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
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.
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 :-)
That's a good question - it's a while ago and the only one that really jumps out is The History of Psychology by Leahy because understanding psychology is as much about understanding how we understand the mind in the context of society, and to do that you need to know the history. Not what you were expecting ...
I highly recommend reading up on Hans Selye's biological model of stress and the HPA axis. Also worth checking out Freudelberger for the seminal article on burnout and Maslach for the formal treatment.
Organisational psychology is great but so contentious an area it's helpful to have a good teacher.
I highly recommend looking into Biopsychology, which is essentially the interplay between our mind and body and even how our mind distributed through the body.
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.
How familiar are you with the term? Perhaps I used an offensive slur for convenience and should reconsider the phrasing? In my experience, over-emphasizing "social responsibility" that has nothing to do with the product tends to put less competent managers in power. Less competent managers tend to favor less competent engineers. And it's a vicious cycle.
I do know the term — I’d define it as generally being aware of the historical struggles that various groups have gone through and realizing how that impacts them today.
It feels like you’re dancing around your word choice and I’m having trouble understanding exactly what you’re saying, especially as how being aware of power struggles impacts your ability to presumably software engineer well. They seem pretty orthogonal to me.
When you say “social responsibility” putting “less competent managers in power,” are you referring to affirmative action? Or something else here?
Affirmative action is about policy and the law. I was referring to a newer trend wherein middle management assumes the role of thought police and decides for others how well educated they are in "historical struggles that various groups have gone through and realizing how that impacts them today."
BTW I absolutely appreciate your concern for fairness, and encourage you to read up about the history of corporate governance and the financial scandals that arise when lawlessness infiltrates management.
I’m sorry to keep coming back for more info, but can you please give a concrete example of this and how it prevents you from being able to do your job well? I haven’t experienced middle management thought police so I’m curious what your experience is here.
In terms of financial scales and lawlessness infiltrating management — are you talking about things like Enron? How this is connected to “woke politics” I can’t figure out.
I'll pass - can't figure out how well you know about Enron and its similarity to other financial scandals, ripple effects of management incompetence, and corporate governance in general. I don't think it would help to provide just one or two examples at this point.
Thank you. I love to see the intersection of many fields of engineering, science, finance, and mass media here on HN. A truly amazing resource. But yes I struggle with the semantics when they blend together too much. I struggle to see how, when petty Us vs. Them battles flare, it's generally in circles where these fields all culminate into one. I struggle to see the sleazy culture of east coast advertising and stock-trading types (bigots from the 50's and 80's) infiltrate technology as a profession, specifically in Silicon Valley. I struggle to see that "social responsibility" and/or spiritual awakening is being packaged and sold like McDonald's.
I'm not giving concrete examples about my job, nor my thoughts on Enron in this thread. Sorry if I exaggerated the point but I do find it offensive to get a grilling about my private life. Not woke at all.
It's not "being aware". It's being required to police your speech to shield your managers from imaginary accusation of offending some group - where claims of offense usually come from people not even belonging to that group, but just enjoying the whiteknighting and the grandstanding. Being required to spend time on changing your code because suddenly established industry terms are deemed "offensive" by some busybody who would never even see this code and never had and never will since would have a look on it. Being dragged into political power games which one has no interest in and would rather concentrate on writing good code. Having work with people being promoted for reasons other than professional competency, and being denied opportunities for reasons other than professional competency. Etc., etc.
It really is. Those who embody it may have "Resist" in their Twitter bio, yet their purported values align with virtually all of the 1%, the corporations, the banks, the media companies, academic institutions, sports teams, celebrities, etc etc.
That's an interesting way to put it but I can definitely relate. When the people talk about abstract lofty political ideals all the time, it might well be the case that they have no idea what they're actually doing, or it could be a way for them to mask/deflect from the fact that their actual engineering skills are very limited. It creates a vicious cycle and a culture that drives people who actually want to do great work away.
Remember the time those two new fathers were overheard making dongle jokes at a conference and the twitter outrage mob got them fired for it? Things like that worry me. They don't prevent me from doing my job, but I could understand how someone prone to anxiety might get hung up on it.
One might also remember that the Black woman who posted about it on Twitter also got fired by her employer. "Woke politics" are an easy target for free-floating anxiety, but the real concern for 99% of us is that we have virtually no rights at work.
Publicly internet shaming someone for a middle school joke overheard at a conference is less professional than making the joke, and I buy the argument that it would "interfere with her doing her job." It'd be different for a more direct or egregious joke or if someone on stage said it.
Apparently she's been a lot more quiet for the past few years to the point that she's harder to google without second order effort. This backs up that what she did was unprofessional and interfered with her job, but I'm torn over this because it also means she got silenced. Then again, are "dongle" jokes the hill you want to die on? Or TWSS? This was in 2013 before the term "woke" was even popularized.
Not sure what her race has to do with this, though.
But at least she got silenced for doing something blatantly wrong. She took their picture, posted on a public forum without addressing the people or anyone else locally.
This is why this type of call-out culture is bad. You attack first, the damage is done, often excessive damage, without addressing the issue locally. It would have been different if they had done something wrong, she gets ignored by the police, THEN calls them out.
The other issue with these public witch hunts is they are random. Some people get no traction, others hunted down. This lack of consistency is a horrible way to enforce rules which may or may not have even been broken.
Generally they undermine patterns, and without patterns in our lives, life itself becomes quite the burden. When it happens but you aren't aware of it, you start to degrade in various ways and if you pile the unknownness (what is happening? why do I feel this way? why am I not getting done what I want to get done?) on top of it, it's not a fun time. At least, that's a factor I've read about recently; plenty more factors and angles. That's not to say that changing patterns is inherently bad, but changing too much at once or a change that must be synchronous and immediate vs. gradually and asynchronous are very different processes for us humans.
By the way, it might also be a misspelling (work politics vs woke politics); but coincidentally this applies there as well but to a lesser degree.
This is a really interesting perspective I haven't run into before. It definitely captures a subtractive strain of political and social thought I find incredibly frustrating. The lefty "woke" variant is hotly criticized lately, but its libertarian and conservative siblings have had their moments in recent years. Something in it speaks to everyone.
