Ask HN: How should I use my $2000 training budget before end of year? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How should I use my $2000 training budget before end of year?

39 pointsvicccccc55 comments

I am an Engineering Manager at a company that offers a $2000 yearly training budget and I did not use any of it this year. It's reset in 2 days.

What should I buy with this?

The rules are pretty lax as long as it's loosely related to Software Engineering, Management and/or Business.

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Buy all your engineers an arduino kit with sensors and blinkylights and motors.

Heard of a large law firm, iirc, whose IT dept did that one year. they didn't require anybody do anything with them, just "here's the fancy $300 kit with all the parts ready". and they got very positive reactions and the people who din't want to play with the kits themselves had people they could pass their kits on to who appreciated them.

Can vouch. My company did this one year. It was a fun idea and we all appreciated it. A few folks even put together some silly robot crawlers for around the office.

On AliExpress I can find kits in the $30 range. Where's one in the $300 range?

This was a couple years after Ardunio came out, so stuff was more expensive then. They got a big kit tho; I was envious.

>Buy all your engineers an arduino kit with sensors and blinkylights and motors.

I would love this.

I mean, it's basically what my job is (write code to make hw do blinky stuff - gross simplification, but yeah...) anyway, but I would find getting that to be really cool. Of course, my SO would just see it as yet more HW taking up residence here (I'm remote and my company sends me all sorts of HW that I need).

You can build our DIY air quality sensor based on the Arduino SDK (fully open source / open hardware) [1].

Something that many people find useful (especially monitoring CO2 levels at home) and it comes with a nice 3d printable enclosure to pass SO approval ...

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/diy/

Raspberry Pico would also be a great, albeit pricier, choice. MicroPython with Thonny is a joy to use.

adafruit.com sells and also builds nifty components for Arduino and other SBCs like Raspberry Pi.

Coincidentally, they happen to sell adabox, a gift box for $60 https://www.adafruit.com/adabox_get_started

I unreservedly endorse adafruit, as a delighted customer and frequent user of their excellent documentation. Tx for mentioning them.

Buy a time management book. It might help you use the budget better next year, so you’re not cramming at the last minute.

Yes, get an O'Reilly subscription for now. And then, sit down in January and plan out your expenditure for next year. Because training is vital, and if you do things right, next year you'll be begging for more training dollars.

You didn't say what kind of Engineering your firm does, but there are many training portals that have popped up specifically geared toward engineering (pun intended) that might be what you are looking for.

We're doing Software Engineering, think SAAS, building Customer service tools with technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, NodeJS, Python, React...

O'Reilly looks pretty good! Thanks for the suggestion!

It was somebody else's suggestion, I was just echoing it. What's your SaaS? Customer service is my jam. I'm a Customer Success Manager for a company.

Just want to mention that I appreciate that quite a few folks here commented about gifting to others instead of just yourself. Especially as an engineering manager, I think your team would appreciate you sharing your 'gift' and you could learn a lot from their own learnings; rather than rush spending your budget yourself on something you won't end up using.

I am sorry this was not clear in my initial message but this is an individual budget everyone in the company has. I'll definitely forward this post to the rest of the engineering team and they can make their own choices. Not trying to rush spend but on the contrary find a good use of this budget with everyone's ideas.

Offensive Security has few courses that might be interesting.

WEB-300 course in particular https://www.offensive-security.com/awae-oswe/ It shows how vulnerabilities are found using code review and how to exploit them in lab environment.

There's a subscription based model for $2000 where you can pick a course and work on it for a whole year https://www.offensive-security.com/learn/

+1. I’m not sure with the OP's familiarly with writing secure code and passing down knowledge to others but there's a def gap in general here.

If WEB-300 is too hardcore, the exam is 48 hours and not including the report writing, the new WEB-200 is at least a good start.

I convinced an employer that I needed to buy weights for a home gym, to help reverse the effects of sitting at a chair all day. Technically speaking a kind of career-related training. I no longer work there, but I still use the weights all the time. I can recommend kettlebells.

https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-benefits

Signup for ACM membership and you get Oreilly access (usually 500$ per year alone) + academic papers and an email forwarding address for 200USD per year.

$2000 is a bit low for hardware, but if you're willing to contribute a bit more of your own money, you can get something cool.

* NUMA-capable CPU. $3000 budget for a lower-end NUMA-server (say, 2x Xeon Silver, or maybe 1x AMD EPYC) gets you the hardware needed to start playing with NUMA (non-uniform memory access). Or any other high-performance computing part really.

* GPUs -- GPUs are very expensive right now, but an NVidia T4 is a bit over $2000 right now. A decent option to get into CUDA on your work budget.

* Software -- A lot of professional software is somewhere from $500 to $4000 or so. Matlab, IDA, EagleCAD, VMWare, SQL Server, Oracle, etc. etc. Pick a tool, any tool, that might benefit you or your team, and use the training budget to get a personal license.

* Networking -- $2000 is enough to start playing with various networks. Buy a bunch of Fiber-optic stuff and connect them together, switches, PCIe ports (ConnectX PCIe cards), fiber lines, transducers. SFP+, or SFP28 (28Gbit networks), 40Gbps, 100Gbps. VLANs, Cisco iOS, etc. etc. So much to play with, plenty of skills you'll gain only with playtime.

* Various other technologies -- Dell iDRAC, SuperMicro IPMI, etc. etc. Have you learned how to use and install these features? If not, surely there's a $2000+ server from Dell, SuperMicro, HP (or other server provider) that is close to your budget?

