Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 553 posts

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

#491

Post by maccard »

cle wrote: post #447
maccard wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, Intellij (and Visual Studio) are more than just LSP. They're debugging, source control, static analysis, test runners, profiling tools, database tools, etc. Secondly, the state of LSP clients is a long way from matching Visual Studio or Intellij. When LSP is competitive with the major IDEs, I'll happily switch, but I don't see that in the next 5 years at least. As an example, try opening UE4 using any o…

I'm well aware of the differences between IntelliJ and LSP, I've been an IntelliJ power user for years and have written plugins as well. Currently I've transitioned back to Emacs for most of my day-to-day coding, since LSP provides good enough completion, navigation, and static analysis, and DAP provides good enough debugging and test running. The rest of your list are non-issues for me, e.g. every editor I know of h…

> Im well aware of the differences between IntelliJ and LSP

Apologies I didn't mean to imply you didn't, I only meant to point out that LSP isn't the only factor in choosing an editor. For some people,(e.g. me) lack of some of that tooling is important.

>since LSP provides good enough completion, navigation, and static analysis

My experience using lsp with clangd as the server on a large project was that it flat out didn't work. Try opening UE4 for example.

> The rest of your list are non-issues for me,

That's great for you, but others do use those tools regularly. It's also a feature that those tools work out of the box, consistently, meaning that a coworker can (occasionally) drive by commit/run/compile on my computer.

> I have a hard time believing that language implementers won't prioritize their implementation over IntelliJ.

Intellij/VS are going to keep improving in that time. As much as I'd love for all of my tooling to be open, I don't see that as realistic in the near future based on the current state of the tooling. I'd love to be wrong though!

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

#492

Post by comprev »

kamaal wrote: post #490
comprev wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech books for the Indian market have been a good resource. The books (and maybe exercises) slightly differ to the US prints to keep control of the market. I acquired a huge stack from an Amazon UK seller for literally pennies each.

>>The books (and maybe exercises) slightly differ to the US prints to keep control of the market. No. They are mostly a little low quality books in terms of paper quality, photo graph color etc. Every thing else is the same. I buy a lot of books as I stay in India. US publishers partner with local publishers and get it printed and sold for cheap.

The academic text books are known to have different test questions so US students can't buy (relatively) dirt cheap "foreign" prints. The text might be the same elsewhere in the book though.

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

#493

Post by alok-g »

p0nce wrote: post #383

Singing lessons were immensely valuable to me for an unexpected reasons: to really make progress in singing you need to forego a lot of older habits and rearrange your neurons, a process that was apparently well understood by the teacher, and that tilted all my subsequent learning endeavours into "finding eigenvalues".

Can you expand more on the connection to eigenvalues? :-) Thanks.

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

#494

Post by elros »

dtech wrote: post #112
totally wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The audiobook is good as well, you can hear the tone of voice, which is useful.

I looked it up and saw it was read by Michael Kramer. It's worth it do just hear his voice.

For a moment I thought you said Cosmo Kramer... That'd be something hahaha

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

#495

Post by SuoDuanDao »

orzig wrote: post #163
WanderPanda wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But don’t let this be an excuse to fall for the toolbox fallacy!

I assume you mean "a poor craftsman blames his tools". Is there actually any evidence that over-focusing on tools is a common problem? I understand it could be, and we've all probably wasted an hour here and there, but I don't fear drowning in a glass of water just because I've swallowed wrong a few times

I was curious enough to look it up, apparently it's the fallacy of "I can't properly start until I have ". In that sense I think it's not at all a problem among professionals, but perhaps an easy stumbling block that discourages a lot of amateurs (the study I heard about was actual trades, where going from amateur to professional is less of a hurdle than among creative pursuits).

I might say, "A journeyman makes his tools do the job, a master invests in his tools".

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

#496

Post by maccard »

vb6sp6 wrote: post #440
maccard wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience. The dealer knew I was ready to walk, but it was as simple as "computer says no lower". I sold them a car, and saw it listed the following day. My napkin math said that the margin was close to 0 on the car in the first place,once they had paid £30 to tax it and a salesperson an hour to talk to someone and take their details.

> and saw it listed the following day. The car business is a giant recursive function where cost can be added at every step. The sales price may have been low but the dealer has lots of ways to add pure profit: * sub-prime loans with high interest * gap insurance * alarm systems * extended warranties * window tints, undercoats, towing hitches, etc. The buyer might also have a trade in which conveniently starts the wh…

Right, that's exactly the point. There was almost 0 money in the pure sale. All of the money is in high interest loans (via kickback from the financing), waterproofing treatments, "extra" insurance, service plans managed in house. The profit on a car night be negligible, but a cheap car sold with gap insuranxe is likely a days salary!

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

#498

Post by bsenftner »

hiyer wrote: post #482
bsenftner wrote: post #2

Harvard Business Review has a series of collected articles from their magazine composing the "Business Fundamentals Series". It is the most comprehensive, easy to read and condense guide you'll find for doing excellent yet difficult work of any kind anywhere.

Are you referring to this - https://store.hbr.org/product/mastering-business-fundamental... ?

It looks like, due to the popularity of this series, Harvard Business Review has started using "Harvard Business Fundamentals" as a general term for a type of online class offering. The product I'm referring to is a set of 7 bound volumes, each a collection of the "best of" articles from Harvard Business Review, each volume focusing on one topic such as Finance, Economics, Marketing, (Start Up) Operations & New Division Formation, Lobbying and Governance, and International Business. When I first saw them they were leather bound and nice library quality, but the set I have is paperbound. I got my set 20 years ago, but saw a revised publication of the entire set about 10 years ago, also a hard and softbound shelf of books.

And don't let the age of these impact your opinion, these are the timeless articles that you probably recognize their ideas because these "radical ideas" when fully mainstream.

These are close, and getting any of these will prove to be a fantastic resource: https://store.hbr.org/product/hbr-classics-boxed-set-16-book... https://store.hbr.org/product/hbr-s-10-must-reads-ultimate-b... https://store.hbr.org/product/harvard-business-review-guides...

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

#499

Post by nkkav »

On the cheap side, books, but not all of them. My buys are "hit or miss", lately mostly hits.

I would recommend:

- The Elements of Style, aka, "the Little book". Made me a credible editor (and documentation writer at the time) almost at zero time.

- Zero to One: in-depth, honest, and non-conformist view of the tech startup landscape. "How Google Works" is a close second.

- The Embedded Systems Dictionary. Not in print but the second-hand paperback is worth it. Great refresher, written with a wit.

Another book I use is "The Developer's Guide to Debugging".

In general I like zero-bullshit or more politely, zero fat books. "The Elements of Style" is one. "The Developer's Guide to Debugging" is also very low in fat, war stories and other nonsense.

There are other books that I like that are less influential.

Aphorism: I don't believe in software books. Exceptions are well-researched reference volumes, e.g., "C: A Reference Manual, 5th edition". I believe in undisputed truths, not in one person's preference or experience over another's.

These days I mostly consult manuals and standard documents. Technical books will only give you that much; see them as a vehicle to learn how to learn. Exceptions are again reference handbooks, that will have to be exhaustive.

I don't believe in trainings, fast, slow or anything. Self-learner here, learned reading by myself around the age of 3 (shocking revelation: have you realized that you can only recall detailed memories only after you have learnt how to read?) Actually it was exactly the winter of 1980 (born 1977). I was a serviceable reader by the coming of sprint 1980 and could read subtitles as fast as the adult is assumed to by early 1981. Educated physicist but self-educated programmer.

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

#500

Post by mv4 »

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…

We need to know.
Post reply on HN