Of course, dismantling order is a poor substitute for refining order, and while the idea of starting over from scratch is seductive, I'm not convinced the "post-dismantling" environment is a good one for building better things (regardless of your definition of "better").
Unfortunately, the thirst for hard resets seems stronger now on all sides than I've ever seen before, which disappoints me to no end. Everything grows out of something else. And if you can't picture how what we have today could become what you want tomorrow without resorting to burning it down, you probably aren't ready to build something better from scratch. The least you can do is let the thing stand while we figure out how to make it work for everyone.
> How do “woke politics” prevent you from doing your job well?
I’m a hiring manager and where I work we have an unwritten “understanding” that if your candidate recommendations don’t include any women you are a sexist.
I just make sure I include a few female candidates even if none in the recruitment pool are capable because it’s not worth the trouble.
However, I imagine that for many “by the book” hiring managers this causes significant anxiety and stress.
It's uninclusive to put one very specific brand of politics in people's face all the time with the unstated message that if you think a little differently you had better be quiet about it.
I'm not OP but I am politically engaged with not 100% the same opinions, so sometimes I get annoyed by the environment and have to remind myself not to care.
Imagine your workspace was full of aggressive pro-Trump messaging. A bit distracting maybe?
But I don’t understand how a workspace that was full of any kind of aggressive messaging is healthy even if I agree with it? That sounds pretty toxic to begin with.
Imagine also your coworkers casually mention they'd gladly shoot any pinko commie liberal they'd encounter, good that there are no such people among us! And then discuss how liberals are filthy amoral idiots only worthy of being spit on. And you happen to be a liberal. And even though you know they're probably joking, and they most certainly don't mean you, would it influence your work relationship with those people a little? Would it make you more distracted and less motivated?
And what if they get their suspicions - say, you couldn't bring yourself to praise Trump as much as others - and then your promotion, which one of your Trump-loving managers has a decisive voice on, does not come through, would you wonder why? Would it impact your work? I think it might.
And yet, I've heard things like these (not about Trump, it was even back when Trump was a TV personality) from many people. Did it impact my work quality? I really hope not, as much as I can help it. But I certainly didn't enjoy it.
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.
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.
Imagine you've lived in the same house your entire life. There's a big couch taking up half the living room, but one of the legs is broken. When you were really little, it tipped over when you sat in it, so you just learned to walk around the couch over to the not-very-comfortable armchair and sit there instead.
This was so long ago that you don't even remember learning not to sit in the couch. You don't think about how much room that couch is wasting or how much time you spend walking around the couch to get to the chair. Sometmies you stub your toe on the way around, but everyone trips every now and then. You've been doing this so long that it is completely unconscious. Hell, you can and do navigate the room in the dark.
Friends ask you about your living room furniture and you—completely honestly as far as you know—say it's all fine. You describe your chair in detail. It's not perfect, but it's serviceable. Certainly lots of other people have furniture that's in worse shape. At least you don't have any of those problems.
Then you sit down with a therapist for a few hours and they say, "Hey, what's up with that couch?"
The kind of advice you'll most likely receive won't be like anything you'd hear from a friend or family member. A therapist thinks critically and draws your attention to the language you use, ideas you'd not previously considered etc. I'm a very reflective person and therapy's helped me make sense of it all.
Not the OP but I have similar experiences and am also very introspective. For me, my introspection dealt a lot with what my thoughts were and how I behaved, but I had a lot of feelings that I had suppressed so deeply they never really came into consciousness. Therapy helped a lot with that.
> I've also always regarded myself as introspective enough not to be able to benefit from therapy.
Not the OP, but as an introspective person, I've found it was actually my introspection that predisposed me to benefiting from therapy. For me, my issues stemmed from negative self-talk, which is a misfiring of introspection. I would read the world and assign negative interpretations to how I was treated or how I messed up -- all the while subconsciously congratulating myself for being a self-aware person.
Therapy was a way for me to correct this misfiring feedback loop. My perceptions of the world may or may not have been correct, but the central idea is that I was assigning inordinate weight to the negative perceptions rather than the positive, which caused my emotions to spiral. This led to a pattern of catastrophizing.
Breaking out of that entailed a third-party grounding me and giving me more balanced interpretive options, and reminding me that my reading of the world was only one of many possibilities and not even necessarily a correct one (the limitations of introspection are sometimes astounding).
The part that's the most helpful about therapy was moving past interpretation, and employing positive techniques and taking action to deal with the world positively (doesn't matter if the interpretation was true or not). These actions encompass things like setting boundaries, or writing stuff down and interrogating them from multiple interpretive lenses instead of accepting them at face value. The act of taking action also helps dispel a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies. [1]
For me and likely for most introverts, negative self-talk is our weakness. Distorted introspection, while seemingly honest, is at the root of many negative emotions. It's very hard to fix feedback loops from within (since the thing you're using to fix them is the very thing that's broken) -- so engaging professional help is often very useful.
[1] An abstract example of this would be (not true of me, but to illustrate the point): Say I was passed over for a promotion and I start building narratives as to why. Maybe it's because I've been wronged in this way or that, or there's discrimination, or I'm not part of the inner circle. All of these things might be true (or not)... but if you think they're true and you respond unproductively by sulking, you're not going to make progress. Instead, you can change the framing and tell yourself maybe it's true, but let's give room to other interpretive options. Maybe it's because I don't really sell my ideas enough, so let's work on that. Maybe I'm really not ready so let's try upskilling. And the end result is that you move the locus of control from things you can't control to things you can control, which improves your overall well-being. And though there's no guarantee, because you've improved yourself in all these ways, your negative self-fulling prophecy might even turn out to be a positive one (but again, there's no guarantee). At any rate, by electing to deal with the world differently, your mental state improves, which causes you to present differently to the world. This in turn has the potential to start positive feedback loops.
Me, for 40 years: I overanalyze things until it sucks the joy out of life and makes me feel paralyzed. I should spend more time analyzing why I do that.
Therapist, in one hour: Maybe analyzing even more isn't the solution here.
