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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136258

by sondog • 6 years ago

524 540 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm a software engineer with a budget for professional development, I'm looking for a good way to spend it. I'm curious what other people have found valuable, it could be a book, MOOC, conference etc

bsenftner2• 6 years ago

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.

hiyer• 6 years ago

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

bsenftner2• 6 years ago

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...

nikivi• 6 years ago

Interestingly most things of value I have learned came from free content (Twitter/Articles/RandomGitHubRepos) especially ones that are open source. I guess the fact that community can build up on the content is super valuable.

Silhouette• 6 years ago

That was my instinctive reaction as well: money is more for hiring help or buying equipment now. Most of my "professional development" now starts with online sources, including tutorial/reference information about different technologies and discussions with other developers, and most of that is freely available.

In my earlier years as a developer I also bought a lot of books and some of them were very useful, and from time to time I still find a good one. If I were at the same stage today, I'd probably also consider online training courses, as some of them do look well presented and for getting up to speed quickly in a new area that sort of guided material can be helpful. (The same applies to in-real-life small group training courses, when that sort of thing becomes more practical again.)

I'm not a big fan of convention/lecture formats, though. They tend to charge a lot for admission, and IME they are rarely worth the time and money, particularly because these days you can often find much of the best material from any particularly good presenters available freely from other sources anyway.

lsiunsuex• 6 years ago

I'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.

qntty• 6 years ago

I second this. I've been using a work account recently to introduce myself to some new things and I was surprised at how much I liked it. It seems like it has gotten better in the past couple years especially.

spaetzleesser2• 6 years ago

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.

PatentlyDC123• 6 years ago

Any instructors you recommend?

whitepoplar2• 6 years ago

Paolo Perrotta's git courses are excellent

clavalle• 6 years ago

Pluralsight is great. But the courses that stand out to me are the ones that have labs, specificially Quiklabs, embedded in them. I wish they'd highlight those somehow so I can find them

Nothing like hands on keyboard to get something new to click!

digianarchist2• 6 years ago

The problem with Pluralsight is a lot of the courses are not that great.

ysoft• 6 years ago

I wish I had known about pluralsight years ago. It has quality content. It helped me move to senior roles easily. I watch/listen daily during commute to work.

rc_hackernews3• 6 years ago

Udi Dahan's "Learn Advanced Distributed Systems Design" course.

https://particular.net/adsd

At one point, I was considering paying out of pocket to attend the course. Fortunately, the company I was working for at the time wanted to send people to it and I got selected.

After taking the course, even if I did have to pay myself, I wouldn't have been upset.

That course is outstanding.

huhtenberg• 6 years ago

Congratulations on your first HN post.

rc_hackernews3• 6 years ago

Thanks!

I've been reading/lurking on this site for YEARS.

For some reason though, the idea of posting has been nerve-rattling even though everyone is technically anonymous.

miguendes3• 6 years ago

Very interesting, can you elaborate more on what was the impact on your professional life?

I wish I had that money now or my company could pay for me.

rc_hackernews3• 6 years ago

Not a super big impact professionally. Creating and maintaining distributed systems is hard. And even harder when business requirements, stakeholders, etc. get involved.

One major take away I got from the course is to limit the more RPC-driven services I typically saw up to that point (and still see in current microservices examples to this day).

He also gave a lecture on the different types of coupling, which I had never even heard of prior to the course.

He also has a few talks on YouTube as well as others that work at Particular Software. I'd highly recommend checking out all of them.

animesh3• 6 years ago

Around April/May, they ran this course for free for 60 days. I progressed to few lessons, but had to stop as I had to focus on some critical stuff at work. I can tell it was good as far I went. I wish I convince my company next year to put us through this course.

te_chris• 6 years ago

Going through dataquest.io has been super rewarding. Backfilled a lot of forgotten stats and probability knowledge, math, learned data science python, good sql practice and now going through different ML techniques. Totally worth it if you want to do data stuff.

spzb• 6 years ago

I've found project management qualifications to give the best ROI. I've done Prince 2 and Scrum. Although I've never had a job title of Project Manager or Scrum Master, they've helped me get senior/lead developer jobs just because recruiters like to see those words on a CV.

mikelward2• 6 years ago

PRINCE2 is the best-designed course I've ever taken. Very concise and practical.

camnora2• 6 years ago

Destroy All Software screencasts by Gary Bernhardt has some great content. Besides the typical CS degree, I felt that these videos were most pivotal in me writing better code.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts

blparker• 6 years ago

Are the videos generally applicable or mainly to Ruby developers?

camnora2• 6 years ago

He covers a wide range of topics. The videos largely use Ruby and Python, but the ideas taught can span across languages. The topics can be found at https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog

semicolonandson• 6 years ago

I was so disappointed when Gary stopped filming these videos that I started making my own screencasts in that style (non-beginner concepts, fast-paced, language agnostic, and terminal-first).

They are on my site here:

https://www.semicolonandsons.com/

I'm not Gary, so the focus is shifted towards areas I have special interests in — namely: the day-to-day of running a software product business as an indie hacker/solopreneur.

s_dev• 6 years ago

He does heavy Black Friday discounts if anyone is considering buying them. Maybe wait a couple of weeks.

christoomey• 6 years ago

Destroy All Software is absolutely fantastic and without question worth $29/month. Probably more than any other single resource, DAS provided some of the most foundational ideas that still drive how I think about software.

You can also view a handful of the screencasts for free (no sign in needed). Some of my personal favorites.

* https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct... * https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/a-com... * https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries

Also, if podcasts are more your thing, we just had Gary as a guest on the Bike Shed podcast this week: https://www.bikeshed.fm/269.

peterstensmyr• 6 years ago

Same for me. As a previously solo half-developer, Gary's videos really drove home how to do best-practice development on a real project. He pushed TDD, separating concerns, and really diving into a single line of code and obsessing over getting it right. Thanks Gary! Sad that he's not making them any more, I really enjoyed the "Web framework from scratch" series. He's recently posted a new video about TypeScript types which is also very good: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDzfXZxesMP-LUICN-RWcbQ

ukd1• 6 years ago

For me it has been paying for folks to help pair code with new languages I'm learning has been amazing at speeding up / getting some nuance quickly. Latest language was Rust.

Second, books.

tbrock• 6 years ago

How do you find those people?

kareemm• 6 years ago

Not OP but I've done the same and had good success on Upwork.

gogopuppygogo2• 6 years ago

Fiverr and Upwork.

derwiki• 6 years ago

Airpair, Codementor, Hack Hands

laverick3• 6 years ago

I've done this before and found it excellent.

SirensOfTitan• 6 years ago

SuperMemo 18, and some time and patience for figuring out incremental reading and self-driven learning (and the SM interface).

bJGVygG7MQVF8c• 6 years ago

A subscription to O'Reilly's digital library

https://learning.oreilly.com

SuoDuanDao3• 6 years ago

Not sure why you'd get flagged for that, you don't seem to have an association?

zorked2• 6 years ago

This is the thing that used to be called Safari, right? This is great, but a tad expensive at $50/month. I wish O'Reilly would just charge a bit less for that.

Bishonen88• 6 years ago

There are sales every now and then which get you pay less for whatever period you continue being subscribed. I pay 20 dollars a month since 2 years without any “student discount” shenanigans

unmole• 6 years ago

Get an ACM Memebership instead, it's significantly less expensive. Among other things, it gives you access to O'Reilly Online.

dave842• 6 years ago

I subscribed for a few months, cancelled and later in the year got an offer to resubscribe for around $200 per annum and they've locked that in for me ever since. Worth a try.

paulgb2• 6 years ago

I've enjoyed having an O'Reilly Safari subscription for random access to books. In particular, the Pragmatic Programmer and Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

I've also had good experiences with SCPD courses from Stanford, if your budget would cover those (they are at the other end of the price spectrum).

kranner2• 6 years ago

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.

animesh3• 6 years ago

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

phonebanshee• 6 years ago

And check your local library. Here in Seattle you get to use Safari if you have a library card.

digianarchist2• 6 years ago

Toronto too albeit the old version.

orzig7• 6 years ago

I frequently muse about whether Safari, which is valuable, is worth the $399/y

Pro: I like being able to sample the same topic from many prospectives (one chapter from each of 3-5 books)

Cons: I wouldn't spend /that/ much on books in a year, the quality of the videos is widely variable, the search (including quality filtering) is _terrible_, and the inability to bookmark specific talks within a conference is infuriating. Part of the pain is how close it is to being really good!

What's your pro/con list?

rdtwo5• 6 years ago

I have a work subscription and never use it. The interface is so terrible I’d rather pay for the book

paulgb2• 6 years ago

To be honest, I didn't realize it was that expensive for an individual (we might have some sort of team pricing -- I'm not sure what my seat cost but I assumed it was cheaper than that). At that rate, you're probably better off with a $400/y budget for paper O'Reilly books.

That said, it is fun to be able to randomly access books on a topic without having to decide whether or not to buy them.

busrf• 6 years ago

If you get an ACM membership, which costs $99/yr, you get access to Safari as a membership benefit.

gogopuppygogo2• 6 years ago

Hiring a tutor to mentor me in a technology I want to learn. Building MVP’s with them to master the tech.

kilroy1232• 6 years ago

How did you find such a mentor?

laverick3• 6 years ago

upwork, linkedin, codementor.io

adambware• 6 years ago

O’Reilly has a subscription that gives access to all of their books. Incredible amount of value over countless topics.

x87678r5• 6 years ago

$49/mo isn't cheap though, you can buy an awful lot of books for that money directly.

guiambros2• 6 years ago

$99/year via an ACM subscription [1]. And you get the printed copies of ACM magazines shipped to you every month.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22799753

pdx6• 6 years ago

Some local libraries have Safari available for free to patrons.

api• 6 years ago

Starting a failed startup many years ago, if opportunity cost counts.

kilroy1232• 6 years ago

Right? I too failed at a self-funded startup. Most expensive 'mistake' of my life, but boy did I learn a lot.

kamaal3• 6 years ago

Making these kind of mistakes is something people avoid. But I'm a little happy I made this in my 20s. It can accelerate your learning by years to even decades. On a longish view of things a lot of things that are clear to me, are still murky to people in my age peer group. That kind of helps making lots of beneficial decisions especially financial and health before others can even see or realize them. You come out ahead in the bell curve.

A start up failure might be painful, and even a little expensive. But it's like a college degree, or other high quality training program. It teaches you a lot and most of it is beneficial stuff if you are willing to apply the lessons elsewhere.

jonathanstrange• 6 years ago

The books I buy. I chose my literature very carefully and buy only the best classical and informative texts for personal use. I'm particularly happy about used copies or Indian versions of otherwise expensive handbooks.

cik• 6 years ago

I'll say books period. Every month I buy them, every month I read them, and I let the topics sort themselves out.

smt883• 6 years ago

You can get them for free at the library. No need to spend professional development money on them.

rovr1382• 6 years ago

Assuming they're there.

beagle32• 6 years ago

Early in your career, yes. As you dig deeper they become available only in university libraries and then not even there.

