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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?

#461

Post by taternuts »

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 started seeing a therapist mostly about my trust issues with women, and it ended up being 90% work-related topics we discussed. Oftentimes I thought I was up against the world and I sucked, and my therapist would bring me down to earth and almost allow me to think that I'm doing a good job, and that I'm a good engineer no matter how many other, better engineers are out there.

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

#462

Post by acomjean »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #452
npsimons wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 resourc…

It was a long time ago, but I got a book "Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition". Its a shame that there isn't better documentation to get past the navigation stuff.

There were some short video tutorials I used too (I can't find right now...)

The story linked here has a bunch of resources. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3492804

(https://batsov.com/articles/2011/11/30/the-ultimate-collecti...)

its old but emacs hasn't changed a ton.

https://batsov.com/articles/2011/11/30/the-ultimate-collecti...

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

#463

Post by killvung »

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…

How did talking to therapist help dealing with mental health like that?

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

#464

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

equality_1138 wrote: post #448
contravariant wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just office politics, only centred around a particular hype.

I'm not sure what particular hype you are referring to. I think of "wokeness" as ultra-generic.

>I think of "wokeness" as ultra-generic.

It really is. Those who embody it may have "Resist" in their Twitter bio, yet their purported values align with virtually all of the 1%, the corporations, the banks, the media companies, academic institutions, sports teams, celebrities, etc etc.

It would be hard to be any more generic.

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

#465

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

athenot wrote: post #130
roland35 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was purchasing a car this helped a lot too! Salesmen are much more experienced than me since they negotiate every day, but even accounting for that it is easy to see what they are doing with other customers and easy to see through the attempts they make on myself. The most common one of course is the "time limited" deal... As if I just happened to show up on the only day there is a sale...

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…

I did this with my previous car, a 2016 Subaru BRZ.

I e-mailed three dealerships in town. I said I wanted a BRZ, Limited trim, Black, with a manual transmission, and asked what their lowest price was. MSRP for this configuration I believe was $29K. One dealership didn't answer at all, the second offered $29K, the third offered $26K and included all the dealer-installed options like the cargo mat for the drunk, auto-dimming mirror with HomeLink, and wheel locks.

I definitely went with the third dealer. Didn't even feel the need to haggle any more than that.

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

#466

Post by kls »

JackFr wrote: post #170
somurzakov wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

That is why you never say cash or commit to financing until the deal is close. Also a dark hack, all car lot have a disclaimer that there is surveillance video and audio equipment on premise. This means you have been notified of surveillance, they can and do bug the cubicle. When they go back to talk it over with their manager many times they are reading you by your conversations going on in the cube and your body language.

I worked in counterintel for a while, so I have had a lot of fun with car dealers over the years. I won't buy a new car (still drive an 87 Suburban Diesel) but from time to time my wife let's me know it's time for her to get a new car. Anyways knowing that they can and do run surveillance can actually be used to your advantage.

Try it one time, when they go back to the manager, say to the person with you, let's leave, I am not going to get what I want here and restate what you know the car is worth based on research. Leave enough meat on the bone for a decent commision and profit, but cut it close to a good deal. Get up and watch them be on the other side of the cube before you can even fully stand up. Manager will have miraculously come back 10-15% over the amount you stated. If you are not willing to walk from the deal, you are not getting a deal.

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

#467

Post by markus_zhang »

darekkay wrote: post #443
drampelt wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Start with going through the settings [1]. You will learn some new things along the way. There's also a great WebStorm Guide [2], with many tips applicable to other languages as well. [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/intellij-idea-settings/ [2] https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/guide/

Thanks, I'm wondering if there are more tutorials about writing plugins. There are a few shortcuts that do not exist and I'd love to implement with a plugin.

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

#469

Post by markus_zhang »

laddng wrote: post #190
_wldu wrote: post #47

Spend $9,000 US dollars to get a MS in CS, Data Science or Cyber Security from Georgia Tech. It's a solid top 10 CS program. It will take a few years, but it is definitely a great investment. If you don't already have an undergrad degree and/or want a quicker program, look at some of the reputable code/security academies that partner with major state universities. They cost a bit more 15K to 20K but are shorter (typi…

I second this - I'm 3 semesters into the online MS in CS program at GATech and it's been a huge level up for me. I highly recommend the investment IF you have the time - it is a large time commitment.

Thanks for sharing. Do you think it's doable without a CS background? I have a Math MS and do use some programming (mostly SQL, Python and some CLI) in my job but never had any formal CS education.

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

#470

Post by kranner »

animesh wrote: post #268
kranner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone in India, the cheapest way to get a Safari Books subscription is via an ACM Professional or Student membership. It’s only INR 1500 per year.

Going through the student membership options, this seems to be only for current students. Was I missing something here?

I think that is as intended. People who are no longer students should select the Professional membership option, which is what I did.
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