This was an interesting read because it's exactly what I talked about in my session yesterday, but would never be able to explain with my own words. Thank you for sharing, and I'll bookmark your comment as a resource to guide people to when they're on the fence about therapy.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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:
> 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.
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.
“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
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 ...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is you're dismissing a valid suggestion based on an assumption you came up with yourself. I understand your point but I feel like it was misplaced here.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure. I can't remember exactly what led me to this point, but I remember going to workout with my personal trainer & feel really angry towards her for no particular reason. I realized in that moment that I was not OK, and I booked a session with a cognitive behavioral therapist. I basically started with "I'm super angry & don't know why", and went from there.
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.
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".
>>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.
Sales people use essentially the same tactic: "i have to call the boss/check with my manager" and then "i tried but they said that's too little, but we can do £X; so I'll get the paper work" ...
Seems you either overpay or have to put up with the silly games and don't know if you're overpaying.
If the system were seeing optional efficiency it would give us all the info about BoM cost and hours worked and C-suite wages, dividends and profit rates, that would enable us to make informed decisions.
This is when you tell them to gfy. Another problem in the UK is that anyone can claim they can do glazing, they can show you fake portfolios and use tactics like above to get you to sign a contract. Then consumer rights will let them to try to "fix" the job until you give up and if you report fraud to police they'll say it's not a crime to do that. Being a poor glazer is not a crime.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
It's incredible how much you can save on your bills! I read the book and called my ISP. I was polite and didn't threaten to leave or do anything aggressive and ended up paying less for faster service.
When I was purchasing a car this helped a lot too! Salesmen are much more experienced than me since they negotiate every day, but even accounting for that it is easy to see what they are doing with other customers and easy to see through the attempts they make on myself. The most common one of course is the "time limited" deal... As if I just happened to show up on the only day there is a sale...
The fun part is you can turn that technique against them and it works like a charm.
I've repeated this a few times now: dedicate a day to car buying and call 10 of them up telling them I'm buying a car TODAY, with these precise specs. No upsells entertained. And I let them in on the fact that I'm calling all the others and expect to make a decision by a set time. Always remain super polite but stay firm. In a way I 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…
A lot of car salesmen ignore buyers like this. They see it as a waste of time to get pitted against each other. I’ve gotten the best results by starting with the dealerships with the lowest prices on TrueCar and then baiting them to invest time in me. Then they’re more committed and eager to close. Show your teeth later in the negotiation.
They're free to turn down the business, and only time will tell if it was the right call. Personally I believe revenue is revenue, and salesmen generally need a lesson in humility, but then again I've never successfully ran a car dealership.
Yeah this. I've tried this in various ways (not with cars, with other things) but usually they just hang up on me. I've never gotten deals that are better than what I could have gotten in other ways.
Depends on inventory and the value of the salesman’s time. This can work if it means they don’t have to waste hours selling you.
The problem though is the lack of real commitment. If you can guarantee you really are going to buy a car today and really will take the lowest offer, plenty of dealers would reply. Without a guaranteed commitment it’s just a negotiating tactic and they know it.
If I’m a salesman I’m OK making less on a sale if my time investment is practically nothing.
There’s a service you can use that has a $500 service fee that will bid it out for you. Dealers will reply because they know you’re serious (otherwise you’re throwing away $500). I can’t say if you get a good deal, but you definitely get quotes.
I like this approach. I check the inventory on a dealer's lot through their website, pick the car I want, learn what I can about it, and show up ready to skip the first steps. I ended up buying my current car from a no-haggle dealership since they had the best price even after factoring in negotiation (they had an overstock of the car I wanted and the new model year was about to be released).
I did this with my previous car, a 2016 Subaru BRZ.
I e-mailed three dealerships in town. I said I wanted a BRZ, Limited trim, Black, with a manual transmission, and asked what their lowest price was. MSRP for this configuration I believe was $29K. One dealership didn't answer at all, the second offered $29K, the third offered $26K and included all the dealer-installed options like the cargo mat for the drunk, auto-dimming mirror with HomeLink, and wheel locks.
I definitely went with the third dealer. Didn't even feel the need to haggle any more than that.
I've had luck with this technique as well. I generally make a deadline a few days out though which gives me a little time to work the phone without being overwhelmed. Some dealers do NOT want to deal this way ("You need to come here to get the best price"), but enough do deal over the phone to make it easy enough.
Now, the best way to save money on cars is to play the meta-game! Looking for a car which is not as popular or rare will give you much more bargaining power. End of model year, end of platform, etc are other good deals. Also having many dealers to compete works better than manufactures with less dealers (I have 10+ Ford dealers nearby, but only 1-2 VW dealers for example)
never buy from dealership at retail prices period.
go to a smaller dealer and ask them to buy a car from wholesale auction for you and you cover their costs.
that way their margin js transparent and is negotiated upfront.
You will be lucky to get 5-10% discount from retail prices, but wholesale prices at Manheim can be 15-30% less than retail, even more if you are willing to buy less than perfect condition car
That is why you never say cash or commit to financing until the deal is close. Also a dark hack, all car lot have a disclaimer that there is surveillance video and audio equipment on premise. This means you have been notified of surveillance, they can and do bug the cubicle. When they go back to talk it over with their manager many times they are reading you by your conversations going on in the cube and your body language.
I worked in counterintel for a while, so I have had a lot of fun with car dealers over the years. I won't buy a new car (still drive an 87 Suburban Diesel) but from time to time my wife let's me know it's time for her to get a new car. Anyways knowing that they can and do run surveillance can actually be used to your advantage.
Try it one time, when they go back to the manager, say to the person with you, let's leave, I am not going to get what I want here and restate what you know the car is worth based on research. Leave enough meat on the bone for a decent commision and profit, but cut it close to a good deal. Get up and watch them be on the other side of the cube before you can even fully stand up. Manager will have miraculously come back 10-15% over the amount you stated. If you are not willing to walk from the deal, you are not getting a deal.