Most material is available for free on the internet, but like most open source material, you have to compile it yourself and that takes time. Good books save you the time by including important dependencies, normalizing notation, etc.

adamnemecek• 6 years ago

Libraries tend to have bad, outdated selections.

WrtCdEvrydy• 6 years ago

Get certified in the technologies your company (or projects use). AWS Certifications, Terraform Certifications. Buy the training material and study it; you don't have to take the test but understanding the technology is worth it.

nolok6• 6 years ago

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 debugger for a language I wasn't used to, debuggers often have esoteric interface and "hidden" features, but learning to use them comfortably will make your life so much easier and pleasant.

Buying a license for a good IDE (in my case, intellij). I use vs code 70% of my time but when I need to work on more complex pieces of code or debugging it just change your life.

Hardware:

Buying a proper "high quality" laptop, notably the screen (real matte screen because screw glares, and 2k/3k/4k resolution because you look at text all day so crystal clear font rendering matters a lot).

A great chair with proper support because my back hurting at the end of every day is not ok.

A switchable sitting / standing desk ( https://www.autonomous.ai/product/standing-desk ).

Quality noise cancelling headphones (Bose QC 35).

SuoDuanDao3• 6 years ago

This reminds me of a study I heard about some time back, comparing the highest performers in various trades to the average. Apparently one major predictor is that outlier performers spend more, even as a percentage of income, on their tools.

WanderPanda• 6 years ago

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

sgt2• 6 years ago

Unless you buy a cheap brand I don't think the matte / glossy holds up anymore. A good quality screen can have a degree of gloss and still offer superior quality to matte. Crystal clear rendering of fonts is a given. Having said the above, I think there's actually very little competition out there that beats MacBook Pro's etc.

nolok6• 6 years ago

It doesn't hold true for me personnally. I have a true matte screen laptop, and its color absolutely suck (they look like a t-shirt that went in the washing machine way too many times), but it has absolutely no glaring whatsoever and it feels a lot more comfortable.

Same way e-ink is much much more pleasant to read a book in the sun than even the most expansive amoled screen.

IggleSniggle• 6 years ago

I have a MBP, and often end up working in the dark or turning my screen brightness way up just to fight the glare. That said, the only thing matte gives you is diffusion of light, and often at the cost of actually being brighter (but again, more diffuse) than the glossy. Personally, I still prefer matte.

mwww2• 6 years ago

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.

marinhero• 6 years ago

+1 on the IDE front. I used to do everything on vim and will always find silly errors that an IDE would have found immediately. I switched to rubymine and not only me but everyone on my team appreciates it!

jtms• 6 years ago

I am glad switching to an IDE worked for you, but for me a well extended and configured Vim setup is the best IDE on earth. Anything an IDE can do, Vim can typically do as well given the right plugin.

orzig7• 6 years ago

I'd be thrilled to spend $1,000 on any of these if I knew for sure they'd work, but the Expected Value of a tool (or any other investment) falls very fast when I consider how little hard evidence I have to go on /for my particular context/.

For books, the dollar cost is so low that I can buy it, invest 15 minutes in evaluating it, and not feel bad walking away. At least 25% of books are worth the time and cost, which is plenty.

nolok6• 6 years ago

I absolutely understand, which is also why I waited way too long to buy them.

Which one do you doubt and what are your questions ? I would be happy to provide more about my experience so you can decide if it matches your need.

jstummbillig• 6 years ago

One of the upsides of living in the EU: As a consumer you can, by law, return any* online purchase for 14 days after delivery for a full refund and for any reason. It's pretty great.

*exemptions include event tickets and clearly personalized items

shireboy• 6 years ago

All good points, but chiming in that I'm actually going the opposite direction on VSCode. I've used VS Professional for 70% of my dev up until recently, but more and more and finding I can do the same things "lighter" with VSCode+appropriate extensions.

nolok6• 6 years ago

Agreed and when I open intellij, it's clear mentally that I'm "working", while ss code makes me mentally feel like "I'm just doing a quick edit", even after 5 hours of coding. It's juste the perfect amount of lightweight but with just all the features I need to be productive.

But at the end of the day there are always those 10+ people projects, or hard debugging case, where a heavy computing-intensive IDE figguring stuff out for you is worth every cent.

Anyway my general point is make sure your tool suits you, if you spend more than 5 minutes fighting against it every day it doesn't, you either need training on it or to change it.

gorjusborg• 6 years ago

Your list is on point.

I'll admit that I haven't any experience with other brands, but the Bose QC35 IIs changed my work life (especially when I as working in the office).

I really should upgrade my chair and desk.

rdtwo5• 6 years ago

Love the headphones but the ear pads wear out every 3-6 months

atlgator• 6 years ago

I love my Bose QC 35! The problem lately is I can't find any current music that is appealing to me. Alas, I must be getting old.

bingerman• 6 years ago

What do you mean by current music? I have absolutely no idea what kind of garbage is pushed on teenagers these days but a lot of new music is produced.

sorum• 6 years ago

Anything after '73 is highly suspicious to me

stjohnswarts• 6 years ago

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.

SomaticPirate• 6 years ago

My anecdote for a good IDE license. The JetBrains Go IDE Goland was well prepared for the ~Go 1.13 switch to using Go modules. Everyone on our team that was using VS Code lost a day of work retooling their env. A few of of them converted even.

symlinkk• 6 years ago

Cmon, let’s be honest. A LeetCode subscription.

x87678r5• 6 years ago

Actually I learned a lot from doing leetcode problems then comparing my results with others, esp ones that were much quicker.

Capira• 6 years ago

Buying Bitcoin.

jkhdigital• 6 years ago

Why, because it eventually provided some measure of financial independence?

acomjean2• 6 years ago

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 tutorials and did the first lessons. It was a little cheeky but it really helped getting running. I liked the short lessons followed by actually doing.

npsimons4• 6 years ago

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.

bluehatbrit• 6 years ago

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.

sz4kerto• 6 years ago

A course about management and organisational development that used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychodrama methods. Self-awareness and people skills are invaluable in software development.

Other than that: rocking-kneeling chair from Varier.

_____s2• 6 years ago

I 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 book that totally changes how you think about certain things is pretty high. A lot of technical books also have _really_ good, practical advice that can be applied to day-to-day work if you want to read them. It's pretty valuable to know the technologies you're working with in some depth.

SonOfLilit• 6 years ago

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)

_____s2• 6 years ago

Are they on the Destroy All Software membership or somewhere else?

pradeeprajr93• 6 years ago

Budget is secondary or not not even needed. In this age of internet, everything (LITERALLY EVERYTHING) is free out there. All it need is interest, dedication and TIME. Don't have enough time? Escape the trap of OTT platforms. You will find some.

donkeyd• 6 years ago

You could try and see if you are allowed to spend the money on hours to work on a side project. If there's something you really feel like doing, but never get time to do, you could maybe spend a week working on that. Because it's a passion project it'll probably bring you more than any class can do.

tekstar• 6 years ago

For some introductory topics that I don't want to invest a ton of money into but want to know more, I've gotten good mileage on lynda.com, free access via my library.

Some videos are quite old so for topics that move quick like technology, be sure to watch the version of the course that is 1-2 years old

blatchcorn• 6 years ago

An internet connection

znpy• 6 years ago

for me it was linux academy (paid by my employer of the time) and getting red hat certified (rhcsa).

in order to get rhcsa certified i had to study and learn all of those little details about linux that i had only skimmed previously, and learn some things that i didn't even knew existed (ex: filesystems acl).

Getting Red Hat certified definitely made me a better sysadmin and a devops engineer with a stronger linux background.

edit: since moving on from that employer i'm paying for linuxacademy myself, although nowadays it's not clear what's going to happen when ther merger with acloudguru will be fully done.

_wldu2• 6 years ago

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 (typically a year or less).

Finally, there are certificate programs (offered by professional training companies) in security, coding, project management, etc. that cost 5K to 10K and last from a week to a month.

d3nj4l• 6 years ago

You make it seem like getting into the MSCS program at Georgia Tech is just a matter of money!

_wldu2• 6 years ago

I didn't mean to imply that. Sorry. If you can get accepted and if you can complete the work, then it's a good program for you. But, yes, it is very difficult (as it should be).

wittjeff• 6 years ago

If you take some of their online courses or a MicroMasters program and do well in them, they'll probably admit you to the online Masters program. Note: I work at edX.

Icathian• 6 years ago

While getting accepted is obviously not a given, the program's admission rate is very high. The founder, Zvi Galil, is on record speaking to the philosophy of democratizing CS education that motivated the program.

Which is a flowery way of saying that getting into OMSCS is much more about affording it than any other similar program.

Getting out with the degree, however, requires some serious commitment.

-Disclosure: I am currently a student in the program.

crims0n• 6 years ago

I thought that price had to be a typo... but wow you are not kidding. I wonder why it is so cheap? Seriously considering it.

randcraw2• 6 years ago

Their MS program is cheap because the lectures are recorded and can be replayed many times at almost no cost. Their only cost to run the class is for support staff to grade projects and write and grade exams.

One downside to this model is that for some courses, like those with rapidly changing content, the lecture videos can go out of date after a year or two. GT needs to address this somehow. (Their ML and computer vision courses especially suffer from this.)

But their degrees are still a great value and worth every penny.

tinyhouse• 6 years ago

They can enroll 1000s of students every year. Why wouldn't it be cheap?

laddng3• 6 years ago

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.

flytram• 6 years ago

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

markus_zhang5• 6 years ago

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.

european321• 6 years ago

If only they would also provide F1 and OPT visas, I would be all-in. It seems like such a great program, but hard to see the value when most of the local employers probably don't even know what it is :/

jkingsbery• 6 years ago

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 flow between adding functionality and improving code really helpful.

Can you get the material for free? Almost always, yes. But it takes time to find the right material, and our time is valuable. A typical industry book is $40-$50, and a typical text book is $100-$150. The authors of these books have spent time organizing the material in a helpful way that you would otherwise need to spend.

For some topics though, it's not just a matter of time savings. I'm working on a topic now that doesn't really have many useful books, so I'm having to read technical specifications produced by industry groups, which lack context and are pretty opaque. I'm missing having a book that explains these ideas in a coherent fashion.

I have tried a few MOOCs for professional development. I've found they can be helpful for a superficial understanding, but they don't encourage the deep understanding I get from reading through a book.

smurpy• 6 years ago

Two thumbs up for Refactoring by Fowler. Exactly. Even if you already know know the 300 odd refactorings he documents... The fact that his names let you talk about them with your team or more easily treat them as abstractions is a powerful win. That book is one of the best investments you can make.

kamaal3• 6 years ago

>Do books sometimes say things that are obvious?

There's a difference between things being obvious when a concept is exposed, and being proactively aware of a concept and having it as a practice/hobby.

Unfortunately the difference between these two things is huge.

