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.
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.
Here's the 80/20 of getting the most out of a therapist, drawn from watching thousands of people get great results over the last 5 years:
* talk to several therapists on the phone for 5 or 10 minutes first. You're going to be hesitant and uncomfortable, it's their job to put you at ease, they're the professional. You'll learn a lot quickly about them, and about the mental health process. If you have an uncomfortable 5 minute chat, you're going to have an uncomfortable hour, so skip that therapist. Go with your intuition, either say "heck yes" or "no".
* make a plan, work the plan. Write out your goals. The way to do this is "present situation" -> "desired situation". Everyone forgets the "desired situation" because they've got so much negative mental energy tied up in "present situation". Anyway, take your goals to your therapist. Put a circle around the one you need to address first. Insist that it gets addressed, or 6 sessions will go by and you'll realise the only change is to your wallet
* ask for homework, do your homework. You're in therapy an hour a week and out of therapy 167 hours a week. Your therapist can't compete with that. What you do outside therapy matters greatly
* if after 3 sessions you haven't established a good working relationship with your therapist and seen a bit of forward motion on your goals, get a new therapist. It could improve but statistically it's unlikely. This is an evidence-based cut-off.
Mental health is health, stay healthy!
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?
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.
Interestingly, in talk therapy it seems to be the patient's own talking that helps, rather than how the therapy is done or who's the therapist. Mark Manson sums the research up nicely in this piece:
https://markmanson.net/how-to-get-better
Turns out that any way to examine and express one's thoughts and emotions that otherwise run unattended is helpful. Therapy, journaling, meditation.
Still, to me this is by it's very nature limited - to what you can consciously dig out and express. If the issues that cause trouble are not conscious, tough luck. Like trying to fix email infrastructure issues by rigorously applying inbox zero.
Perhaps lasting improvements in such cases require forms of therapy that involve consciousness altering techniques? Psychedelics are recently making a comeback in therapy. "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan is on my reading list:
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.
Meanwhile all my American friends get free therapy. Weird how that breaks the narrative about US healthcare.
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.
I don't want someone who is impartial or non-judgmental. If I'm going to pay someone I want actionable advice from someone who has been in my shoes. Having friends who know me, who come from different backgrounds, cultures, countries does way more for me. Them saying "schoolornot, knock it off, you're acting immature" does way more for me than laying on a nobody's couch.
I'm not knocking it but it's not for me.
Coaches do that.
It's an entirely reasonable assumption given that the OP said that they've a _budget_.
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 guess what I'm saying is, everyone - including construction workers - should take your advice.
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.
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".
You really don’t realize how much negotiating you do in day to day life. Its good to be comfortable with it.
It was a really great thing and I highly recommend it to everyone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Since then, as with many things in our industry, it seems the book has been turned into a buzzword consulting/training money grab. Sigh.)
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 pay for Intellij Ultimate out of pocket, work would buy it but frankly it's easier to just have my own license and I use it a lot outside of work.
vscode is fantastic at what it does but one is a wheelbarrow, the other a dump truck.
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.
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).
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?
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.
Make your work feel like pleasure and there is no limit to what you can achieve. So maybe don't only think "what can I be better at ?" but also "how can my life be better while I work ?".
Software:
A proper training session with a high level debugger for a language I wasn't used to, debuggers often have esoteric interface and "hidden" features, but learning to use them comfortably will make your life so much easier and pleasant.
Buying a license for a good IDE (in my case, intellij). I use vs code 70% of my time but when I need to work on more complex pieces of code or debugging it just change your life.
Hardware:
Buying a proper "high quality" laptop, notably the screen (real matte screen because screw glares, and 2k/3k/4k resolution because you look at text all day so crystal clear font rendering matters a lot).
A great chair with proper support because my back hurting at the end of every day is not ok.
A switchable sitting / standing desk ( https://www.autonomous.ai/product/standing-desk ).
Quality noise cancelling headphones (Bose QC 35).
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.
I'll admit that I haven't any experience with other brands, but the Bose QC35 IIs changed my work life (especially when I as working in the office).
I really should upgrade my chair and desk.
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.
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.
Is it this course? https://course.fast.ai/
Also instead of other PD I would suggest to save (invest) as much as possible as early as possible. A career in tech is very seldom healthy as a forever job so having an escape path is important.
I used this technique to get enough invested by 45 that I could comfortably live on the dividends/capital gains/passive income it generates without ever touching the investment principle. This is a very nice feeling as it allowed me to "escape the grinder."
Telling Eric Schmidt (while at Google) to "go fuck yourself" and walk out the door to never return was the most empowering thing I have ever done.
My career has been much more rewarding since.
You can't mention this and not tell the full story. You know what you were doing here :)
> My career has been much more rewarding since.
That sounds like an interesting story. Any more details?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's benefits to having compute on the same network as you. It will also be much faster to transfer files.
EDIT: actually not just as a leader / manager, but in all areas of my life.
Edit: software -> soft
I mean stuff like better communication, goal setting, learning strategies, negotiation skills...
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 am a leadership coach with 15+ years experience hiring and developing top talent for Google, Amazon, IBM, and more than 30 startups. I love helping leaders build clarity and confidence.
If you'd like to book a complimentary call, you can find me at https://calendly.com/alignedclarity/discovery
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
You can also view a handful of the screencasts for free (no sign in needed). Some of my personal favorites.