I’ve tried that and they wouldn’t budge. I got rock bottom and I offered to do financing if they would go lower but the incentive structure of the individual sales person didn’t match that of the dealership so no go
You showed too much commitment. In either situation they knew your were going to buy. The trick is to keep one foot out the door until you're locked in on price.
I had the same experience. The dealer knew I was ready to walk, but it was as simple as "computer says no lower". I sold them a car, and saw it listed the following day. My napkin math said that the margin was close to 0 on the car in the first place,once they had paid £30 to tax it and a salesperson an hour to talk to someone and take their details.
Right, that's exactly the point. There was almost 0 money in the pure sale. All of the money is in high interest loans (via kickback from the financing), waterproofing treatments, "extra" insurance, service plans managed in house. The profit on a car night be negligible, but a cheap car sold with gap insuranxe is likely a days salary!
I keep hearing "they make money on financing" but I don't see how that's possible. I've bought three new cars financed, and every time the finance person puts my info in and gets finance "offers" from 4-5 big banks plus their in-house financing, and just lets me pick the one with the best rate -- usually most of the finance offers are under 5%, with the best one being under 1%. One time I went to one of the offering banks directly and got a worse rate than they offered me through the dealer! Maybe they're making commission on the sale but it can't be much.
Hi! I work in auto finance.
About my company: we finance in the USA and we focus in "sub prime" (aka bad credit), but we are a "full spectrum" lender.
Dealerships TOTALLY make money on the financing. In your example, it might be $1000 - it sounds like you have pretty good credit, and the margins are thin there. You should remember that if someone is leaning YOU money, they just want a reliable investment for their portfolio - they'll make their money on the next guy.
If you are getting <1% offers, that is probably financing from the manufacturer (that is, Toyota Financing is lending money for a Toyota, at a Toyota dealership). These deals are HOT because Toyota Financing's #1 job is to sell Toyota's - making money is #2 or #3.
Also, did you buy a warranty or gap coverage? Cause that is profit for the dealer, too.
You probably think you got the "best rate" because you SAW ALL THE OFFERS. Nope. Dealerships see the rate from the bank and can bump it up. Did Wells Fargo offer you 2%, well, let's show him 3% and I keep the difference.
Also, yup, getting a "direct rate" is difficult. The bank doesn't really know the car you are buying, and they might see that you were already approved at the dealership and give you a WORSE rate DELIBERATLY simply to maintain a relationship with the dealership.
Getting a higher rate directly from the bank does not necessarily mean that the dealer is not making any money on your loan. It is likely that the bank just offers better rates through their dealer partners because: 1. it's less hassle than dealing with retail customers, and 2. the dealer market for loans is more competitive.
I mean yes, I'm sure they're getting something, but the margins are so thin I don't think it's even worth considering. Consider a $50k car, dealer offers you 1% via bank. At best the bank is only taking half of that (0.5% is already ridiculous for a not-really-secured loan, considering new car depreciation), so over a 5yr loan the dealership makes... $1250. That's, what, one week of salary for one of their salesmen? I just don't think it's as much of a factor as we think it is. People talk about the dealerships handing out $10k discounts because "they make their money on financing" but the math just doesn't support that unless you're doing credit-card-interest-level loans.
Usually people cite the financing incentives when people mistakenly use the "cash is king" strategy when trying to negotiate on a car, but it isn't the only way they're making money. Dealers make significant money from manufacturer kick-backs and service too.
Also 1% sounds too low for an independent bank loan, even with the now-cratered loan rates. I am guessing that is probably a subsidized loan through a manufacturer's bank. Manufacturers have long offered artificially low rates through their own banks to help move product.
100%. There are lots of small dealers that will be super happy to go pick up a car at auction for you. I highly recommend this if you want the best price. If you don't really care, it is significantly faster and easier to just go to a dealership.
I’ve heard of the same, but with email. Spec out the car you want, timeframe you are wanting to purchase, and copy dealerships on the email. Tell them the lowest price gets your business.
So first I do my homework. Get my own financing. Know exactly what model I want. Then I look online for all the dealers selling this vehicle, note the place, contact info, leave room for the name of the rep I'll be speaking to, price, etc.
Then I call each one, telling them I saw the online inventory had the vehicle in stock but since I'm buying today I just want to check if that's still the case. That already reduces some of the options: many dealers will leave attractive but outdated inventory to generate leads, and then try to upsell.
I start from the cheapest option I see online and work my way through the list. As I encounter the higher priced versions, I voice a slight disappointement that another dealer X is selling the same model for $Y. That's when they can choose to match or stay firm. Either way I thank them for their time and tell them I will be calling back within a couple hours to let them know.
During this time, I often get callbacks with counter-offers. I note the value, thank them and let them know I'm finishing my list.
Once I have a winner, I go back and call all the others, starting with the most pricy, to let them know I've made my decision, and that I respect their time so didn't want to let them hang. Things get interesting at that stage, as more counter-offers appear. At that stage, you can also visit in person to thank the salesperson as you're on the way to the lowest offer: sometimes they end up with yet another counter offer.
Having your own financing means you're not stuck with their shell game. Only when you go to doing the paperwork, you can negotiate financing rates and see if they can beat what you got from your bank. But the sale price is already set at that stage so it's safe.
The whole point during this process, it's super important to remain humble and friendly. Even though you control the process, any smugness will kill your options. And to tie this back to the thread, that's a skill you can improve with negotiation training (and it benefits more than just car buying).
You don't really pit them against each other in the sense that two dealers are going to duke it out on a conference call or something.
You just state what you want at a price and then walk away if you don't get what you want. Some will flat out tell you "i can't beat that price, go for it" or they won't even bother responding to calls or emails.
When you have other options, it changes the power dynamic of the relationship and gives you a ton of leverage. The dealership needs you to purchase the vehicle and that can't happen if you walk away.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
Back in the 90s tech futurists were talking about having "the library of congress on the size of your finger nail".
Now we actually could do something in that realm (LoC is about ~10tb and there's 1tb microsd cards; we're probably talking "within 5-7 years" without any exaggeration) but there's so many courts and laws stopping it from happening, the great cambrian explosion of knowledge has been held back.
Every local library could store the full digitised book contents of the LoC[1] for about $5,000.