Books are the cheapest and yet a high quality way of learning things, getting clarity and in general being exposed to rich quality of concepts. You could sure spend wandering in the wilderness learning things by experience over years. Or you can get them learning a book.

Books aren't even that expensive, given how much they give you on the longer run.

piva00• 6 years ago

I completely agree. I've learned more through books than any other medium.

They take time and, for me, it took a while to realise how I best learnt. I don't like reading technical books cover to cover, not on the first read at least. I try to look through the index for concepts that catch my interest, either because I realise I know nothing except the term (so that makes me feel a bit ignorant and curious to check it out) or it's a concept I can visualise being applied more easily.

Usually from there I will read something I don't know what means and go look for that. When I've scanned through a bit to catch my interest then I start reading from the first chapter.

It took me years to realise I didn't have to force myself to sit down and open a book from page 1. It's a bit obvious and stupid but I believe I'm not alone in having to learn myself how do I like to learn.

kristopolous4• 6 years ago

A typical industry book is $40-$50, and a typical text book is $100-$150.

If this is out of some people's budgets, check eBay. Also some thrift store chains have certain locations that are book focused.

You can get older edition textbooks for practically free. It's not like Claude Shannon's equations have changed. The old editions are effectively just as good.

I've picked up plenty of classic books, HBR, Drucker, Christensen, Moore, etc ... $2-3 in fine condition. To be honest, half the time it looks unread. Then you can donate them "back into the stream" when you're done for others.

randomNumber72• 6 years ago

If this is out of some people's budgets, check eBay.

Just google "library genisis" ;)

faster• 6 years ago

I have gotten a lot of books via alibris.com (no affiliation, just a happy customer), a marketplace for used booksellers. I got a brand new $170 statistics textbook for about $35 because it was intended for another country; thinner paper and crappier binding, but the same book. I've also gotten used books that were indistinguishable from new books.

Not as cheap as ebay, but an enormous selection with pretty reliable quality ratings.

noir_lord2• 6 years ago

Also hit charity shops near to universities at the end of the academic year.

About 15 years ago when I was utterly broke I bought 20 text books (good ones like https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/introduction-algorithms-third... ) for .50p a book (they didn't know what they had so I gave them £20 for the lot instead of £10, would have done more but I really didn't have it).

czynskee• 6 years ago

One thing you can also do is specifically look for the international edition. These will often be paperback and non-color, but otherwise have the same content. I've found some popular comp-sci textbooks for ~20% the cost of the cheapest paperback US edition.

jjice• 6 years ago

I always check for a used book first. I got a basically unused copy of the original Dragon Book for $9 shipped. The spine even still cracked when I opened it. Some student out them probably didn't do too great in their compiler class...

JackFr3• 6 years ago

I had the reaction when reading a preprint of Domain Driven Design. It was packed with ideas which were just coming into focus in my own mind after 10 years in the industry, but I didn't have names for them or have them systematized. It's a terrific feeling reading a well-written book like that and going 'Yes! Yes! Yes!'.

(Since then, as with many things in our industry, it seems the book has been turned into a buzzword consulting/training money grab. Sigh.)

whitepoplar2• 6 years ago

The book itself has turned into a consulting money grab, or DDD as a concept?

jfaerge171• 6 years ago

When I first read the DDD book almosty 15 years ago, I think it took me 2 or 3 reads to get it into my head. I really like the first half that can be used purely for a design perspective, and the second half for communicating with the business people to do business domain modelling .

Other books I really like are

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, it is a good read and lets you talk to a lot of UX'ers as I have found more than a few that have used this book for their thesis.

Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf, which is old but in world of streaming procesing a lot of the patterns can be reused.

The Site Reliability Engineering books or their free counter parts found on https://landing.google.com/sre/books/

edited to add a couple of newlines.

jedberg• 6 years ago

For some topics though, it's not just a matter of time savings. I'm working on a topic now that doesn't really have many useful books, so I'm having to read technical specifications produced by industry groups, which lack context and are pretty opaque. I'm missing having a book that explains these ideas in a coherent fashion.

I know a couple of tech book authors, and this is how they all got started on their first book. :) There was no good book, they did all the work of becoming an expert, and then curated their learnings into a book for others.

intricatedetail3• 6 years ago

There are two groups of engineers - if they embark on opaque documented problem - one will write a book and share everything they learned, the other - patent the ideas and make sure nobody else uses them without paying.

zibbity-rw• 6 years ago

Yesss! Feel the same way about books on topics like Deep Learning, django, etc. Book form is much better.

tzs• 6 years ago

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.

Breza4• 6 years ago

I completely agree with everything you say here. Well put.

gorbachev• 6 years ago

A slightly different perspective than what I've seen in responses so far.

Best money I've spent on professional development is spending time with people having completely different backgrounds and perspectives to mine.

Some examples include traveling abroad, attending meetups, conferences or networking events, talking with people who have interesting things to say, seeking out resources or people that offer counter points to your current thinking on things.

ThePhysicist• 6 years ago

I once did a two-day workshop on negotiation techniques, which covered not only methods but also helped me to become more comfortable dealing with the psychological stress that's induced in many negotiation situations. So far I'd say the course (which was free as I won it as a prize in a business plan competition) is directly responsible for at least 50-100.000 € of additional revenue that I made in the last years, simply because I negotiated more effectively.

I'd highly recommend honing this skill as it will also help you as an employee, as even small gains in salary can add up to quite a lot of money over the years. For freelancers and entrepreneurs negotiation is also important of course and will greatly help you.

snarkypixel• 6 years ago

Adding to that, even if you don't like negotiating, it's helpful to understand the tactics used by the other person so you can counter them (or at least be aware of it).

For instance, my favorite tactic when someone is pushing hard to sell me something or negotiate is the "Appeal to the authority" (i.e. "Let me first talk about it to my wife (or co-founder) about it."

Another popular negotiation tactic is to get asked between option A or option B, where in fact you could simply respond with "option C is more what I'm looking for".

woahAcademia• 6 years ago

Appeal to the Authority

Is different than

Appeal to Authority

Wow that's crazy.

gadders• 6 years ago

>For instance, my favorite tactic when someone is pushing hard to sell me something or negotiate is the "Appeal to the authority" (i.e. "Let me first talk about it to my wife (or co-founder) about it."

In the UK, some sleazy sellers of things like double glazing won't even start discussing the sale unless both husband and wife are present to prevent this tactic.

esond• 6 years ago

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.

tedmcory77• 6 years ago

Seconding this book. I took grad school level negotiation classes and this book added as much or more value when I've negotiated for pricing, salary, etc.

switch007• 6 years ago

I was part-way through the book and I needed to sell some things on Gumtree. Normally I'd expect some low balling at first and then accept below the asking price.

However using what I'd read in the book, I got the asking price for all 4 items I sold!

totally• 6 years ago

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

cashsterling• 6 years ago

Another vote for this book... it is very good. I negotiate contracts, price, and terms & conditions as a significant portion of my job.

spelunker• 6 years ago

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

5555624• 6 years ago

There's also a TEDx talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_voss_never_split_the_differe...

dave842• 6 years ago

That book paid for itself ten times over by the time I had finished reading it, practicing on insurance renewals and utility bills.

ethbr03• 6 years ago

One key component that Voss spends a lot of time on -- if your counterparty comes out a negotiation feeling like they lost, everyone loses.

The outcome of a successful negotiation is that a fair deal is struck, and everyone feels good (or at least not bad) about it.

There are very few situations in the real world that are true one-offs, where you'll never have to interact with that counterparty again. Consequently, scorched-Earth is a poor long-term approach.

hooloovoo_zoo• 6 years ago

Interesting, I found the author so off-putting I didn't make it more than 50 pages. I'll have to try again based on all these +1s.

balabaster• 6 years ago

His Masterclass was awesome too! And I definitely recommend listening to the Audiobook vs. reading it. Hearing his tone of voice and watching his body language made such a difference in understanding his point.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 6 years ago

comfortable with it?

roland352• 6 years ago

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...

athenot2• 6 years ago

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 suspect many appreciate this because I'm not wasting their time, it's a quick decision on how eager they are to fill their quota. But it's fun to see how much the "final price" evolves over the course of a few hours…

raverbashing• 6 years ago

It's a cool exercise and it's certainly nice to play their techniques against themselves, just make sure the time you're putting into it won't affect your opportunity cost

How much is a day off work going to cost you? If you can save more than that by negotiating go ahead.

Let's say one day might shave you $1k off, but 2 days of effort might save you $1.5k, consider the diminishing returns. Or just consider it "education" or "entertainment"

Jemaclus• 6 years ago

I came here to say negotiation. I recently did a two-day workshop on negotiation as well, and it was invigorating and really got me jazzed up about my job. I'm a manager, so I spend a lot of time negotiating with other teams and with external vendors, and negotiating with my employees vs my peers vs my superiors is also a skill I needed to hone. The workshop itself really let me see what was happening under the hood.

It was a really great thing and I highly recommend it to everyone.

qwerty1234599• 6 years ago

Good chair, good microphone, good webcam

chrisweekly• 6 years ago

https://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)

eliseumds• 6 years ago

Learning new languages. Lots of doors opened, access to a new world of content. Specially for non-native English speakers.

spaetzleesser2• 6 years ago

I 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.

gtf215• 6 years ago

As 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.

radihuq2• 6 years ago

How did you find your coach?

gtf215• 6 years ago

Recommendation from an investor and mentor I really respected. She had worked with my coach for years.

miguendes3• 6 years ago

I'm considering hiring a coach to improve my soft skills. The problem is finding the right person. Do you have any tips on how to find such person?

Edit: software -> soft

I mean stuff like better communication, goal setting, learning strategies, negotiation skills...

dpritchett• 6 years ago

What are you hoping to learn? Might be hard to get it all from a single coach.

radihuq2• 6 years ago

I'm not a coach, but I know one strategy that helped me IMMENSELY develop my social skills was moving to a new place where I didn't know anyone (and more importantly, no one knew me) and becoming the social person I wanted to be.

At first I was pretty socially awkward, but over time (1-2 yrs) I became more confident in social environments and my conversation skills improved. I think the "fake it till you make it" worked great for me here.

Obviously there are limitations to this - not sure most people can just move to a new city - but perhaps the principles can be applied ---> put yourself in an environment (like going to a meetup) where no one knows you and act like a socialite

rdtwo5• 6 years ago

Best way to learn is through doing different challenges for yourself. A good psychologist can help you setup a plan and program without any out of pocket expenses besides co pay. Problem is finding one that uses evidence based therapy and isn’t a quack. Look for someone with a degree from a good university that specializes in anxiety

gtf215• 6 years ago

Those are all things I've found coaching to help with. I had tried other coaches before settling with mine, she was recommended by an investor who had worked with her closely for years. To be honest, so much of it is deeply personal. She works brilliantly for me, but I'm sure others might have different experiences (although she coaches many founders).

