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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?

#421

Post by free_rms »

azinman2 wrote: post #413
free_rms wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not OP but I am politically engaged with not 100% the same opinions, so sometimes I get annoyed by the environment and have to remind myself not to care.

Imagine your workspace was full of aggressive pro-Trump messaging. A bit distracting maybe?

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

#422

Post by przemyt »

zestyping wrote: post #330
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…

I've spent a lot of time with therapists but they've only had the effect of being a sort of guard rail to keep me from falling too deep when I fall; it doesn't seem like they have helped me make any lasting improvements. Based on what I've heard from friends and on this thread, it sounds like it's possible to get a lot more out of talk therapy? What's your range of experiences been like with better or worse therapist…

My experience with therapy is similar to yours, albeit with one therapist (so far). The guard rail is not a bad thing, but all in all the process does not seem to lead to actually solving deeper issues.

Interestingly, in talk therapy it seems to be the patient's own talking that helps, rather than how the therapy is done or who's the therapist. Mark Manson sums the research up nicely in this piece:

https://markmanson.net/how-to-get-better

Turns out that any way to examine and express one's thoughts and emotions that otherwise run unattended is helpful. Therapy, journaling, meditation.

Still, to me this is by it's very nature limited - to what you can consciously dig out and express. If the issues that cause trouble are not conscious, tough luck. Like trying to fix email infrastructure issues by rigorously applying inbox zero.

Perhaps lasting improvements in such cases require forms of therapy that involve consciousness altering techniques? Psychedelics are recently making a comeback in therapy. "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan is on my reading list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Change_Your_Mind

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

#423

Post by intricatedetail »

gadders wrote: post #298
snarkypixel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>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." In the UK, some sleazy sellers of things like double glazing won't even start discussing the sale unless both husband and wife are present to prevent this tactic.

This is when you tell them to gfy. Another problem in the UK is that anyone can claim they can do glazing, they can show you fake portfolios and use tactics like above to get you to sign a contract. Then consumer rights will let them to try to "fix" the job until you give up and if you report fraud to police they'll say it's not a crime to do that. Being a poor glazer is not a crime.

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

#424

Post by vestrigi »

sanguy wrote: post #234

The therapist is a good one already suggested. Also instead of other PD I would suggest to save (invest) as much as possible as early as possible. A career in tech is very seldom healthy as a forever job so having an escape path is important. I used this technique to get enough invested by 45 that I could comfortably live on the dividends/capital gains/passive income it generates without ever touching the investment…

Seems like it's easier to save up that amount of money if you're working at a position that is high enough to personally tell the CEO of Google to GFY.

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

#425

Post by equality_1138 »

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?

How familiar are you with the term? Perhaps I used an offensive slur for convenience and should reconsider the phrasing? In my experience, over-emphasizing "social responsibility" that has nothing to do with the product tends to put less competent managers in power. Less competent managers tend to favor less competent engineers. And it's a vicious cycle.

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

#426

Post by intricatedetail »

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 think this is a must have for large projects. I wish their search options where like in a search engine though. VS Code is fine for quick edits but feels too basic to handle large codebase.

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

#427

Post by intricatedetail »

jedberg wrote: post #263
jkingsbery wrote: post #48

As 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…

> For some topics though, it's not just a matter of time savings. I'm working on a topic now that doesn't really have many useful books, so I'm having to read technical specifications produced by industry groups, which lack context and are pretty opaque. I'm missing having a book that explains these ideas in a coherent fashion. I know a couple of tech book authors, and this is how they all got started on their first…

There are two groups of engineers - if they embark on opaque documented problem - one will write a book and share everything they learned, the other - patent the ideas and make sure nobody else uses them without paying.

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

#428

Post by reb »

oneplane wrote: post #374
azinman2 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Generally they undermine patterns, and without patterns in our lives, life itself becomes quite the burden. When it happens but you aren't aware of it, you start to degrade in various ways and if you pile the unknownness (what is happening? why do I feel this way? why am I not getting done what I want to get done?) on top of it, it's not a fun time. At least, that's a factor I've read about recently; plenty more fact…

This is a really interesting perspective I haven't run into before. It definitely captures a subtractive strain of political and social thought I find incredibly frustrating. The lefty "woke" variant is hotly criticized lately, but its libertarian and conservative siblings have had their moments in recent years. Something in it speaks to everyone.

Of course, dismantling order is a poor substitute for refining order, and while the idea of starting over from scratch is seductive, I'm not convinced the "post-dismantling" environment is a good one for building better things (regardless of your definition of "better").

Unfortunately, the thirst for hard resets seems stronger now on all sides than I've ever seen before, which disappoints me to no end. Everything grows out of something else. And if you can't picture how what we have today could become what you want tomorrow without resorting to burning it down, you probably aren't ready to build something better from scratch. The least you can do is let the thing stand while we figure out how to make it work for everyone.

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

#430

Post by jjice »

kristopolous wrote: post #108
jkingsbery wrote: post #48

As 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…

I always check for a used book first. I got a basically unused copy of the original Dragon Book for $9 shipped. The spine even still cracked when I opened it. Some student out them probably didn't do too great in their compiler class...
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