That this isn't happening is a crime.
________________________________
Notes:
1. I get about 200 TB based on 40 million books, OCRd at 5 MB per book. A 2 TB SATA 5200 RPM drive runs about $100, and the full collection would fit on 50 such drives. Full optical scans are ~10x larger. The LoC's collection includes another 130 million non-book items. https://www.loc.gov/about/general-information/
Interesting. I web searched and Google told me 10TB so I went with that.
I think we're still within the information revolution and to put it into perspective let's look at the textile revolution.
Clothes used to be expensive. Someone maybe owned 1 or 2 sets, often passed down from their parents. You could easily illustrate your wealth by wearing many layers of fine material. Simply owning many clothes was sufficient to signify great power and prestige.
Then the textile revolution came and today durable well fitted clothes are cheap. Unless you're a fashionista or have children, they are almost unmeasurable in ones budget (children used to wear dresses because it was a practical solution for one garment throughout growing childhood)
But this took generations AFTER the mechanical loom and all the technology existed. The society of clothes making also needed to be overhauled and that took arguably a century.
That's where we're at with information. Our industrialism can create the material requirements for the storing and transmission of information readily, sustainably and cheaply. However our cultural and societal overhaul to accommodate it is still maybe only a 1/3 done.
After the printed word became really cheap with the advertisement supported penny presses of the 1830s it still took about 100 years of public education advocacy before you could safely assume every adult knew how to read. These things take decades because it's a function of generational churn. It's at the pace of human lives
I have a partially written book on this interplay I'll eventually finish one day... maybe people will be able to pick up used unread copies for $2 - I look forward to that day.
Clothes always had a social signalling component. The signalling dynamic shifted, becoming both increasingly accessible, capable of defining increasingly finer social groups, esspecially those not associated with high-powwer or high-status groups (nobility, royalty, clergy, miltitary, artisans, merchants).
Information is ... somewhat trickier. Clothing is manifest and overt. Information ... mostly isn't. (Memes, logos, jingles, musical hooks, and slogans being prime exceptions.) Possession of specific information becomes a credible (expensive to obtain, hard to falsify) indicator of strong group identity --- whether you're talking about membership within a religious sect, programming subspecialty, profession, banking cabal, political party, or neihbourhood gang. Various fandoms seem to be a reasonably benign (for now) expression of this.
The total number of titles in Europe at the time was about one million. Today, one millon titles are published per year. (http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-Data.html) On average, that's one book per 330 Americans. Who read fewer than one book per year, on average.
What does it mean to publish if what's recorded is never read? The old WORN drive joke (write once, read never) has fangs.
Or if different cultures (religious, geographic, professional, political,...) share no common literary or informational references?
> What does it mean to publish if what's recorded is never read? The old WORN drive joke (write once, read never) has fangs.
The mere act of publishing itself is a form of capital and political and social exercise regardless of who reads it.
This is a deep rabbit hole and I don't have time to go into here (there's 2 chapters in this mythical book I speak of on it) but I'll point you in two directions, both centered on xerox
1. As a brief premiere look up the scholarly work 'Xerox Project: Photocopy Machines as a Metaphor for an “Open Society”' - or look into how the open society foundation supposedly helped defeat apartheid south africa and bring down the soviets via copy machines and cottage publications.
2. As a cornerstone of the first step of the modern LGBT rights movement in the 1950s. "ONE magazine", one of the first LGBT magazines using a specific Xerox machine as best I can determine either in Mar Vista or Venice california. Shortly there after, the Mattachine society, a second LGBT rights group, used the same copy machine to do their publication as well. The machine was also used to fight anti-mccarthyist blacklisting publications for the film industry as well. A similar effort happened for civil rights in Jim Crow south (I live in LA so I can do better research on the LGBT stuff since I can drive to the physical archives)
Even if nobody ever read any of these and the publications went into the garbage can, the maturation of thought and the coalition building as a function of the geographic space necessitated by the access to the machines had meaningful political ramifications.
You can also read the book 'Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture' for a decent deep dive on this.
I agree and like the discussion you guy's started from my seemingly innocent comment.
I add one argument why I think scientific papers and nonfiction books (Library Genisis) should be free (and legal) ...
You often hear the complaint that so many people are uneducated and believe in conspiracy theories (or other stupid things). This is (imho) problematic for a democracy.
Giving free access to books and papers could really help.
Also a lot of research is founded by tax money and papers are by far the most expensive literature....
Re: Uneducated / conspiracy theories... I think you are discounting the general public’s desire to seek knowledge outside of what the ‘engagement’ driven algorithms feed them.
The algorithm’s prime directive is at odds with serving quality books and papers because they are not as engaging relative to fiction passed as non-fiction (lies) and misinformation.
I started this by downloading all of the books the LoC put out until 1918 (locserendipity.com). Full text sources in an external drive took up around 200 GB.
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.
Tech books for the Indian market have been a good resource. The books (and maybe exercises) slightly differ to the US prints to keep control of the market.
I acquired a huge stack from an Amazon UK seller for literally pennies each.
The academic text books are known to have different test questions so US students can't buy (relatively) dirt cheap "foreign" prints. The text might be the same elsewhere in the book though.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
It looks like (to me) there is a DDD training industry, along the lines of, or as a part of the “agile transformation“ training industry.
Which in and of itself isn’t bad I suppose, but part of me feels that these are cynical attempts to unscrupulously monetize ideas who’s time has come by bombarding credulous middle management with buzzwords.
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.
> 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.
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.
First of all, Intellij (and Visual Studio) are more than just LSP. They're debugging, source control, static analysis, test runners, profiling tools, database tools, etc.
Secondly, the state of LSP clients is a long way from matching Visual Studio or Intellij. When LSP is competitive with the major IDEs, I'll happily switch, but I don't see that in the next 5 years at least. As an example, try opening UE4 using any of the LSP implementations.