I think the best thing to do is to get recommendations / referrals from people you know, and try a few sessions. It really takes time (in my experience) to find a good rhythm with a coach, and to learn how to work with that person. An important indicator for me was that I felt really comfortable really quickly, and that my coach didn't just prescribe solutions, but instead helped me think through problems.

laverick3• 6 years ago

I used this service before and found it quite good.

https://findyourcoach.com

coachtech• 6 years ago

People are asking "How do I find a coach?", and like most personal services, the best leads come from referrals and friends.

I'm a tech mentor and lifecoach myself, and I'm ready to work with you to help achieve your dreams. I offer a free discovery call to get clear on your goals: https://calendly.com/ryanpetroff/discovery-call

orzig7• 6 years ago

I've also struggled with finding the right coach. It's a tricky evaluation problem: The first meeting shouldn't feel perfectly comfortable, the whole point is that they're going to bring in viewpoints that stress you out. But incorrect viewpoints also stress me out. I'd love to demand scientific evidence behind all of their assertions, but have (kicking and screaming) come to realize that many important things in life simply don't/can't have studies at my preferred level of rigor.

An idea: Hire a coach with the expressed goal of finding another coach. Like an interim CEO who understands they are not being considered for the permanent position. I tried this once, with friend-of-a-friend coach, and she couldn't really break out of her reflexive attempts to fix me directly, but that's n=1 and a convenience sample at that, so I think there's still potential in the idea. Let me know if it works for you!

whimsicalism3• 6 years ago

I'd love to demand scientific evidence behind all of their assertions, but have (kicking and screaming) come to realize that many important things in life simply don't/can't have studies at my preferred level of rigor.

Hm. I still haven't accepted this, perhaps it's why I think a lot of management "techniques" are bullshit or bullshit combined with obvious truisms.

wenc3• 6 years ago

I'd love to demand scientific evidence behind all of their assertions, but have (kicking and screaming) come to realize that many important things in life simply don't/can't have studies at my preferred level of rigor.

I've had to unlearn this, and part of my awakening was watching the stagnation of rationalists (myself included) who think a lot and argue about things but rarely take action. So much of rationalism is based on assumptions (due to our inherent inability to capture everything in our models) and those assumptions can be wrong in real life. Rationalists also generally fear uncertainty unless they can describe or quantify it, but this is not always possible. I've learned to let go of hyperrationalism and instead, rely more on using intuitive reasoning and heuristics.

If I hired a coach, I would want one who's more or less an empiricist who can push me to try new things and verify them for myself. Action, even if not perfectly rigorous, produces new information. A lot of stuff we cannot prove actually works in real life.

(I still don't believe in crackpot theories but heuristics at least help me choose between reasonable options.)

x87678r5• 6 years ago

I hate the idea but someone else said, every professional athlete has a coach.

alignedclarity• 6 years ago

Finding a stellar coach is much like making any other hire - their skills and style need to match your needs. It is definitely worth speaking to a few individuals to find a perfect fit.

I am a leadership coach with 15+ years experience hiring and developing top talent for Google, Amazon, IBM, and more than 30 startups. I love helping leaders build clarity and confidence.

If you'd like to book a complimentary call, you can find me at https://calendly.com/alignedclarity/discovery

roel_v2• 6 years ago

Not 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.

deepstack2• 6 years ago

if you have PSD just use some services to convert it to HTML5. No point hiring a front end developer.

deepstack2• 6 years ago

What I mean is if you are making a SPA. Which is often NOT needed for regular web site unless you have a good reason to do so.

segmondy• 6 years ago

which services?

donquichotte• 6 years ago

1) Tuition for university (600$/semester * 10 semesters)

2) Sublime Text (80$)

neillyons2• 6 years ago

As a Python developer it has to be PyCharm Professional Edition. I am a more effective developer because of it.

majora2007• 6 years ago

I just switched to PyCharm from VSCode and wow, you're right. It is amazing and makes dealing with venv easy versus when I used vs code I just installed everything globally because I cba.

tsjq2• 6 years ago

For a newbie Python developer & pycharm user (~15 months, at work) , pls share points on the benefits of pycharm professional edition over the free one

neillyons2• 6 years ago

Free version is good too.

The differences are listed here https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/#chooseYourEdition

polskibus• 6 years ago

SIGMOD conference, only been once so far (2019). I am interested in database theory and related hard practical problems though, you may not be.

amir734jj• 6 years ago

Spend $0 for tuition and third year PhD student in compilers. The best decision I have made. Hated my masters thesis subject which was about lattice based cryptography.

tootie• 6 years ago

Aside from college, not much. I've read some books and done some courses and conferences but I didn't find any of them to be the least bit useful. One thing I did in college outside of CS education was a class on voice and diction which really helped my speaking. Absolutely everything I've learned to be good at, I've learned by doing. And that includes programming despite having a CS degree.

robofanatic• 6 years ago

If it wasn't 2020 I'd say - Travel

KptMarchewa• 6 years ago

Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

Advanced iOS at Big Nerd Ranch, in 2012. It was still ObjC, back then, but it made a big difference.

It was not cheap, but I still believe that it was worth it.

sukh• 6 years ago

Books, Udemy and independent authored content helped me get better at finance and programming.

Fuji cameras are great for daily use and its hardware controls teach you how to take nicer stills.

Manufacturing a real product helped me learn about distribution and inventory– something I'd never be exposed to in tech.

Travel helps me reboot and think about whats really important.

mikelward2• 6 years ago

In 2010 I won a ticket to YOW Melbourne. The speakers included Erik Meijer, Guy Steele, Dan Ingalls, and Dave Thomas. If I'd known how good it was going to be I would have paid for it.

https://yowconference.com/

rectang• 6 years ago

I ran a lunch-time book club at work for groups between 3 and 10 people, covering technical topics like programming languages, version control, and so on. After a management change at the company, I couldn't get budget for books or lunches any more.

So I bought the books and bought the lunches.

The most effective way to learn something thoroughly is to teach it, and I was the facilitator for the book club, leading all the discussions and planning things out. The thousand dollars or so I spent per book, which won me sufficiently motivated study partners depending on me to lead, offered much more value than money spent on typical coursework or conventions.

Never mind the value I was providing for the company (lost on the new management, but I felt good about it nonetheless), spending that money was justifiable solely in terms of creating a maximally stimulating learning environment for myself.

orzig7• 6 years ago

Having run something similar ~5y ago, an added benefit is that you end up with former 'students' at companies throughout the industry.

Specifically, a pattern I saw 5-10 times is:

1. Someone shows up at the meetings, about 3mo after being hired

2. After 2-3 sessions (to see if their serious) I invite them to lunch 1-on-1. I find out that they are really interested in my topic, and do it as maybe 10% of their role, so their manager suggested they check out my group

3. After 6mo, they invite /me/ to lunch to tell me their applying to transfer to join the team I'm on, which does is focused on the topic.

4. After 1wk, my manager tells me that they were rejected. Understandably, the reasons have to stay in the room.

5. After 2mo, they join an equivalent team at another company

6. After 1-3y, in ~50% of cases, they are senior on that team and check to see if I'm interested in a job.

avbanks• 6 years ago

Such a great idea, thanks for sharing!

Cthulhu_• 6 years ago

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 live on for a month, take it. Make a list of things you'd like to dig into, or just spend a month doodling. Or take half days off for a month and participate in something like Advent of Code. You can challenge yourself in various ways, like use an unfamiliar language for the month, or a different language every day. Do some tutorials and make stuff in Pico-8, embrace the limitations and embarrassingly unreadable code, which is amazing at the same time because you wrote it and it all fits in your head. Just throwing it out there.

paulie_a2• 6 years ago

I've been using jetbrains products for years and just bought the personal ultimate license this weekend. Their products are great and their support his excellent!

danpalmer• 6 years ago

I've only had one support interaction but it was fairly poor. Their keyboard layout support didn't correctly honour the keyboard layout in macOS that I used, and the response was "file a bug", pointing me to a public issue tracker where I found someone else had reported it 6 years previously. I think that bug has been open for 8 years now – I got an email when another poor customer found it and asked if there was any update. All the issue asks for is for their products to honour the keys the OS says are being pressed.

noir_lord2• 6 years ago

Second this.

I pay for Intellij Ultimate out of pocket, work would buy it but frankly it's easier to just have my own license and I use it a lot outside of work.

vscode is fantastic at what it does but one is a wheelbarrow, the other a dump truck.

corytheboyd2• 6 years ago

The way I like to think of it: VSCode is a text editor with plugins, Jetbrains is an IDE.

boogies• 6 years ago

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.

You can get warnings when syntax isn’t available in your script’s flavor of shell in [neo]vi[m], emacs, or GNU ed with shellcheck, I’d be mildly surprised if there wasn’t a similar editor-agnostic linter for PHP.

cle2• 6 years ago

I just tried this in VSCode using Intelephense and it detected the invalid syntax just fine ("PHP 5.4+ syntax found."). I've never done PHP development, but it only took a few clicks to set it up (install extension and go into preferences and change the language version).

Since VSCode is just using LSP under the hood, that means it would also work fine in Emacs, [neo]vi[m], Sublime, Atom, etc.

In the long run, I don't see how IntelliJ will be able to compete with LSP, as it gets polished up.

drampelt• 6 years ago

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.

paulie_a2• 6 years ago

My personal favorite is "find usages". You can destroy dead code which makes life a bit better in a large codebase. The pretty basic auto refactor is also nice

It seems like there are just a lot of those small things you get used to that are really nice

x87678r5• 6 years ago

Jetbrains has a lot of videos on youtube. eg this Intellij one has a bunch of stuff I never knew existed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AMcN-wkspU

darekkay2• 6 years ago

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/

billfruit• 6 years ago

I actually was wondering if clion is worth the money..

Kluny• 6 years ago

So worth it. I got PHPStorm when I started working at Automattic. I'd been developing in PHP for several years at that point, and didn't see the point in an IDE. But my previous job had been a low-end local company.

At Automattic, the expectations were so much higher. They'd give me a 3000+ line, 20+ file codebase to review, for example. There was plenty of time to complete the task, but with so much code to deal with I needed to very quickly develop some skills and tools to keep it all straight.

I learned a lot of keyboard shortcuts for PHPStorm for quickly noting filenames and line numbers in my review sheet, and wrote several macros for quickly writing out repetitive text. These things were essential because it was so easy to get lost or distracted even by flipping between my notes and the code. I could end up going through the same file 4 times if I wasn't careful (on a first pass, that is - it was normal to take several passes through a code base).

vinayan3• 6 years ago

I agree. I got license for the JetBrains All product pack. It's been a huge boost in my productivity for Python and C++ because the refactoring tools make mundane things so much faster.

Also, templating is incredibly powerful. I avoid copy / paste in favor of typing or generating things out. Copy/Paste is a really bad pattern and the overhead of having to put the code in makes me think about abstracting it much earlier than if I just copied and pasting things.

intricatedetail3• 6 years ago

I think this is a must have for large projects. I wish their search options where like in a search engine though. VS Code is fine for quick edits but feels too basic to handle large codebase.

ed25519FUUU2• 6 years ago

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

whazor• 6 years ago

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.

luckyshot• 6 years ago

Can you share your setup? I love VS Code and it would be great to optimize my workflow.

ajmurmann2• 6 years ago

I attended a weekend-long T-Group. It's a workshop in sick you get to practice interpersonal interactions dialed to 11 with super fast feedback. It's really hard to describe without it sounding ridiculous. In essence one person says something and then someone else will give them immediate feedback on it. It's hands down the best learning experience I've ever had. It's also very, very hard emotional work.