* https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct... * https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/a-com... * https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries
Also, if podcasts are more your thing, we just had Gary as a guest on the Bike Shed podcast this week: https://www.bikeshed.fm/269.
They are on my site here:
https://www.semicolonandsons.com/
I'm not Gary, so the focus is shifted towards areas I have special interests in — namely: the day-to-day of running a software product business as an indie hacker/solopreneur.
Like many people, I was nervous about public speaking earlier in my career. Out of a desire to improve myself and to "give back" to the community, I applied to speak at some industry conferences. Many people think about conferences as TED-talk style luxury events, at which speakers are compensated for their time and expertise. In reality, the only thing most conferences give speakers are a few free tickets to the conference and access to speaker-only events. Travel (and often lodging) need to be bought out-of-pocket.
By putting myself out of my comfort zone and speaking at these conferences, I developed valuable skills that significantly helped my career as it continued to develop. Being able to speak confidently in stressful situations -- to a wide variety of audiences -- is a very valuable skill to have.
In addition to the confidence boost of getting some talks under my belt -- and the actual skill of public speaking -- the networking opportunities afforded to conference speakers are often unmatched. I was able to have intimate conversations with leaders in my field (information security), and learn first-hand how luminaries think about contemporary challenges.
I realize this answer probably doesn't conform to the type of response that OP was seeking, but it's the truth of my experience.
Good luck!
but agreed on the reward of speaking at confs. just that people shouldnt find it a norm to pay to speak.
- Spending 2k with a work station and changing my environment from expensive Macbooks to an expensive workstation and cheap laptops as a front end
This has worked really well for me too. Desktop is xeon with 64gb ram and I can take advantage of that power from anywhere.
Nothing like hands on keyboard to get something new to click!
At one point, I was considering paying out of pocket to attend the course. Fortunately, the company I was working for at the time wanted to send people to it and I got selected.
After taking the course, even if I did have to pay myself, I wouldn't have been upset.
That course is outstanding.
I wish I had that money now or my company could pay for me.
Second, books.
For me, the skills of listening before responding and processing a response in a timely manner were invaluable lessons learned taking improv classes.
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).
Pro: I like being able to sample the same topic from many prospectives (one chapter from each of 3-5 books)
Cons: I wouldn't spend /that/ much on books in a year, the quality of the videos is widely variable, the search (including quality filtering) is _terrible_, and the inability to bookmark specific talks within a conference is infuriating. Part of the pain is how close it is to being really good!
What's your pro/con list?
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.
(his paid episodes are irrelevant to me because they tend to be about things I have a lot of experience with, otherwise I'd buy without question)
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.
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.
> 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.
(Web dev since 1998)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I read about 30-100 work-related books a year and have seen salary double every few years.
I try to alternate books between different areas, more or less from these sections:
Technical(on currently used technology)
Technical(unused tech vaguely related and may be useful)
Management
Domain(scientific textbooks, best to search from related university course reading lists)
Biographies/accounts/events of typical and super users
Your salary didn't double because of books. I read a lot of work-related books, too, but my salary has been stagnant for years.
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.
It seems silly, the more you feel like you belong, or general how people think you belong works better.
If you can do the work/job, even better.
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.
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/...
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.
WCAG 2.0 - https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
WCAG is the gold standard for accessibility. Most governments including the US government conforms to WCAG for accessibility guidance and criteria.
Fuji cameras are great for daily use and its hardware controls teach you how to take nicer stills.
Manufacturing a real product helped me learn about distribution and inventory– something I'd never be exposed to in tech.
Travel helps me reboot and think about whats really important.
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.
I have found I am getting much better results and much less stuff falls through the cracks when I make notes on paper. Nice pen, paper and ink aren't essential, but they make it more enjoyable.
Audible.
I used to fill my long commute times with Harvard Business Review and other similar content. As I already have a bit of experience, these allowed me to connect a lot of dots together.
*
In general most of good advice is not given out freely and learning on your own mistakes costs a lot of time (and reputation).
Be prepared to pay for it.
I pay regularly for access to materials that let me save time and grow faster and for tools that let me do that with less effort.
Not all of them give me immediate results but the ones that do make it all up.
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.
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.
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.
2) Sublime Text (80$)
Powershell and python got me off the helpdesk, pluralsight helped me glue it together into SRE skills.
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.
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.
It was not cheap, but I still believe that it was worth it.
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.
Other than that: rocking-kneeling chair from Varier.
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
Reading and practicing Test Driven Development by Kent Beck.
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.
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.
Linux is huge and tinkering is how you learn it, I have at least one laptop in an inoperable state at any time...
Other than that travel to events and being able to buy time to study.
It graduated in just 2 months due to my 10+ years of experience in tech.
I recommend it to every experienced programmer considering getting a degree.
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.
$1400
The whole thing has this arrogant faux-subversive “not your grandma’s manager training” attitude that seeps into every aspect, and it makes a lot of pretense about being candid but in reality it has zero useful or new advice to offer, just rehashing well-known management considerations but trying to retrofit some notion of being more candid and edgy onto it. Most of the advice is even harmful because forcing more confrontational notions of candid behavior into management will not work at all in most large corporate cultures.
Plucky is essentially a way to get your company to pay for you to travel to another city, and mingle with other “edgy” tech leaders, which is insufferable and boring.
1000% do not recommend.
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.