I'm well aware of the differences between IntelliJ and LSP, I've been an IntelliJ power user for years and have written plugins as well. Currently I've transitioned back to Emacs for most of my day-to-day coding, since LSP provides good enough completion, navigation, and static analysis, and DAP provides good enough debugging and test running. The rest of your list are non-issues for me, e.g. every editor I know of has good source control tools, and most profiling I do is not in an IDE, it's using special-purpose profiling tools.
LSP and DAP are open protocols supported by most editors and IDEs. I have a hard time believing that language implementers won't prioritize their implementation over IntelliJ. Which is a good thing, our development stacks should be open and free.
> Im well aware of the differences between IntelliJ and LSP
Apologies I didn't mean to imply you didn't, I only meant to point out that LSP isn't the only factor in choosing an editor. For some people,(e.g. me) lack of some of that tooling is important.
>since LSP provides good enough completion, navigation, and static analysis
My experience using lsp with clangd as the server on a large project was that it flat out didn't work. Try opening UE4 for example.
> The rest of your list are non-issues for me,
That's great for you, but others do use those tools regularly. It's also a feature that those tools work out of the box, consistently, meaning that a coworker can (occasionally) drive by commit/run/compile on my computer.
> I have a hard time believing that language implementers won't prioritize their implementation over IntelliJ.
Intellij/VS are going to keep improving in that time. As much as I'd love for all of my tooling to be open, I don't see that as realistic in the near future based on the current state of the tooling. I'd love to be wrong though!
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.
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).
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.
Thanks, I'm wondering if there are more tutorials about writing plugins. There are a few shortcuts that do not exist and I'd love to implement with a plugin.
In 2014, I have written a just for fun plugin in about 2 hours (check out my write-up [1]). I've followed the "How to make an IntelliJ IDEA plugin in less than 30 minutes" [2] guide back then. Unfortunately, this guide seems to be outdated, but now there's an official guide [3].
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
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Thanks a million!
IDE: How do you estimate which one is going to be best /after/ you invest in the training? I have been really trying to get better at emacs, for example, but it still feels clunky a lot of the time so I only use it for org-mode. I also switched to VS Code and honestly don't see what the hype is about - but does that mean I just need more training? From who? ("If brute force isn't working, use more of it!")
Hardware: I bought a gamer laptop (for use with Ubuntu) recently because it had a GPU, but was shocked to discover that I never got used to the keyboard. Again, I thought that I would get better, but it really hasn't. Fortunately, my Kenesis keyboard /was/ something with a continuously rising learning curve (I'm not hopeless, contra the evidence above!) But now I'm doing a lot of work in Looker which tries to do extraordinary things in the browser, but brings my machine to a crawl. My Mac-using coworker says it's less of an issue for him, but I can't quite bear to drop $2k just for that one application. That said, the value-of-my-time-over-1y calculation suggests I should. But does "good computer" just mean a Mac?
Monitor: What would be a good monitor buying guide? I'm happy with mine now but don't know what any of the specs mean for the future
Chair: This is like the definition of "YMMV" but how would you go about evaluating chairs, esp in the covid era?
Standing desk: I've been procrastinating on this one because while I understand how to measure things, I foresee myself visiting a half dozen diffent sites with different ways of representing the size/specs of their desks and getting pretty overwhelmed. And that would be the hardest thing to return.
Quality noise cancelling headphones: OK I guess I have no excuse here.
Thanks again, you've already forced me to think through several mental blocks and realize they are real but entirely surmountable. Any answers (from anyone) to the questions above would also be appreciated!
IDE: Use IntelliJ Community Edition (or whatever Jetbrains IDE matches your project). Print out a keystrokes cheat sheet and tape it on your desk. Try to do stuff as a series of snippets, autocorrects, autocompletes and refactorings rather than pounding out the code (this is especially relevant in Java where it can save you like 90% keystrokes).
Example: don't start a new method by writing the new method. Start it by calling it somewhere with arguments, then alt-enter (auto-correct) to create the method, with the types and arguments already filled in.
Chair: get Herman Miller Aeron or Mirra (cheaper), second hand
Standing desk: I use cardboard boxes on a regular desk. I take sitting breaks when I'm thinking but not actively typing. Pomodoros also work (stand 20, sit 5 or 10). Don't use your phone when you sit.
> IDE: How do you estimate which one is going to be best /after/ you invest in the training?
I had put off using a paid IDE for years. However the recommendation for IDEA tools kept growing stronger among my network. So I just took the plunge with their JetBrains (for Java). And what worked for me was I was full on using their IDE. Including running the app/web-server from within IDE. The great thing is they have 30 day trial period and so I learned most of the right way of using it. i.e., keyboard short cuts, navigation etc., Towards the end of the trial period I could sense a clear increase in my productivity. From then on buying full version was easy decision.
With their DataGrip product it was something similar. Good thing is their trial version allows 30 minute sessions. I kept on using it for a month or so until I was annoyed with repeated restarts so bought their full suite of products (the difference between two tools and full suite is something like ~10$/month).
> Laptop.
MacBook's keyboard + Trackpad has been a game changer for me. Especially the trackpad. It's incredibly easy for me to navigate using trackpad. From exclusively Linux for ~12 years I've gone full on Apple ecosystem over last 3 years. Now not just Laptop I can also vouch for their bluetooth keyboard, trackpad and iPhone-11, and AirPods Pro.
If you're in EU, every single one of these you can try for 14 days with no engagement, often 30 days if bought on amazon.
> IDE
This one I probably can't answer you because of how personnal it is. My two best advices are:
- if there is a paying tool where you thought "yes it's cool but I don't really need that I can do without", don't do that and buy it. You will feel a lot better buying a tool that you ultimately don't need much than discovering after 10 years that you were wasting your time that a 100e spend could save you
- try a tool that is diametrically opposed to what you are used to, and force yourself to use it for a while no matter what, see if that different way of thinking works better if or if your original choice works better
Eg if you're a vim guy, don't try emacs or vs code (small steps); but intellij or similar, discover an entirely opposite way of doing things. It may convert you, or you may learn that you were right in your choice. Mostly all such tools have a free trial time. Hard part is to force yourself to use the new tool no matter what for a while.