There is a class at Stanford graduate School of business that follows this. I understand it's their most popular class. At Stanford it's stretched over several weeks. The workshop I attended we've from Friday evening to Sunday evening and was hosted by Jana who also is involved with the Stanford class. You can find the Stafford class and links to others who offer this type of experience here: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/experience/learning/leadership/...

penguinium• 6 years ago

Are there online T-groups?

ajmurmann2• 6 years ago

I don't know. I attended mine in 2019.

omginternets4• 6 years ago

I was lucky enough to get paid for this but I'll say it anyway: learning to speak is the only thing of lasting value I have gotten out of startup accelerators.

I would have gladly drop a few grand to acquire that skill. In fact, I'm considering hiring a speaking coach to improve.

I've historically been a strong written communicator, but it turns out that speaking is very different from writing. In fact, I had thought of myself as a pretty strong speaker due to my experience giving scholarly presentations ... how wrong I was. Academic talks are a different beast altogether.

If you haven't seen Patrick Winston's How to Speak lecture [0], drop what you're doing and watch it now. I'll leave you with a (paraphrased) quote from his lecture: your ideas are like your children and you don't want to send them off into the world dressed in rags.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

biztos• 6 years ago

Have you heard of Toastmasters?[0]

I haven't done this myself but I plan to, as I've heard good things about it, and if you live in a big city or metro area there is probably at least one group you could join. Also in many cities outside the US, for example I think Bangkok has several different ones, I know Budapest has at least two. And it's really cheap, AFAICT, in case that's a factor.

It's got a bit of a self-help sheen to it but I knew a couple guys in SF who were involved and they said it was just about public speaking. At which they were much better than I am.

[0] https://www.toastmasters.org

wenc3• 6 years ago

I was part of Toastmasters for a while. My observation was that the pedagogy is indirect: the premise is that you are thrown into the deep end and start to speak from day 1 and get feedback from others. The problem is, depending on your cohort, you might or might not get useful feedback. Not everyone knows how to help you improve -- they can only supply perceptions. You might get an experienced Toastmaster in the chapter who is also a good teacher, but you also might not.

I found direct pedagogy to be much more useful for me personally. I took an in-person storytelling class and received feedback from an instructor who was also a practitioner. It's much more expensive, but it's still learn-by-doing (had to tell a new story every week for 8 weeks, and classes were 3 hours long each week, and like a workshop, I got real critique (positive and negative) -- so stressful) but I actually learned real technique (stuff like aspects of physical presence, using hooks, different forms of narrative arcs for different genres, etc.) The difference for me was professional feedback, and that difference was appreciable.

omginternets4• 6 years ago

This may just be exactly what the doctor ordered. Thanks!

nvusuvu• 6 years ago

I took your advice, dropped everything, and spent the last hour watching Patrick Winston's lecture. What a master class in public speaking! I'll be revisiting this lecture to take in-depth notes.

omginternets4• 6 years ago

I'm really glad you enjoyed it :)

It's funny, I had the same reaction as you. I watched it once without taking notes (because it's so damn engaging!) and at the end of it, I suddenly realized that I would need to take notes if I wanted to learn this stuff!

I really don't understand why I wasn't taught this in school. It's borderline criminal.

P.S.: the "fencing in the idea" is something I do all the time now.

suyash• 6 years ago

May I recommend my newsletter if you're looking to improve technical communication skills : http://tinyletter.com/suyash

omginternets4• 6 years ago

You may! Thank you so much -- I'll be following this religiously.

lucasfcosta• 6 years ago

I’ve just watched this lecture and I can’t thank you enough. It was one of the most useful talks I’ve ever seen.

julianozen• 6 years ago

I just watched this video and wanted to return to say thanks for the great suggestion. What an unexpectedly delightful lecture

SZJX3• 6 years ago

I watched this talk as it was posted on HN a while ago, though I have to say, surprisingly I wasn't very impressed with it for whatever reason. Maybe I have to revisit it to see if I can get more out of it.

npsimons4• 6 years ago

Books, but then I've always learned best from books - you set your own pace, they are easily cross-referenced and indexable, and to top it all off books are more often than not structured and well-organized. Re-reading is also an option. I point out all these things to contrast books to lectures or coaching, or even videos; they're just not the same or as good as a good book.

As for specifics, if you haven't read it already, "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master" is excellent and a great place to start, and one of their biggest tips? Read books, at least one per quarter.

melenaboija3• 6 years ago

- 15k with an MSc in Data Science after 10 years of professional experience. Key aspects that made this useful for me: I commited to it 100% and went for a 4 gpa as that was the only way to take it seriously, I could do it because of my personal situation and tine availability. I learned A LOT, among other things that I am not that stupid as I thought while taking CS, it was just a matter of interest to me. This gave me my currennt job with a significant turn to my career.

- Spending 2k with a work station and changing my environment from expensive Macbooks to an expensive workstation and cheap laptops as a front end

vb6sp64• 6 years ago

expensive workstation and cheap laptops as a front end

This has worked really well for me too. Desktop is xeon with 64gb ram and I can take advantage of that power from anywhere.

melenaboija3• 6 years ago

Same here, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 64gb.

I just realized I don't need that when I am seating in front of tv or while traveling, and as long as I can connect two external monitors to my laptop is enough.

Something "similar" to this in MacBook world is 4k, and you end up with a portable device with worst battery performance and always suffering that you are about to loose your life.

VS Code was definitely something that helped to decide for this configuration.

baggachipz3• 6 years ago

Improv lessons. Seriously. Being confident speaking in front of others and the life lessons it provides ("yes, and") are absolutely indispensable. It brought me out of my shell and advanced me in my career significantly, all while having fun and making friends.

omar12• 6 years ago

Definitely!

For me, the skills of listening before responding and processing a response in a timely manner were invaluable lessons learned taking improv classes.

joshlk• 6 years ago

Good idea. What do you mean exactly by improv lessons?

baggachipz3• 6 years ago

Improv Comedy classes. In any decent-sized city, there is probably at least one comedy theater, and one or many improv groups at each. Some of them offer classes to get into improv comedy. I can recommend a couple in my city (Charlotte) but if you poke around a bit you should be able to find something near you.

dbancajas2• 6 years ago

would you recommend it for someone who's generally not witty and takes at least 5 seconds to answer someone they don't know? basically i'm slow as hell in interactions, especially to new acquaintances.

baggachipz3• 6 years ago

Absolutely. Once you get over yourself, you may be surprised how witty you can be.

perfmode• 6 years ago

49 day solitary meditation retreat

$1400

jensneuse• 6 years ago

I left a good paying job to start my first startup where I earned 1/3. The startup failed but I learned so much so that I tripled my initial salary in 2 years after the failing startup. Lesson learned? Take as much risk as you can.

cjfd• 6 years ago

Reading Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Reading and practicing Test Driven Development by Kent Beck.

adenadel• 6 years ago

My master's degree. I did a relatively unique (and affordable) program at the University of Oregon that focuses on professional development for scientists and includes a 9 month internship. The program and my internship have completely shaped my professional interests and I think that the program does a really good job of preparing STEM undergrads for careers in industry.

michjedi3• 6 years ago

Books.

I read about 30-100 work-related books a year and have seen salary double every few years.

I try to alternate books between different areas, more or less from these sections:

Technical(on currently used technology)

Technical(unused tech vaguely related and may be useful)

Management

Domain(scientific textbooks, best to search from related university course reading lists)

Biographies/accounts/events of typical and super users

lelele• 6 years ago

I read about 30-100 work-related books a year and have seen salary double every few years.

Your salary didn't double because of books. I read a lot of work-related books, too, but my salary has been stagnant for years.

JRainey2• 6 years ago

Reforge courses are fantastic.

JRainey2• 6 years ago

Reforge courses are fantastic

maCDzP• 6 years ago

Therapy. I've found it extremely helpful in my role as a manager.

enz• 6 years ago

Obviously, books!

When I was younger (before my first job), I was spending $5/month for a cheap VPS. I have learnt Linux administration basic with that VPS and I get a job a few month later. So, money very well spent, I guess.

jrvarela56• 6 years ago

Onsite Workshops in TN, USA.

This is not your typical trainning or practical skills-focused workshop. 6 days of group therapy without access to phone/computer. ~5-6k for the course + room and board. Price has been rising but it's worth every penny.

You explore personal issues through guided group dynamics. You share and listen to others. By the end of the course, you know more about your group partners' lives than anyone you've known in 'real life'.

I learned so much about myself, how to deal with my feelings and the impact my experiences/impressions have on my performance as a professional, family member and partner.

bvm• 6 years ago

A decent desktop computer.

clintonb• 6 years ago

The book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” by Marshall Goldsmith helped me become a better, more empathetic, teammate. It’s less than $20, but worth far more.

macjohnmcc• 6 years ago

As a Visual Studio user I find the plugin FastFind to be invaluable. Insanely fast search tool.

unoti2• 6 years ago

1. Book: Nonviolent Communication, by Marhsall Rosenberg PhD. Great things are built by teams. The more senior I become, the greatest challenges involve teamwork, and the programming is the easy part. I've read countless leadership and self help books, but the simple concepts in just the first few chapters were absolutely transformative to me.

2. The Fast AI for coders course and associated book. (Maybe this shouldn't be on this list, because it's free, but it's still the absolute best place to learn machine learning from scratch.) This is a book and a set of videos that go over the same material. I work on a team of data scientists, and using information from the first few chapters of this book I've done things that are far beyond the capabilities of my teammates. Unlike most courses, this starts with practical knowledge you can use to do useful work on day 1. Then later it moves into the theory of how it works. You don't need more than high school math to get going.

3. The Coursera Deep Learning Specialization, a set of 5 AI courses. Has a certification you can use on your resume and LinkedIn.

elchief• 6 years ago

I second NVC by Rosenberg. The only problem with reading it is you then realize how violently everyone communicates

animesh3• 6 years ago

The Fast AI for coders course and associated book

Is it this course? https://course.fast.ai/

unoti2• 6 years ago

Yep! That's the one. Start today!

ogjunkyard• 6 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation on the FastAI for Coders course/book. I immediately bought it based on the Amazon page and have spent the last hour reading it. I FINALLY feel like a book about AI/ML/Deep Learning gets where I'm coming from, and that's enough to get started and keep me going (at least for now).

mbloom1915• 6 years ago

Venture University - just an awesome way to immerse yourself into how venture capital works and what it takes for both the startup and investor to achieve their goals.

