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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

I cancelled my IEEE membership years ago. I enjoyed their magazines and journals, but remember being frustrated at the time with their pricing. After I cancelled, they became aggressively spammy, and they are now on my shitlist. This President's Note seems to be more of the same.

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The same here. Being a member for ca. 9 years. After they made IEEE Spectrum digital only and even badges digital only, I completly lost my interest due to high expenses and limited overall value. Those two little physical things were a real bond to IEEE.

Maybe it works for specialists in the narrow fields, but as I shifted from electronics to IT, I could not find real benefits for myself there, even in the "Computer" section.

Yeah their offerings are not good on CS and IT. They have couple of good conference and journals in electronics. The member discounted rates are not that attractive though, and if your institution/company is paying, who cares? The real benefit is access to specific publications of a society. If I would be working for a big company with a unlimited access (for which they charge up hundreds of k$ per year) I wouldn't have been a member. I guess ot used to be important to be a senior member or fellow back in the day, but now nobody cares.

In the past I wouldn't go to IEEE for IT and CS, except maybe, possibly for the physical level; that's the ACMs bailiwick. I had the distinct fortunate/unfortunate to be an absolute crossover, but could afford neither exsxcept when in pharma where they staffed their own libraries (from necessity), and paid for access.

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