My eye opener was debugging a hard problem in PHPStorm and noticing that instead of fighting/trying to extract information from its debugger, I was helped and supported by it. Suddenly that tool became my assistant and I couldn't do without, and I have been subscribed to jetbrains ever since (their intellisense is also miles ahead but I don't know if that alone would have converted me)
> I bought a gamer laptop
Ah, I have one too ! Love it ! Used to be Asus ROG serie, now is MSI G-serie. Awesome thing. The keyboard is the worst thing ever made for coding (especially on msi, they're steelseries keyboard, re-arranged for gaming).
I don't know your personnal situation, but if you can afford it and assuming you are a coder, buy a dedicated work laptop. Only thing that matters are screen and keyboard. Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell XPS, that kind of thing. Price in the 1000-2000 range usually. Not having anything but work on it will end up as a bonus and net positive, I promise you that (no distraction).
My current laptop is a thinkpad matte screen with semi mechanical key, if I need to show it to someone it looks terrible (and right out of the 60s), but it's awesome. If you spend more than 5 minutes a week fighting against your keyboard, you need to change it. If you need to "change position" because of the glare, change.
> Monitor
High refresh rate (120/144/240 hz, look for gamers latop they care about that), good color rendering (eg look for srgb screen) and contrast. In this one, opposite the laptop one, gamer's things are actually pretty good because rendering fast and clearly matters a lot there. The contrast is important because you want something that you can see clearly without being at 100% brightness, so the gamers 120hz/hdr compatible screen are a welcomed thing.
Do not think 60hz/75hz is enough, you won't see the difference going up but going down after being used to it makes it clear how better it is. This is a ~300e spend max.
> Chair
The rules are: it should not be an effort to be sitting in a good posture in it, and it should be your natural posture in it. If you don't sit better on it "unless I force myself to sit that way", forget it you won't do it. I bought a "medical/ergonomical" chair meant for people with back problems, for 240e.
> Standing desk
Absolutely agree, I bought one from autonomous during a sale. One thing I can tell you is it's a lie to thing standing is always better, so I would really suggest a switching that can do both. I'm still not sure it makes my life better per se, but I know at least I'm not sitting all day anymore and I don't feel terrible working standing up which is what I scared of.
> Quality noise cancelling headphones
Of the entire list this is probably the first one you should go for (if you can, eg don't need to answer your colleagues every 5 minutes). You will be very surprised by how much many distraction you didn't notice it removes and how much more centrated you become when it's only you, the screen, your mind and maybe some music.
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.
I assume you mean "a poor craftsman blames his tools".
Is there actually any evidence that over-focusing on tools is a common problem? I understand it could be, and we've all probably wasted an hour here and there, but I don't fear drowning in a glass of water just because I've swallowed wrong a few times
I was curious enough to look it up, apparently it's the fallacy of "I can't properly start until I have <tool X>". In that sense I think it's not at all a problem among professionals, but perhaps an easy stumbling block that discourages a lot of amateurs (the study I heard about was actual trades, where going from amateur to professional is less of a hurdle than among creative pursuits).
I might say, "A journeyman makes his tools do the job, a master invests in his tools".
+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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I second this - I'm 3 semesters into the online MS in CS program at GATech and it's been a huge level up for me. I highly recommend the investment IF you have the time - it is a large time commitment.
As a full time employee (9-5 job) in an MNC and father of new born do you think it is still doable?
How many hours do you have to dedicate on a weekly based?
It heavily depends on the courses you pick. I'm a full time employee (9-5 job) but no family and I usually dedicate a hour or two of my mornings and early evenings to the course as well as a couple hours every weekend, but I pick what others consider to be the more intense courses (compilers, distributed systems, operating systems). I also go all in on these courses since you get out of it what you put in.
This site is very accurate when it comes to the hours per week breakdown on courses: https://omscentral.com/ You'll see that some courses are drastically easier than others, the more intense ones being more rewarding. In all, you can make it as hard or as easy as you want and pick your courses that way. Having the BS in CS (I do) helps since you may recognize some of these topics from undergrad.
Thanks for sharing. Do you think it's doable without a CS background? I have a Math MS and do use some programming (mostly SQL, Python and some CLI) in my job but never had any formal CS education.
It depends on the courses you pick. With your Math MS, you might actually do really well in the Machine Learning/AI courses that they offer. The projects are mostly in Python and a lot of students do not have a CS undergrad, so you won't be alone there. https://omscentral.com/ is a good resource if you want to see per-course reviews on what the courses are like or how much programming you do. The systems engineering courses (compilers, distributed systems, operating systems) are heavy in C/C++, but the machine learning courses are heavy in Python (AI for robotics for example, which is a great course). You can go to Udacity or Youtube and check out the videos if you want to try it out.
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.
> 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.
Isn't that the case for almost every course, though? Curriculums take years to develop and change, and it's always easier to just reuse what you already have.
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I don't know if I really agree -- I have found having a coach extremely valuable (and mine is totally unqualified in terms of psychology degrees, but has heaps of experience of coaching founders). Having someone to help you think through problems who can do so objectively, and doesn't get fascinated with the detail because she's removed from the problems to a degree, is great.
A psychologist can basically be a coach for things like social anxiety. You might be able to get a better coach but you can also get a highly qualified one subsidized by healthcare.
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!
> 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.)
I think there's a medium ground. Rationalism and empiricism in the historical sense are interesting philosophies, good to study.
The "neo-rationalism" that you tend to find online (especially in HN & LW adjacent communities) falls much more into the criticisms you define, but I hardly really consider those communities actually "rational" at all.
Heuristics are important, but what I find management often does is lie to themselves about what is an intuitive heursitic, (perhaps justified by a story of how it worked in another company) and what is something that is generally justified by empirics. Sometimes you need to make ad-hoc, intuitive decisions due to resource constraints, but you should be aware of when those times are and shouldn't act as if they are equivalent.
I've seen this happen in some companies and it is not pretty: when you don't distinguish between the story and fact, then everyone just starts telling stories and it becomes very difficult to ascertain what is happening.
> 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.
Both can be true! The fuzziness gives BS a lot of space to grow. But it's objectively true that some companies do better than others, with an effect size is so large and sustained that I (at least) have trouble believing that it's just chance
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
- 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
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.