So much of our future falls in the hands of companies and investors funding them, so knowing how all of this works is crucial to understanding why and when company's make huge decisions that impact us.

https://www.venture.university/

rticesterp• 6 years ago

Two day presentation skills class. The class went over how to present for a large group and how to make slides that are easy to understand. Other topics focused on engaging the audience with stories that are easy to understand. The course concluded with everyone giving a five minute presentation. Feedback on limiting filler words and hand gestures was invaluable

_gy5c• 6 years ago

"Designing Data-Intensive Applications" is the best reference I've found explaining the many pitfalls of data storage and transmission. It's especially helpful if your code has ownership of any data (i.e. if you create or modify it), and an order of magnitude more useful if your organization has multiple processes touching a given piece of data.

https://dataintensive.net/

zerop• 6 years ago

Please don't fund money on any training/book/online. This doesn't work in most cases and might influence incorrectly. Look for ways where you would get more interaction/engagement with skilled and diverse set of people. The lessons should touch your mind and must be hard earned. That's when they will stay with you. Rest of trainings/book take aways are someone else's experiences and effects are very ephemeral and might be incorrect sometimes. The key is to look for deeper experiences.

corytheboyd2• 6 years ago

Kind of off topic, as it’s instead a tool, but buying a Jetbrains license was a big win for me. If you put in the time to learn it, it really does give you superpowers. You won’t 10x your productivity, think more like 1.5x, but IMO that is huge for something you spend so much time with as a software engineer.

motohagiography• 6 years ago

Not money spent, but time wise, doing YC's startup school a couple years ago. https://www.startupschool.org/library

BenGosub• 6 years ago

Two things I've focused on improving lately are: - Improving my typing speed and technique (there are many free web sites to do this) and - Improving my algorithm skills by doing exercises on HackerRank and Exercism.

iancmceachern• 6 years ago

Conferences, for the folks you meet and connections you make, not the Conferenc talks themselves.

austincheney• 6 years ago

ISC2 CISSP Course book - https://www.amazon.com/Official-ISC-Guide-CISSP-CBK/dp/11194...

Now it's the 5th edition. I read this a decade ago when it was the second edition. I just the book and was able to then pass the test. This is a great book to learn about security even if you don't care to certify. Judging from many comments I have seen on Hacker News most software developers really have absolutely no idea what security really is. CISSP remains the industry gold standard for security.

WCAG 2.0 - https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

WCAG is the gold standard for accessibility. Most governments including the US government conforms to WCAG for accessibility guidance and criteria.

factorialboy• 6 years ago

IntellijIDEA

locochef• 6 years ago

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 affects not only your home life, but your work life.

Taking the time to talk to a professional and become introspective and conscious of my own mental health has provided me with more value than all the books and conferences and talks I've consumed put together.

ilyas121• 6 years ago

This for me as well! I used to think that if I was inward-looking enough I could handle all of this myself. But outsourcing this kind of work to a professional has saved me so much time and trial&error with how to take care of my mental health.

mac01021• 6 years ago

Is it possible for you, without sharing personal details that you would rather not share, to give a more concrete and detailed account of the value that your therapist has provided to you?

I've also always regarded myself as introspective enough not to be able to benefit from therapy. And, while I'm open minded to the idea that I am wrong about that, I just have trouble imagining or envisioning what I might be missing.

jeeshan• 6 years ago

Fully agree. There are therapists who also do coaching.

Neil44• 6 years ago

Likewise. Just about general life stuff. Understanding yourself better helps you out in all aspects of life.

equality_11387• 6 years ago

Seconded. In particular, I've come to recognize the growing confluence of woke politics and tech management as major impediment on my ability to do my job well. Reading up on career coaching and psychology has certainly helped, but can also serve to overcomplicate the situation. My therapist provides highly personal and much more practical guidance in accepting the bs.

azinman25• 6 years ago

How do “woke politics” prevent you from doing your job well?

pc862• 6 years ago

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.

Kaze4043• 6 years ago

What about their response makes you think it was a non answer? I specifically opened this thread to share the exact same experience, as therapy has helped my professional life much more than any book or tool I ever bought.

joncrane• 6 years ago

Actually, if your employer has a EAP (Employee Assistance Program), they do!

rognjen• 6 years ago

Exactly what I came to say.

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

antihero• 6 years ago

Absolutely, I've grown hugely as a person since starting therapy, it facilitates you cutting the shit about yourself, examining yourself and the world around you and how you it influences you and you influence it.

jimmytucson• 6 years ago

Ironically, the word "architecture" comes from designing and constructing buildings. Likewise, someone who frames houses can become preoccupied with beams and rafter angles while not operating a saw or driving in nails.

I guess what I'm saying is, everyone - including construction workers - should take your advice.

dbancajas2• 6 years ago

how does one find a therapist? Like what search terms and what kinds do we need advise as someone who works on the tech field.

evil-olive• 6 years ago

If you're in the US, Psychology Today's "Find a Therapist" tool [0] is excellent and lets you filter by a number of things including whether they accept your insurance plan, location, gender, specialty, and so on.

0: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists

jw12242• 6 years ago

Starting therapy earlier this year was possibly the best thing I’ve done for myself in years. It took about 3 months of weekly sessions to properly “notice” what a difference it was making, but now it’s blindingly obvious, and I’m so glad I did it.

I found my therapist through https://www.bacp.co.uk/ — I’m not sure which country you’re in, but there’s bound to be similar directories out there.

I set their filters to find therapists who deal with issues relevant to me, and within a practical distance. After that, I just systematically went through each of their profiles, read their bios, and narrowed it down to a shortlist of 10.

I then picked two based on gut instinct. I had an introductory session with them both, and immediately “clicked” with one of them, who I’ve been seeing ever since.

mkolodny• 6 years ago

Depending on where you live, ZocDoc can be a great way to find a therapist: https://www.zocdoc.com/

I'd recommend searching "psychotherapist" or "psychologist". Psychiatrists seem to be more focused on prescribing medication than helping you work through your issues.

zestyping• 6 years ago

I've spent a lot of time with therapists but they've only had the effect of being a sort of guard rail to keep me from falling too deep when I fall; it doesn't seem like they have helped me make any lasting improvements.

Based on what I've heard from friends and on this thread, it sounds like it's possible to get a lot more out of talk therapy?

What's your range of experiences been like with better or worse therapists, and how do you know when you should look for a better one?

rusk3• 6 years ago

Have you tried cognitive behavioural therapy? It’s a fairly powerful set of tools that work quite well for a lot of people, though not everybody admittedly ...

oneplane2• 6 years ago

Two cents: real change is not a lot of fun while it's happening, because change is hard, and makes some simple things take a lot more time and energy for a while.

allerhellsten• 6 years ago

I've seen three therapists. The first two were a complete waste of time, the third one completely changed my life for the better (incidentally, this started out as couple's therapy for my failed marriage).

It's basically like in any profession: 80% are mediocre, 10% are so bad you never want to try again and the last 10% are the gold you're searching for. There's also a question of whether you go along with a certain type of person, but there's also clearly excellence at work.

I knew I was onto something very early on. She went directly to work, stabbing into the wounds with massive empathy and brutal honesty. She described herself as her goal being "getting rid of me as soon as possible", which contributed to my trust in myself not just being a money cow for her. But the most starring fact was that I couldn't hide. She broke through all my layers and facades and went directly to the core issue of me not accepting myself as I am.

I think these are signals to watch out for (plus: a waiting list so long you usually don't get a place with the good ones), so good luck and YMMV. In any case, it's a pain finding a good therapist, but it's still worth it.

But before you get or continue a bad therapy experience, be sure to try out Leo Widrich and his blog. He's the only other therapist I didn't see who helped me grow to being a better version of myself.

screye• 6 years ago

being a sort of guard rail to keep me from falling too deep when I fall

This is a dead give away that you are functioning too close to your emotional limit. The therapist serves the purpose of the guard rail, because it is the most pressing requirement.

lasting improvements

To make improvements , the first requirement is breathing room.

Once you feel like you have that space, you can leverage your therapist to start putting things into place. The general routines and thought processes needed for healthier lifestyles can be found on page 1 of a google search.

The real value of the therapist is two fold. As a man, it is opening up enough to truly identify the real problems as they exist. The second is helping you prioritize and shape those 'Google page 1' solutions into one that perfectly aligns with your current lifestyle.

You might just have a not-so-good therapist, but, making space for self-improvement is central to actually making any progress.

przemyt• 6 years ago

My experience with therapy is similar to yours, albeit with one therapist (so far). The guard rail is not a bad thing, but all in all the process does not seem to lead to actually solving deeper issues.

Interestingly, in talk therapy it seems to be the patient's own talking that helps, rather than how the therapy is done or who's the therapist. Mark Manson sums the research up nicely in this piece:

https://markmanson.net/how-to-get-better

Turns out that any way to examine and express one's thoughts and emotions that otherwise run unattended is helpful. Therapy, journaling, meditation.

Still, to me this is by it's very nature limited - to what you can consciously dig out and express. If the issues that cause trouble are not conscious, tough luck. Like trying to fix email infrastructure issues by rigorously applying inbox zero.

Perhaps lasting improvements in such cases require forms of therapy that involve consciousness altering techniques? Psychedelics are recently making a comeback in therapy. "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan is on my reading list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Change_Your_Mind

schoolornot• 6 years ago

Disagree. I know not everyone is lucky to have close friends but as someone who has always dealt with things alone, I feel guilty and vulnerable the few times I've spoken to therapists. Even years later I regret going.

I don't want someone who is impartial or non-judgmental. If I'm going to pay someone I want actionable advice from someone who has been in my shoes. Having friends who know me, who come from different backgrounds, cultures, countries does way more for me. Them saying "schoolornot, knock it off, you're acting immature" does way more for me than laying on a nobody's couch.

I'm not knocking it but it's not for me.

RankingMember2• 6 years ago

In my opinion, part of the value in a therapist is that they don't know you, so they can provide advice not clouded by a shared history or any loyalty to you.

jasonv• 6 years ago

Therapists don’t generally give advice.

Coaches do that.

PopeDotNinja2• 6 years ago

+1 for therapy. Best $10K I ever spent. Over 18 months I ever spent.

systemvoltage2• 6 years ago

Can you please tell us what kind of things were discusssed? Not going into your personal details, just general idea would be great.

A lot of people here who haven't talked to a therapist are wondering the same in unison.

rusk3• 6 years ago

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 every time :-)

notrandom• 6 years ago

Do you have a bunch of textbooks that you would recommend reading? :)

Solvitieg• 6 years ago

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.

issa3• 6 years ago

I don't know who these American friends that get free therapy are, but as an American, I've never heard of that. I do know people who pay two thousand dollars a month for health insurance for their family and it INCLUDES therapy. But that seems pretty different.

weakfish• 6 years ago

Not sure how your friends are doing that. I had to stop therapy because I couldn't afford it.

