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Ask HN: How to spend Learning (L&D) Budget of USD 1000?

20 points by shailid ↗ HN
I'm a software engineer (backend, 10+ Years), and am offered a learning budget of USD 1000 by my employer, what are the your suggestions on best ways to spend it?

edit: interests include,

- business (startup)

- personal finance (little)

- distributed systems

- functional languages

25 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 60.9 ms ] thread
this2shallPass
What do you want to learn? How do you want to develop?
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offtop5
IMO the best ways to learn are free. I guess a YouTube premium subscription would cut down on time wasted watching ads. I
dingusthemingus
Im in a similar boat, most things are free to learn online unless you want to buy textbooks, so the only thing left is certificates and learning courses with teachers. Not sure i want to commit my free time studying for those things.

I told my company i was going to get a certificate but never did and free time programing has been spent freelancing/learning random stuff.

LeonB
You can learn everything for free - but the paid courses are valuable and can make it quicker and easier to learn, as the authors take the time to be more comprehensive and consistent. (I spend my own money on them)
FabioBertone
I have a similar situation. I am using the budget to:

- get Duolingo subscription

- get Audible subscription

- Buy books. I keep a list of books I should own or read someday, and I buy from it once in a while. When I need to learn a new topic fast, I buy 2-3 books on that topic

- Coursera has a business subscription that gives you "unlimited" certifications. But I plan to get it only if at the end of the year I have enough certifications to claim

- I have seen some smart things claimed under L&D, like subscriptions to tools you want to learn or use to support learning (Figma, Notion)

I hope these ideas help you!

ecesena
I want to add that with Audible if you have a connected account w/ your significant other the library is shared. So you can buy books that interest both.
LeonB
In addition to the other answers - Pluralsight
nicbou
I had a similar "problem" at my last employer. Two of us booked a trip (from Germany) to San Francisco to attend a conference (and ride rented motorcycles around). I worked from there for a few extra days before heading back home.

If your employer isn't so cavalier with its spending, start with what interests you, and what fits in the budget. I'd use the opportunity to do something fun, rather than solely useful.

mtbkvc
Cloud (aws,azure) or k8s certs maybe? The knowledge can help your company and certs can make you more desirable if you decide to move on one day
bjacobt
I’ve been taking some courses on Udacity, specifically their ML/DL and robotics course. As a full stack dev and beginner in these fields I like the structure. Their courses are over $1,500 but you can find coupons that give 50 - 75% discount by doing a quick google search.
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open-source-ux
If you are interested in video courses, particularly for programming languages, the link below is to a small, but useful, YouTube channel from a developer who reviews popular tutorial sites like Plurasight, LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Udacity etc.

https://www.youtube.com/c/TechCourseReview/videos

This is probably stating the obvious, but sometimes (often?) online course instructors may have expertise in their subject but aren't particularly good at instruction or at explaining things clearly. Some sites give no course preview other than an introduction video (which may be scripted while the rest of the course is unscripted). I'd be wary of platforms like this (e.g. Pluralsight) that give no option to see the instructor's delivery or how they explain things.

I'm sure everyone has encountered video tutorials like the one shown in this parody video:

Every programming tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlSjtxy5ak

danieka
I’d suggest books and maybe journals. I’m perhaps a membership with ACM or IEEE, I’m not a member of either but I’m considering it.

The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow (2017): https://web.archive.org/web/20170406220055/http://dev-books....

The most mentioned books on HN: https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-ha

And here’s a list of my most resent book purchase. I have high hopes for these books.

The Pragmatic Programmer

Test Driven Development

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility

The Effective Engineer

Type-Driven Development with Idris

Programming Pearls

The Goal

The Phoenix Project

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps

Coders at Work

Code (Charles Petzold)

The Mythical Man Month

Structure and interpretation of computer programs

tcbasche
I bought a metric shiteload of books. Basically just climbed down the Amazon suggestions rabbit hole and got a heap of technical books that matched what I wanted to learn.
Jtsummers
I like physical books, and I want to buy more. But for $1k you can also get access to O'Reilly's [0] library ($499/year) which has a ton of excellent books on a variety of topics (not just programming). It's not as good as 10 years ago when they offered download tokens (I have so many PDFs from those days), but it's still a good system. And you can sometimes get discounts (ACM or IEEE used to get you access for half the cost, so total of ACM/IEEE + O'Reilly was basically the same as just O'Reilly, not sure the current discounts I get it through my employer). Then that $500 remaining can be directed towards higher quality books (especially ones you want on your reference shelf) or other materials.

[0] http://learning.oreilly.com

miguendes
It's worth mentioning that via ACM you only have access to books + videos.

Quote from ACM's email:

``` Effective Monday, June 15, 2020, O'Reilly Media will no longer offer the following learning formats through ACM's O'Reilly Learning Collection:

    Live Online Training
    Katacoda Scenarios
    Jupyter Notebooks
    Sandboxes
    Certifications
All books, recorded videos (including O'Reilly conference/Superstream events), and learning paths will remain accessible to ACM Members. If you are currently using content from any of the categories above, make sure to complete your training by Sunday, June 14. -ACM Learning Center ```
Jtsummers
Good to know. I've never looked at their certifications, and the scenarios I've looked at suffer a bit from:

  How to draw an owl:
  1. Draw a circle
  2. Print this picture of an owl
No real steps that you're presented to work through like a good tutorial should do. Too much material in the last step that boils down to "copy these 50 lines of code and you're done!".
arlu
I had this one year and got the Safari Online subscription. It was nice because of the breadth of topics in their catalog
hkarthik
I really like educative.io. I pay for it every year. Lots of great content and it is well curated.
andrei_says_
I found O’Reilly subscription to be useful. Around $400/year.

Followed by books and some dedicated courses.