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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?

#471

Post by laddng »

flytram wrote: post #449
laddng wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a full time employee (9-5 job) in an MNC and father of new born do you think it is still doable? How many hours do you have to dedicate on a weekly based? PS: Already have a Bachelors in Computer Science

It heavily depends on the courses you pick. I'm a full time employee (9-5 job) but no family and I usually dedicate a hour or two of my mornings and early evenings to the course as well as a couple hours every weekend, but I pick what others consider to be the more intense courses (compilers, distributed systems, operating systems). I also go all in on these courses since you get out of it what you put in.

This site is very accurate when it comes to the hours per week breakdown on courses: https://omscentral.com/ You'll see that some courses are drastically easier than others, the more intense ones being more rewarding. In all, you can make it as hard or as easy as you want and pick your courses that way. Having the BS in CS (I do) helps since you may recognize some of these topics from undergrad.

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

#472

Post by laddng »

markus_zhang wrote: post #469
laddng wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on the courses you pick. With your Math MS, you might actually do really well in the Machine Learning/AI courses that they offer. The projects are mostly in Python and a lot of students do not have a CS undergrad, so you won't be alone there. https://omscentral.com/ is a good resource if you want to see per-course reviews on what the courses are like or how much programming you do. The systems engineering courses (compilers, distributed systems, operating systems) are heavy in C/C++, but the machine learning courses are heavy in Python (AI for robotics for example, which is a great course). You can go to Udacity or Youtube and check out the videos if you want to try it out.

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

#473

Post by rognjen »

pc86 wrote: post #300
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…

OP said they have a professional development budget, so it's presumably from an employer. Cute non-answer notwithstanding, I don't think their employer is going to allocate professional development resources for therapy.

Exactly what I came to say.

It's an entirely reasonable assumption given that the OP said that they've a _budget_.

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

#474

Post by mabcat »

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…

If you're in Australia, find a therapist using the thing I built: https://www.oktotalk.com.au . If you fill out the questions, the site might be able to recommend you someone good straight off. Otherwise one of our staff will help you through the process. We try really hard to bypass that "I tried 4 therapists before I found the right one" thing, and get you in with someone right the first time.

Here's the 80/20 of getting the most out of a therapist, drawn from watching thousands of people get great results over the last 5 years:

* talk to several therapists on the phone for 5 or 10 minutes first. You're going to be hesitant and uncomfortable, it's their job to put you at ease, they're the professional. You'll learn a lot quickly about them, and about the mental health process. If you have an uncomfortable 5 minute chat, you're going to have an uncomfortable hour, so skip that therapist. Go with your intuition, either say "heck yes" or "no".

* make a plan, work the plan. Write out your goals. The way to do this is "present situation" -> "desired situation". Everyone forgets the "desired situation" because they've got so much negative mental energy tied up in "present situation". Anyway, take your goals to your therapist. Put a circle around the one you need to address first. Insist that it gets addressed, or 6 sessions will go by and you'll realise the only change is to your wallet

* ask for homework, do your homework. You're in therapy an hour a week and out of therapy 167 hours a week. Your therapist can't compete with that. What you do outside therapy matters greatly

* if after 3 sessions you haven't established a good working relationship with your therapist and seen a bit of forward motion on your goals, get a new therapist. It could improve but statistically it's unlikely. This is an evidence-based cut-off.

Mental health is health, stay healthy!

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

#475

Post by markus_zhang »

simmons wrote: post #238

This may not be a useful answer for you depending on your situation, but the best money I've spent on professional development has been funding sabbaticals between gigs where I engage in deep study on topics that are harder to learn in small doses.

John Carmack did a lot of programming retreats for his research too. Guess it was really useful.

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

#477

Post by tpineiro »

I'm consulting for a company that is hosting super inexpensive workshop on change management for Managers and ICs on 12/9. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/plumeria-workshops-managing-thr...

It's geared towards identifying when and how to guide yourself and others through company changes. So, while not specifically tailored for software dev it can definitely help with communication as a whole.

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

#478

Post by david38 »

worker767424 wrote: post #420
teachrdan wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

But at least she got silenced for doing something blatantly wrong. She took their picture, posted on a public forum without addressing the people or anyone else locally.

This is why this type of call-out culture is bad. You attack first, the damage is done, often excessive damage, without addressing the issue locally. It would have been different if they had done something wrong, she gets ignored by the police, THEN calls them out.

The other issue with these public witch hunts is they are random. Some people get no traction, others hunted down. This lack of consistency is a horrible way to enforce rules which may or may not have even been broken.

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

#479

Post by aaron695 »

Overseas junkets.

If you are paying for all of it, put the money into the trip over the conference.

Find something community driven so the conference bit was cheaper and it's a good group of people.

Infosec conferences used to be value for money and looked good in interviews. Mix of 3 letter to government to professional to amateur to blackhat people to hang with.

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

#480

Post by whazor »

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 spent some time with vscode to install all the correct extensions properly. And for me back is currently on par with Jetbrains tooling, with the added benefit that vscode is faster.
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