- Pixelbook with 8Gb. Not cheap ($1000) but I think you can find similar options for half of that. I mostly wanted to try it but I am happy with it now. Important, I just use it for Chrome and VS Code, nothing else! Battery life is decent, you can run linux apps, it has touchscreen and is light. I personally don't care about the screen now, I actually prefer small laptops to carry them and I have two 27" screens on my desk
- I run the IDE on the laptop and lxc containers in the workstation for different projects
For me, everything is on the remote desktop so I can work on any device via RDP (phone, tablet, chromebook, raspberrypi, etc).
The laptop needs no configuration. It doesn't need to be backed up, I don't need any software licenses. The laptop can be lost, stolen, damaged, etc and nothing will be lost.
If I was more mobile, the laptop specs would be more important but I work in the same physical space. It needs to be able to power some monitors and the keyboard needs to be decent for the few times a year I go out of town.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Exactly this - most of the libraries in my area have little if no technical books. I know exactly why too - I've frequently come across libraries in the UK that are selling off their technical books, because they're not receiving much attention. I've had multiple occasions where I've managed to buy dozens of books for the value of just one of them.
It's not easy to even ask for a book. I've asked librarians for books before, and I even have a friend currently working in a fairly large library request a book for me (with evidence from me of interest in it), and the request was refused.
The real books worth reading are those that make you a greater expert than the majority of the population. Libraries don't benefit much from storing books that will only be read by one or two people.
I gave away technical books at my local library as they had a "free books section". Some of them were older editions of industry standard text books (Real-time rendering and PBRT first edition), but the library refused to take donations because they were "technical books". Granted a lot of them were really outdated 90s technical game programming books like "Windows 95 Game SDK Strategy Guide" and "The Black Art of Windows Game Programming".
What are examples of books you can't even find at university libraries?
I've been in software for 20 years and have not yet felt like I needed to read anything that wasn't pretty mainstream.
I imagine one's professional reading is more academic when working on things like hardware or compilers, but most of us (for better or worse) are just working on CRUD apps in a marketing-adjacent space or maintaining a corporate Java monolith.
You won’t find more than the introductory stuff for advanced subjects in math, physics and computation unless the university has someone working on that stuff. It’s been over 20 years since I was last enrolled as a student, but when I was, I had to ask for inter-library loaned books every other month because my deep interests differed from those of the faculty elders.
I don’t know what the CRUD equivalent would be, if there is one, but at the time random projections and large deviations were fringe math, and only the basic texts were available everywhere.
Most books on deep learning are too new or have too popular a style to be included in uni libraries. By the time they do appear, the examples no longer work because the tools have evolved.
The same goes for recent books on applied machine learning or recent tools or libraries intended for professional practitioners. I think libraries are reluctant to buy books they think will go out of date quickly.
Many Librarians are more than happy to find what you are looking for on inter-library loan. If by some chance the book is still not there, you can request that they buy it with little to no fuss (at least in the US). The catalog that your local library has online is more of a starting bid.
Additionally, if you have an alma mater, try looking with them. Most universities will give full library access to alumni if you are part of the alumni association, including journal articles, newpaper subscriptions, magazines, etc. Dues aren't too expensive and lifetime membership is reasonable, at least for me.
I'm currently living near Purdue University and that's definitely the situation here.
But I'm from Puerto Rico, live in the city, graduated from the University of Puerto Rico and that's not the situation there. I can, probably, at best, get them to give me access to an old computer of theirs in the floor and access journals through there.
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.
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.
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 :)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> I spent some time a decade ago learning better emacs skills (macros on the fly).
This. I spent a week in 2000 focusing on learning Emacs. To this day, I'll use downtime to browse through packages, forums and documentation looking for new (to me) things to tweak Emacs with, or new (mostly CLI) tools. I just discovered the various rainbow modes last month, and life is so much better.
Do you have any advice of where to get started learning Emacs? I don't get on with vim and have the very basic editor / navigation commands down in emacs, but finding well written learning resources past that point seems really difficult. Should I learn a package manager before Emacs lisp? Or start learning some of the built in more advanced functionality past opening and editing files?
I'm struggling to find resources as well as understanding what to learn next and it's proving quite a blocker.
It was a long time ago, but I got a book "Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition". Its a shame that there isn't better documentation to get past the navigation stuff.
There were some short video tutorials I used too (I can't find right now...)
I just went through the Emacs tutorial (C-h t), then used Emacs everyday, for everything. I pick up bits and pieces here and there across the web. I went through Chassel's Emacs lisp book a while back, but can't remember most of it as I felt it's more aimed at developing Emacs itself.
A lot of Emacs is self-documenting and I use that. Look at the docs for the current mode (C-h m), learn keybindings (C-h b), change settings (M-x customize-group), read the info pages (C-h i m emacs).
Funnily enough, studying Common Lisp has helped me more easily read elisp.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Is it still worth to get it from ACM? I remember that they have recently restricted a bunch of sfuff on the ACM subscription. Examples: live online trainings, katacoda, notebooks, sandboxes and certifications.
> Examples: live online trainings, katacoda, notebooks, sandboxes and certifications.
To some of us, we don't learn very well from those things. Books tend to have a higher knowledge value and other advantages. For a discount, I'd be willing to give those things up, assuming I wasn't already getting access to Safari through work and didn't already have a reading list of purchased books a mile long.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Basically what you are saying is that as one learns anything, because of the correlations, important directions may be different than what was apparent earlier. E.g., considering how beautiful a face looks is determined by many features together, but some are more imoortant than others. There come the eigenvectors... :-) So to maximize potential, it becomes important to find the eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue.
If I understood your message correctly, then extension to non-linear world is trivial (though linear approximations would often be good enough).
Yes, it's really a simple realization. Almost common wisdom that some things matter more than others, but when you've learned something alone / incorrectly you must forget those first classifications.
For example my singing teacher said to not do the fomer exercices anymore now that she would give me new ones.
The new ones embeded that decorrelated view, they would train just breathing, or just glottal closure, or just pitch.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.