RankingMember2• 6 years ago

Please tell us more about these American friends. I'm an American and this "free therapy" is completely foreign to me. More and more therapists aren't in-network because dealing with insurance is a pain in the ass, so even if you've got insurance you end up paying out-of-network which might cover $50 of that $150 session.

velcrovan• 6 years ago

How does that work?? As an American, I must know.

gricardo99• 6 years ago

mental health is probably one of the worst aspects of a very dysfunctional US healthcare system. Somehow your friends ended up with an incredibly generous health plan (by the way, not "free", I'm guessing very expensive for their employers), but I assure you this is far from the norm.

triceratops• 6 years ago

It's not free in America, it's covered by many employer health insurance plans (and probably costs more than $150/h). I imagine many Canadian employers also offer supplemental insurance to cover therapy.

linseed_213• 6 years ago

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

jcomis2• 6 years ago

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!

SZJX3• 6 years ago

I mean sure, all the tech elites in the US get the best medical care out there, far better than those in so-called "welfare states" such as the Scandinavian countries. However such conditions are bound to their job and thus not applicable to the general cases. Don't think this is what the "narrative about US healthcare" is about. If you work in big tech in the US you live in a paradise-like condition far removed from the masses, this is pretty much widely known isn't it.

taternuts• 6 years ago

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.

killvung• 6 years ago

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

mabcat• 6 years ago

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!

maybelsyrup• 6 years ago

Transparent plug but also sincere offer: I'm a psychotherapist. (I'm also a psychiatric researcher, which made me something of a data scientist, which is how I ended up on HN.) I work in private practice, dealing mainly with relationship and mood issues, and I've seen no small number of men and women in the kinds of fields that make up the HN readership over the course of my career - tech, STEM, etc.

It'll surprise no one to hear me say that I agree with locochef about investing in oneself through therapy^, but I also want to say that one of the most fascinating and simultaneously scary aspects of my work is seeing day in, day out the degree to which human beings excel at having stress pile up while ignoring it, denying it, believing themselves to somehow deserve it, "tough it out" to nearly-lethal degrees, or being kind of unaware of it entirely. A corollary of this observation is that the people (or the couples, or the families) who decide to see a therapist "early", when the challenge / problem / dilemma isn't yet at crisis level, are often the ones who benefit most. Like someone said down thread, it's like any other part of health: it costs less to not eat those cheeseburgers now than to have the bypass surgery later. Small investments made somewhat early can forestall a lot of ugly shit down the road. Frankly, if half the shit I help people with every day was taught universally in the fifth to tenth grades, I'd be out of a job (but happily so).

If anyone has general questions about therapy or related topics, I'm happy to answer if I'm able (or give you a nice "I have no idea" if I don't). Email in bio.

^ Sometimes! It's not for everyone, nor even for the same person at different times of their lives, and it can be harmful or end up being something you regret. But I agree in a general sense.

borja_froged• 6 years ago

I 100% Agree. Spending time for yourself and having someone to help you do that is key nowadays to avoid burnout. Thank you for sharing your story :)

ubac• 6 years ago

On a similar note, philosophical life coaching: https://www.pamelajhobart.com/

Read her site, you'll either immediately say "that's for me" or "absolutely not," and either way you'll be right. Does both phone and email coaching ("Interlocutor as a Service"), which is strange but super interesting and (for me at least) surprisingly effective

raobit• 6 years ago

You really made a good point ,even i have observed how psychology really helps in looking,observing things and changes perspective about everything

gwlperl• 6 years ago

Computer science degree at the University of Florida, which cost me about $5,000 in 1985.

rsync• 6 years ago

A few computers, some digiboards, a bocaboard, 12 modems and a T1 to my first apartment in Boulder.

Of course the BBS only lasted 18 months and never made any money but it provided an early (1995) and very in-depth window into what running an ISP would be like and eventually a PaaS/IaaS (or whatever rsync.net is).

In second place for "best money you have spent on professional development?" would be hotel/flight costs for Defcon 6-10.

analog31• 6 years ago

Something you're interested in, but don't have the self discipline or resources to learn on your own. For instance I loved math and science but would not have been disciplined enough to organize and follow through with my own course of study. Those became my college majors. On the other hand, I found it trivially easy and effortless to learn things like computer programming and electronics (after the basic intro courses got me started), and have not received any further training in those things, though I use them every day.

So, without identifying a particular subject, match something you're interested in, with a way of teaching/learning, that you're unlikely to be able to provide for yourself. Also, some of those things such as courses at your nearby college, or a conference, have the added benefit of removing you from the daily hurly-burly with your supervisor's blessing.

Separo• 6 years ago

$0 for HardvardX CS50

tekno45• 6 years ago

Pluralsight got me a job because I better understood how i could automate smaller tasks.

Powershell and python got me off the helpdesk, pluralsight helped me glue it together into SRE skills.

miffe• 6 years ago

Not exactly what your asking for, but I found that a good roller mouse helped immensely for reducing the strain i my arm due to the mouse.

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 6 years ago

Textbooks in general (like academic textbooks, not orielly style books). Work through a textbook or three each year, and once you’re a decade into your career it’s like you have another degree under your belt. Find something you want to dive deep on and instead of reading a dozen blogs, buy the textbook and do some of the exercises as you go. It keeps you spending time in foundational stuff rather than specific frameworks, and it pays incredible dividends. It’s slow as hell, and only really pays off on many year timescales, but don’t discount it for that.

nwhitehead• 6 years ago

This is a good one. It is all too easy to spend years casually "interested" in a topic without developing a true foundation of the important ideas in the field.

In my case I spent two decades casually reading about economics. But then one day I ordered an economics textbook to work through the problems, and found out that I basically knew nothing and couldn't do any of the problems. A few months of slowly working through the textbook gave me a much deeper level of understanding. I could do the problems now.

mannymanman• 6 years ago

Examples of textbooks you have used?

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 6 years ago

I just looked through my bookshelves and here’s what I’ve been through since college (in no particular order other than top to bottom on my shelves):

7 books on general ML (highlights: Murphy’s Machine Learning, Hastie et al’s ESL, Koller&Friedman’s PGMs)

5 on more specialized ML (highlights: Agarwal&Chen’s statistical recommender systems book, Manning&Schutze’s statistical NLP, Settles’ active learning)

13 on stats (highlights: Wooldridge’s econometrics of x-section/panel data, Angrist&Pischke’s econometrics)

4 on numerical methods (highlight: Absil et al’s optimization on matrix manifolds)

4 on CS (highlight: CLRS’s intro to algorithms)

10 on calculus/geometry/topology/algebra (highlights: Bachman’s geometric approach to differential forms, Hestenes&Sobzyk's Clifford algebra to geometric calculus)

8 on fiction writing (highlight: Bickham’s Scene & Structure)

And Rosenberg‘s Nonviolent Communication (not a textbook, but still a highlight worth mentioning).

It amounts to between 3 and 4 per year. Looking back and counting them up, my reaction is holy crap that’s a lot, but that’s kinda the point. Each year it is a reasonable amount of self study. Not nothing, but not anything crazy. Over the course of many years, it adds up to a hell of a lever.

cashewchoo• 6 years ago

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 is absolutely a huge multiplier for any software engineer. Just knowing how to grep, sed and 'awk {print $1}' gets you so amazingly far. And on a higher level, knowing how to throw together an nginx proxy or simple postgres db etc is also huge.

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

My habit, when I'm playing with a new language, or other command-line-friendly gadget, is to spin up a new GNU/Linux VM on a cloud somewhere, dabble on there, then delete the VM once I'm done. If I've got any files worth keeping I put them on GitHub.

Don't have to worry about filling my own machine with rubbish, I can load the VM without it impacting my own machine, and I can generally be fearless (and incautious) in the knowledge the machine is of no real consequence. It's also a good way to try out an unfamiliar distro, or an unfamiliar Unix.

It's also a gateway to developing working proficiency with linux

And also with cloud computing. It's a good excuse to play about with EC2 firewalls, for instance.

andrewmcwatters2• 6 years ago

LowEndBox, and you can get $15/year VPSs out there.

jldugger• 6 years ago

free-for-dev lists a couple of free forever hosts -- OCI and GCP.

ed25519FUUU2• 6 years ago

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.

stevehiehn• 6 years ago

This was the greatest $20 I ever spent on my career: https://www.udemy.com/course/master-the-coding-interview-dat...

sanguy• 6 years ago

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 principle. This is a very nice feeling as it allowed me to "escape the grinder."

Telling Eric Schmidt (while at Google) to "go fuck yourself" and walk out the door to never return was the most empowering thing I have ever done.

My career has been much more rewarding since.

sharadov• 6 years ago

Most people here are saying therapists, but the crux of the problem is the "tech" job. The sooner you can get out the better. Everything else is a band aid.

webmaven2• 6 years ago

Telling Eric Schmidt (while at Google) to "go fuck yourself" and walk out the door to never return was the most empowering thing I have ever done.
My career has been much more rewarding since.

That sounds like an interesting story. Any more details?

tsjq2• 6 years ago

I'm guessing he/she had a good amount of "fuck you money" ! ;)

Dragonai• 6 years ago

Telling Eric Schmidt (while at Google) to "go fuck yourself" and walk out the door to never return was the most empowering thing I have ever done.

You can't mention this and not tell the full story. You know what you were doing here :)

vestrigi• 6 years ago

Seems like it's easier to save up that amount of money if you're working at a position that is high enough to personally tell the CEO of Google to GFY.

mv4• 6 years ago

We need to know.

simmons• 6 years ago

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.

wimagguc• 6 years ago

This is a useful answer, especially because I don't think most people consider or make this decision mindfully. Sabbaticals can be an important option not only to advance your professional development but also to avoid burnout.

And I always hear people who consider it, but nine times out of ten (or probably more), they drop the idea for a copout reason (I met someone / need to save money for X / this job is too great to leave)

markus_zhang5• 6 years ago

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

kirillcool• 6 years ago

A good chair. If you're going to spend the next 30 years sitting 8-10 hours a day, do your body a favor and invest into a good chair.

anon776• 6 years ago

Uncle Bobs Clean Code class. In person class over 2 days, shredded a lot of bad habits I had.

hinkley• 6 years ago

On this general topic, someone pointed out to me years ago that whenever interest rates are lower than inflation, 'investing in your future' may be the best use for the money. That could be increasing your salary, making yourself more employable, building your social network, or even finding a pastime that makes you happier than what you usually do with your free time.

mlthoughts2018• 6 years ago

I’ll give an example of a horrible waste of money on manager training: Plucky

https://www.beplucky.com/

The whole thing has this arrogant faux-subversive “not your grandma’s manager training” attitude that seeps into every aspect, and it makes a lot of pretense about being candid but in reality it has zero useful or new advice to offer, just rehashing well-known management considerations but trying to retrofit some notion of being more candid and edgy onto it. Most of the advice is even harmful because forcing more confrontational notions of candid behavior into management will not work at all in most large corporate cultures.

Plucky is essentially a way to get your company to pay for you to travel to another city, and mingle with other “edgy” tech leaders, which is insufferable and boring.

1000% do not recommend.

