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Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
61–70 of 553 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#62I'm a big fan of pluralsight.com (no association). It's only $29 / month USD. I always go back to it when I want to brush up on something or learn something completely new. Not all videos / instructors are created equally of course, but their content has been the most consistent IMO.
Agreed. I have made it a rule now that instead of struggling for weeks figuring out something new I will spend two days on a Pluralsight or Udemy course to get some fundamentals first.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#63https://every-layout.dev has fantastic free content, but the full $100 for all the materials (book, site, components) has had absurdly high ROI for me. I spent less than an hour's consulting wages, and it's been transformative - a gift that keeps giving. Highest possible recommendation.
(Web dev since 1998)
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#64I don't think there's been any better value for me than Gary Bernhardt's Destroy All Software. I randomly stumbled upon it way back in 2014 when I had just learned my first programming language and was dabbling in Ruby, watched everything, and it made me much better at my job. It was $29/m at the time. Apart from that, I think maybe one or two books every year. Most of them are pretty poor, but the value of that odd…
Gary's free conference talk videos have been some of the most mind-expanding materials I've met. Go watch them now.
(his paid episodes are irrelevant to me because they tend to be about things I have a lot of experience with, otherwise I'd buy without question)
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#65Learning new languages. Lots of doors opened, access to a new world of content. Specially for non-native English speakers.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#66I think it’s a good idea to invest in courses about negotiation, project management or other interpersonal skills. Toastmasters is also great and cheap. For most software engineers the technical side is the easy part but if you want to survive in a big company you need some level of non technical skills. There are only a few places where you can do well on technical skills alone.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#67As a founder / CTO the best money I have spent is on a really good coach. My coach (my cofounder's too, and now some of our leadership team) doesn't have particular expertise in founding or leading companies, but works with many founders, and she's not technical, but the things I think I have found hardest to learn are mostly around people management and leadership, which I think are underrated skills that require serious development (actually, whether one is in a position of leadership or not). When I think of all the books I have bought or conferences to which I have been, in terms of impact on my effectiveness as a manager and leader, coaching is wayyyyyyyy out in front.
EDIT: actually not just as a leader / manager, but in all areas of my life.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#68Not technically "spent" because I didn't pay for it myself, but I took a sales course once (2 days in person) which cost whoever ended up paying for me e3000-ish, but I grew more from that course than any technical courses or conferences I ever went to. Still, if I had to do it again but I'd have to pay myself I'm not sure I'd do it, which is a bit of a contradiction I guess.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?
#69I 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…
Nice! I was looking for an advice like that one. I am working on a Notebook where the screen is too bright and it's really uncomfortable to work sometimes.