buy books they think will go out of date quickly.

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

#415

Post by teachrdan »

jjoonathan wrote: post #381
azinman2 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One might also remember that the Black woman who posted about it on Twitter also got fired by her employer. "Woke politics" are an easy target for free-floating anxiety, but the real concern for 99% of us is that we have virtually no rights at work.

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

#416

Post by notrandom »

rusk wrote: post #363
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 a similar vein I went and did a degree in psychology at night. Nobody in work got it; HR refused me extra leave because they didn’t think it was relevant to my competencies ... but definitely the single best thing I have done for my career in terms of having one and having a great personal life too. Even today people ask me “what do you use it for?” to which I ominously reply “I’m using it right now” - gets them e…

Do you have a bunch of textbooks that you would recommend reading? :)

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

#417

Post by worker767424 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #381
azinman2 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The story: https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...

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

#419

Post by dalmo3 »

munificent wrote: post #315
mac01021 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible for you, without sharing personal details that you would rather not share, to give a more concrete and detailed account of the value that your therapist has provided to you? I've also always regarded myself as introspective enough not to be able to benefit from therapy. And, while I'm open minded to the idea that I am wrong about that, I just have trouble imagining or envisioning what I might be missin…

Imagine you've lived in the same house your entire life. There's a big couch taking up half the living room, but one of the legs is broken. When you were really little, it tipped over when you sat in it, so you just learned to walk around the couch over to the not-very-comfortable armchair and sit there instead. This was so long ago that you don't even remember learning not to sit in the couch. You don't think about…

Great analogy for physical therapy too!

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

#420

Post by worker767424 »

teachrdan wrote: post #415
jjoonathan wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One might also remember that the Black woman who posted about it on Twitter also got fired by her employer. "Woke politics" are an easy target for free-floating anxiety, but the real concern for 99% of us is that we have virtually no rights at work.

Publicly internet shaming someone for a middle school joke overheard at a conference is less professional than making the joke, and I buy the argument that it would "interfere with her doing her job." It'd be different for a more direct or egregious joke or if someone on stage said it.

Apparently she's been a lot more quiet for the past few years to the point that she's harder to google without second order effort. This backs up that what she did was unprofessional and interfered with her job, but I'm torn over this because it also means she got silenced. Then again, are "dongle" jokes the hill you want to die on? Or TWSS? This was in 2013 before the term "woke" was even popularized.

Not sure what her race has to do with this, though.

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