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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?

#451

Post by rusk »

notrandom wrote: post #416
rusk wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

That's a good question - it's a while ago and the only one that really jumps out is The History of Psychology by Leahy because understanding psychology is as much about understanding how we understand the mind in the context of society, and to do that you need to know the history. Not what you were expecting ...

I highly recommend reading up on Hans Selye's biological model of stress and the HPA axis. Also worth checking out Freudelberger for the seminal article on burnout and Maslach for the formal treatment.

Organisational psychology is great but so contentious an area it's helpful to have a good teacher.

I highly recommend looking into Biopsychology, which is essentially the interplay between our mind and body and even how our mind distributed through the body.

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

#452

Post by bluehatbrit »

npsimons wrote: post #133
acomjean wrote: post #36

If you aren’t great with your toolset spending time learning your editor/ide . I spent some time a decade ago learning better emacs skills (macros on the fly). Also getting better with jet brains IDEs. Made me more productive and my work more enjoyable. I also read some of the “Unix power tools” book from oreilly, to help my command line skills. Thirdly I had to learn symfony so I signed up for symfonycasts video tut…

> I spent some time a decade ago learning better emacs skills (macros on the fly). This. I spent a week in 2000 focusing on learning Emacs. To this day, I'll use downtime to browse through packages, forums and documentation looking for new (to me) things to tweak Emacs with, or new (mostly CLI) tools. I just discovered the various rainbow modes last month, and life is so much better.

Do you have any advice of where to get started learning Emacs? I don't get on with vim and have the very basic editor / navigation commands down in emacs, but finding well written learning resources past that point seems really difficult. Should I learn a package manager before Emacs lisp? Or start learning some of the built in more advanced functionality past opening and editing files?

I'm struggling to find resources as well as understanding what to learn next and it's proving quite a blocker.

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

#453

Post by ed25519FUUU »

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…

As a vscode user, I opened up pycharm to see if I like it at all. It asked if I wanted to update ideavim plugins and I said yes. Now looking at ~200% CPU usage for about a minute. Still can't open my folder[1].

There's nothing I hate more than work software that I have to tinker with to keep working. Maybe it doesn't deserve the reputation it has for being a resource hog, or maybe it does?

https://i.imgur.com/TpfAvrB.png

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

#454

Post by tzs »

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…

> Can you get the material for free? Almost always, yes. But it takes time to find the right material, and our time is valuable. [...] The authors of these books have spent time organizing the material in a helpful way that you would otherwise need to spend.

This is one of the best things about books.

Yes, I can find all the material on the web, sometimes even all at the same site. But web writers usually cannot resist the temptation into putting in a ton of links, turning the material into a directed graph.

There will usually be many ways to reach a given node, some that reach it before you have read all the prerequisites.

There is often no good way to know if you've actually visited all the nodes. You might have taken a fork 10 nodes ago, and the other branch goes to places that nothing in your branch links to. Unless you remember that you need to backtrack 10 nodes and try the other fork, you miss all that.

I want the author to figure out what order I should visit the nodes to get everything there in a good order for learning, and then provide a way for me to effortlessly follow that order.

With a book, that's easy: start at chapter 1 and read to the end. A web site could do that, but for some reason most do not.

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

#455

Post by ed25519FUUU »

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…

A raspberry pi 4 would be better bang for your buck in my opinion, especially if your IP is relatively static through your ISP.

There's benefits to having compute on the same network as you. It will also be much faster to transfer files.

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

#456

Post by stjohnswarts »

nolok wrote: post #26

I found that (for me !) it was less useful to invest in learning to do new things, as opposed to investing in being more efficient and / or having my work time more pleasant. Make your work feel like pleasure and there is no limit to what you can achieve. So maybe don't only think "what can I be better at ?" but also "how can my life be better while I work ?". Software: A proper training session with a high level deb…

I think standing desks are a waste of money. setting a timer to get up and stretch your legs every half an hour to hour is the best thing you do. I completely agree on buying a great chair though.

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

#457

Post by linseed_213 »

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.

It's $150 in the us also. Insurance occasionally covers it, making it ~$10-50 co-pay.

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

#458

Post by jcomis »

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.

I pay $180 and have to manually claim it. Nothing is covered until I hit my out of network deductible of $1200? Then it's 60% covered. So yeah, not cheap here!

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

#459

Post by jcomis »

spelunker wrote: post #214
esond wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. This relatively short book has made more of a difference to my personal livelihood than maybe any other pice of literature or advice. You really don’t realize how much negotiating you do in day to day life. Its good to be comfortable with it.

Chris Voss also has a Masterclass on negotiation. I imagine it's probably similar to his book, but it's very good.

It's basically verbatim.

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

#460

Post by ethbr0 »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #446
ralfhn wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each their own but I found the opposite to be true. Coding or trying to focus on one one task while chat/email notifications are popping up left and right is very disruptive. I went down from two monitors to one and I'm very happy with the decision.

One benefit I've had from an ultrawide monitor is that notifications will generally go unnoticed. I just bought a 49" ultrawide (essentially two 27" monitors side by side) and the notification area is so far into my peripheral vision I regularly miss messages.

I guess this is my experience as well.

Previously, I felt like I had two choices: (1) mute+hide all notifications, or (2) leave them visible/alerting.

Now, there's (3) leave them visible, but outside my focus.

Physically turning my focus to bring them into view, whenever I have a break, seems to work better than either of the other two.

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