1-6• 6 years ago

Dave Ramsey on YouTube

evo_9• 6 years ago

Online learning resources such as PluralSight, Udemy, Coursera.

I use to buy courses that were long/complete but rarely finished them; too much basic stuff was covered and/or gone into detail that was a waste of time.

I now buy courses that are 4-5 hours tops and really dig into a topic I want to learn about.

I used this technique to retool my skillset after having a few setbacks in row job-wise; it's incredible the effect of this change in approach has had for me.

cl42• 6 years ago

Professional CEO coach. I spent 3 years working with him and it was the best personal development I could have committed to. I learned that leadership is a trainable skillset, and that interpersonal dynamics are also something you can practice and improve upon.

vishnugupta2• 6 years ago

Not exactly “development” category, buying high quality tools that I use on a daily basis has been hugely beneficial. JetBrains developer pack in particular, I don’t know the exact name but you get their whole suite of developer tools. I can’t live without two of them at the moment, DataGrip and WebStorm.

an_d_rew• 6 years ago

Assertiveness training.

The difference between being assertive and being aggressive can be more subtle than you think, but the rewards for you and your team (and your friendships and your relationships) can be boundless.

timwaagh• 6 years ago

I really don't know. College is the biggest investment I did. But whether it was worth it depends on whether I could have gotten a programming job without it and I'm just not sure about the answer. As for the rest of it, I do have an Oracle certification which is generally recommended for Java developers. But I never spent a dime for that, although perhaps i should have done it earlier.

pinewurst• 6 years ago

Buying "The C Programming Language" by K&R back in 1983. :)

david_shaw2• 6 years ago

The best money I've spent on professional development is paying to travel to industry conferences at which I was accepted to speak.

Like many people, I was nervous about public speaking earlier in my career. Out of a desire to improve myself and to "give back" to the community, I applied to speak at some industry conferences. Many people think about conferences as TED-talk style luxury events, at which speakers are compensated for their time and expertise. In reality, the only thing most conferences give speakers are a few free tickets to the conference and access to speaker-only events. Travel (and often lodging) need to be bought out-of-pocket.

By putting myself out of my comfort zone and speaking at these conferences, I developed valuable skills that significantly helped my career as it continued to develop. Being able to speak confidently in stressful situations -- to a wide variety of audiences -- is a very valuable skill to have.

In addition to the confidence boost of getting some talks under my belt -- and the actual skill of public speaking -- the networking opportunities afforded to conference speakers are often unmatched. I was able to have intimate conversations with leaders in my field (information security), and learn first-hand how luminaries think about contemporary challenges.

I realize this answer probably doesn't conform to the type of response that OP was seeking, but it's the truth of my experience.

Good luck!

swyx• 6 years ago

this is a surprising answer. in my world (react/frontend) most conferences pay for travel or at least help defer a significant amount of the cost up to a limit. your employer should also have a budget for conf travel.

but agreed on the reward of speaking at confs. just that people shouldnt find it a norm to pay to speak.

david_shaw2• 6 years ago

your employer should also have a budget for conf travel.

In my case, my employer paid my travel/lodging fees and I did not have to pay anything out-of-pocket (or take PTO or anything). However, if I were (for example) between jobs -- or if my employer refused to pay for travel/lodging to conferences -- I'd still strongly recommend the buy.

In my experience, larger or more corporate conferences tend to pay more (including travel, lodging, and sometimes cash compensation), but the smaller, more "community-oriented" conferences do not.

gpspake• 6 years ago

Somebody told me to go watch a specific course on Frontend Masters and I ended up watching over a hundred hours of courses. In addition to all the valuable practical things I learned, I was amazed at the content and it raised the bar for the level of quality I demand from learning resources. There are a lot of trash courses and books out there that aren't worth the time. Now I vet things more before diving in. That and my Jetbrains all products license :)

stopachka• 6 years ago

The habit I’ve stuck with the longest, which continues to bear fruit:

1. If a book comes to mind, just buy it. No wishlists, no libraries. Feel free to get _both_ kindle and paperback, even the audible.

The returns on this habit are incalculable. I do this at an extreme level, which amounts to about 5k / year. That’s similar to a great gym membership or owning a small car. Expensive but doable.

LaundroMat• 6 years ago

I buy most books second hand. I'm not interested in the newest and latest (hearing about a book years after it was published is a signal of quality) so that saves me a lot of money.

Also, I'm not attached to those books as much as I would be if I had bought them new, which means I have less of an issue clearing them out to save space.

nikisweeting• 6 years ago

This only works if you actually read them.

jtsiskin• 6 years ago

I do something similarish - if a book comes to mind, find it on “the internet” right away. Buy the physical book if I like the first chapter or two.

ethbr03• 6 years ago

What would you do if you had a million dollars?
I'll tell you what I'd do, man, two monitors at the same time.

Maybe I have less mental swap space than the average person, but nothing has increased my productivity like monitor space.

Plunking down for an ultawidescreen was the best development decision I've made. Being able to have specs/docs + IDE + search + chat/email open at the same time, accessible with a physical turn of my head, greatly boosted my productivity.

ralfhn• 6 years ago

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.

mynameisvlad2• 6 years ago

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.

k__• 6 years ago

A therapist, haha. But this was already stated here.

Otherwise?

Hard to say. I think nothing that cost me money has helped me at least as much as the things I got money for.

I got a bunch of certs, but I think they alone aren't any good. Certs, jobs, projects, customers, awards, all together form a picture that you know what you're doing. The more you show, the less people ask questions that are potentially not it your favor.

sys_64738• 6 years ago

Got an MBA.

landemva• 6 years ago

Disconnect for a couple weeks. Backpack or sail. Pause and reflect.

1970-01-01• 6 years ago

SANS training is worth the $$$$ prices.

rootsudo• 6 years ago

Stylist, proper clothing and health/gym.

It seems silly, the more you feel like you belong, or general how people think you belong works better.

If you can do the work/job, even better.

p0nce3• 6 years ago

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".

alok-g2• 6 years ago

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

p0nce3• 6 years ago

As an example.

Suppose you get an interest in your bodily functions, and try experimenting with foods and stuff. You want to understand this stuff.

At first your mental model will be very confused. You may think that you can sense your (say) sodium levels while ignoring much larger effects you can't name yet, and confuse them with those you have named.

As you "diagonalize" your experiments and results, you find that the one thing that dominate health is the "quantity of inflammation".

inflammated vs non-inflammated can then be seen as an "eigenvalue" of bodily function space. Having this first, dominant eigenvector that you can feel will help you identify the second, then the third... until you get into irrelevancy territory.

This is all assuming linearity of things, so of course it has limitations, but your "System 1" neural processes could also be roughly modelled with dot products, from higher dimensional spaces to a single value (ref: Thinking Fast and Slow).

What I wanted to say is that singing leassons taught me to decipher the non-eigen vectors from those uncorrelated (important factors in an outcome).

What happens, at least in singing, is that this diagonalized learning strongly outperforms whatever I had before. For other domains I may very well trick myself :)

The analogy is a metaphor with linear algebra, in linear algebra / PCA you find eigenvectors to decorrelate things.

issa3• 6 years ago

I would suggest spending any extra time and money you have on doing something fun and helpful. For example, learning to play poker, or chess. Both of those things will tangentially help you in your professional life, but are also enjoyable hobbies. I don't mean to limit it to strategy games. Almost anything that involves some learning will end up being beneficial at some level even if it is not technically professional development.

kruuuder• 6 years ago

OP isn't looking for general advice but for actual, personal stories.

vermooten• 6 years ago

MSc in CS at Manchester University. Life-changing.

xwvvvvwx• 6 years ago

Cutting my working hours, which gave me more peace of mind and time to study.

mmhsieh• 6 years ago

$10 or so spent on the dynamics of software development by jim mccarthy.

lmilcin• 6 years ago

Nice pen, paper and ink.

I have found I am getting much better results and much less stuff falls through the cracks when I make notes on paper. Nice pen, paper and ink aren't essential, but they make it more enjoyable.

Audible.

I used to fill my long commute times with Harvard Business Review and other similar content. As I already have a bit of experience, these allowed me to connect a lot of dots together.

In general most of good advice is not given out freely and learning on your own mistakes costs a lot of time (and reputation).

Be prepared to pay for it.

I pay regularly for access to materials that let me save time and grow faster and for tools that let me do that with less effort.

Not all of them give me immediate results but the ones that do make it all up.

nunorbatista• 6 years ago

I consider the investment on my Masters was worth it. It changed the way I see the world and improved dramatically my writing skills.

openfuture• 6 years ago

Laptops and different form factor computers.

Linux is huge and tinkering is how you learn it, I have at least one laptop in an inoperable state at any time...

Other than that travel to events and being able to buy time to study.

miguelrochefort• 6 years ago

$3200 for a Bachelor of CS degree at Western Governors University.

It graduated in just 2 months due to my 10+ years of experience in tech.

I recommend it to every experienced programmer considering getting a degree.

tpineiro• 6 years ago

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.

aaron695• 6 years ago

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.

breckenedge• 6 years ago

Not exactly spent, but I gave up $40k/year in salary to go work at a company that I respect, with people that I respect, with a lot of nice benefits and proper work/life balance. I’m much happier with my career now.

nkkav• 6 years ago

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.

marviio• 6 years ago

Membership fee to the University Student Computer Association. I got exposed to UNIX (BSD 4.3 Reno) and the Internet as the first HTTP servers went up (the good stuff was still only on Gopher and FTP). I wasn't studying Computer Science or anything close, but I learned so much that I can look back on almost 25 years in IT.

g3ph4z• 6 years ago

I bought a new monitor (it wasn't expensive), a headphone, comfy chair. I spend half of day at my desk, so I think it was necessary. Also I bought a lot books.

Trailing2Dots• 6 years ago

While my professional life was going well, my personal life sucked. I considered my self a self-development junkie - trying one method after another. I lucked onto a seminar called "The Secret of Creating Your Future". One of its tenets is goal setting. This seminar was an introduction to NLP - a worthy goal. My original goal was to better my professional development, but I discovered that my personal development was improving enormously as well.

Eventually I was enrolled in courses aimed primarily at professional therapists. They certainly welcomed me as they need people to practice with as they themselves are learning new techniques.

This series has enormously transformed both my professional and personal life. Highly recommended.

tobiasbischoff• 6 years ago

I was always working on laptops ever. But given that travel moved to zero and will stay that way for some time I invested in a maxed out desktop PC that triple boots into linux, win10 and MacOS - a real dream and productivity workhorse.

ckib16• 6 years ago

Learning about financial independence. The peace of mind that comes from knowing you have your financial world in order is enormous and opens up many possibilities. You are in control once you have 'F--- You" money.

caviv• 6 years ago

I know it sounds like cliché, but actually my B.A. in Psychology and Business Management. Cost met around $12K the whole university studying but gave me much more than I expected regarding understanding myself.

PB2035• 6 years ago

vistage.com - like an advisory board when don't have an advisory board Also known as TEC.COM.AU The Executive Connection. Was invalubale on my journey

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

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