* Get that Talos II POWER9 computer to play with PowerPC.

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A lot of the other discussion points about books and/or training are no where near $2000. ACM Membership is great but only $100 to $200 / year. IEEE Membership is similar. Unless you can find like 30 papers to download in the next 2 days, you're not reaching your $2000 budget.

Instead, the big-ticket items (obscure hardware, obscure software) easily gets you to $2000, $3000, or $4000 budgets in a single purchase. You should be aiming to blow-away your budget (and maybe spend a bit of your own money) and do something you normally wouldn't be able to do.

Err on the side of going way overbudget.

Since OP is an engineering manager, I wonder if they could get ACM memberships for all their engineers. Plus SIAM, or IEEE depending on their field.

What text editor do you use? Get a course on that. Totally transferable skill no matter what you end up doing.

I know a good one if you use Sublime Text ;)

Can you share?

https://benfrain.com/video-courses/ultimate-text-editing-pro...

It’s linked from the Sublime site too: https://www.sublimetext.com/support

Full disclosure: I am the author.

I had no idea there were courses for text editors. This looks really useful, thanks.

courses ... for text editors?!?

TIL, too :)

Thank you!

Get an O'Reilly subscription.

I can 100% recommend this. Using O'Reilly like a library instead of a bookstore makes me a better developer no question.

This looks good! Thanks

Even better

https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-benefits

Signup for ACM membership and you get oreilly access + academic papers and an email forwarding address for 200USD per year.

Do you really get full oreilly access with ACM? they make it sound like it's not all included by specifying "custom collection" and "including recorded conferences"

I'm not currently subscribed but had it in 2020 and it was the full online oreilly library.

It literally just redirected you to the oreilly site from ACM and did the academic auth.

If your team touches on frontend or it might ever want to develop internal tools:

* https://learnui.design * https://css-for-js.dev * https://threejs-journey.com/ * https://frontendmasters.com

Professional mentoring via something like BetterUp.

Or work on your communication skills. You can do this via mentoring too, but also a mix of books and things like stage/acting lessons.

Not sure how much coding you do nowadays but, I would highly recommend getting https://polypad.io/ license for quick macro tasks.

I also recommend a https://www.masterclass.com/ subscription! No it is not programming but, I believe they great videos on a variety of topics.

Right before I left Google I used my education expense to enroll in an online live writing class. It was really great:

https://writeofpassage.school

The best part was that I wasn't ready to commit to a 6 week intense course but I could pay more (still within budget) to get a lifetime membership. I ended up doing the course during a later cohort.

You could buy a bunch of these books.

https://teachyourselfcs.com/

Maybe some Management books as well, though my reccomendations there are unfortunately not as good. In any case books would be good for whatever is left.

At the current point in your career there might not be much point in certifications but if you did want any now might be an especially good time to buy the tests since just about everything can be taken remotely.

Linux academy has good cloud and DevOps training.

You could buy a ticket to Black Hat in Vegas. I believe they are around $1000. Not sure if buying it now would apply since the actual event isn't till next year.

I'll give you a one-on-one experience based 20 hours class in Software Engineering, Management and Business. It's a bargain at $2000 if you sign up before year-end 2021. :)

This is a great opportunity to support your favorite content creators in tech, if there is a blog or YouTube channel that you find yourself turning to regularly, see if they sell any information products, premium subscriptions, or training.

As you're already familiar with the person's content and style, you're more likely to actually use what you bought. Plus, many creators offer team licenses on their premium materials so that you can share them with your team.

https://www.executeprogram.com/

Execute program by Gary Bernhardt is definitely worth a look.

I went through the same challenge today. I find it insane that companies like confluent, databricks, external aws partners, snowflake, etc charge each of their training sessions $1000+, making them almost not worth it. Eventually i bought a couple books, udemy courses and one of the aforementioned trainings and will share them with colleagues.

Part of the reason the classes are pricey is to make sure you really want to do it before you take it

That said, they also have loads of discounts available (especially if you're a customer or partner)

I want to add that I am not trying to game the system, genuinely interested in things that would make me better at my job.

If you're near a city which offers the in-person Dale Carnegie course (8-12 weeks), it's invaluable leadership training within corporate budgets. Proven over many decades.

With all the news about cyberattacks/incidents, it may be a good occasion to learn more about cybersecurity and how cyberattacks are actually performed.

It happens that I wrote a book about Security and Rust :)

https://academy.kerkour.com/black-hat-rust

MasterClass is probably the best thing I've spent money on. There's a lot of business topics including negotiation. Mamet's screenwriting class I find are related to product dev quite a lot, as well as Will Wright's game design class.

Get an ACM membership, https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-benefits.

Can you gift me an educative.io subscription? It's $119 a year and I will get access to lots of programming tutorials that will help me change a career to a better paying dev job.

Jrobah{a°t} gmail{°} com

Wish I can but not possible, the spendings will be checked and needs to be for our use only. I know you can get to high paying dev job with free ressources only though!

Buy all the books in your wish list!!

No, buy everyone in your dept the book in your list that'll impact them the most, and then encourage everyone to read it and discuss how it impacts the business. This seems trite but if done right, it's a very positive impact. Your company culture will dictate whether this is even possible though. If you don't already have great communication and collaboration with your team, then a "book club" might not be a good first step, and your training should be focused on team building instead.