Do you have leftover budget for the year that you can expense for learning & development / professional development / training, as someone working in tech?

Here are four recommendations to spend it in ways that can help your learning you the next year:
1. Buy a book or two! I find them to be one of the best investments.

Here are more than 100 recommendations for those working in tech.

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/holiday-tech-b…
2. Get a tech-related newsletter subscription. Ones on technology substack.com/discover/categ… and business substack.com/discover/categ…

The most-read one for those in product is Lenny's Newsletter lennysnewsletter.com. I write for eng manager / engineers: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
3. Subscribe to online resources that have courses you want to learn, like @FrontendMasters, @eggheadio, @pluralsight and others.

4. Look ahead for online conferences you're interested in, and grab an (early bird) ticket now.

What other recommendations do you have?

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More from @GergelyOrosz

23 Dec
“I’m a senior engineer and got an offer from a FinTech unicorn. The salary is higher than what I make and I heard good things about the eng culture.

BUT.

There’s no equity.

I’m conflicted if I should take it. What is your take?”

Ok, you know my thoughts on equity. But:
1. The best startups/scaleups offer meaningful equity to employee, especially engineers on top of a solid salary. Period. (More on equity: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/equity-for-sof…)

So this place is not top of market in this sense. However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore them:
2. Where are you right now? And why are your options?

Ask yourself these:
a) Do they pay more to what I make?
b) Would I learn more to what I learn now?
c) Are the people and challenges exciting?
d) Is this my best offer?

If the answer is “yes” to 3 out of 4, don’t ignore them.
Read 5 tweets
15 Dec
"I just got a 12% raise at my company as part of the regular pay adjustment. It's because my director noticed someone in the same role made this much more than I do."

A real story, and a common one. Let me tell you how compensation and open salaries at Netflix work in practice:
1. Pay. Netflix pays top of the market... in cash. No equity (although you can ask for it). No bonuses. Just cash. A LOT of it.

How much? As much as competitors (Google, Meta, Amazon) etc pay and they move upwards with them when needed.
2. (Kind of) open compensation. Everyone who is at director or above at Netflix can see the compensation of *every* other Netflix employee - upwards as well. It's all cash, so they see one (big) number.

We're talking 1,000+ people. Unheard of at any other similar size company.
Read 8 tweets
15 Dec
“As someone working in tech, how can I get into angel investing?”

I’ve made ~10 angel investments the past months and here’s how I went about it (thread)

1. Big tech alumni. After I quit Uber I got invited to the Uber alumni investment club. Huh? So apparently these exist
1. (Cont’d) Facebook has one, Uber has one, and a bunch of other companies (even smaller ones). They’re places you can see deals come in, and put in from very small checks.

Granted this was lucky, but seeing dozens of pitches over months was helpful in learning on the side.
2. Help founders/startups without expectations.

My first investment came well after I talked with a founder from my network, offering advice, help and feedback as it was an area I was experienced in. When they later raised, I offered to join in, and it made perfect sense.
Read 8 tweets
13 Dec
If you work in tech, #TechTwitter is the place to learn, keep up to date and get inspired.

Follow the right people and you learn something new every day.

Here are 20 tech folks I always pay attention to. They tweet no fluff. Plus details on what to expect when following them:
1. @johncutlefish. One of the most inquisitive thinkers in product management. Asks questions that we should all be asking.

Tweets about: the beautiful mess of product management, engineering and the art of getting things done.

Sample of what to expect:
2. @rakyll long-time principal engineer at Google, now at AWS.

As an engineer, I just nod to almost all tweets of hers. They hit too close to home.

Tweets about: software engineering, engineering culture, and hard truths.

Sample of what to expect:
Read 20 tweets
13 Dec
An inconvenient fact: the most practical - and a very commonly used - use case for cryptocurrencies is to run Ponzi schemes, and cash in from them.

Someone creates a new currency, promotes it, and those getting in early make massive profits, at the expense of later customers.
Ponzi schemes are typically banned by governments when too many people lose money - which eventually always happens.

The unregulated and cross-border nature of crypto is the reason these schemes can go ahead.

A history of Ponzi schemes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_P…
An example of a Ponzi scheme is Techlead creating a coin that has all characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. There's no value in it beyond buying early enough, then selling it.

The person making a profit of millions? Who created this useless coin: Techlead.

Read 4 tweets
12 Dec
I cannot shake the similarities between the Dotcom Boom and web3:
- Huge hype
- A technology most people don’t understand
- Few practical/real-world use cases
- Incredible returns in the span of months (then: IPOs. Now: tokens)
- Lots of naysayers
- Celebs/influencers involved
For the Dotcom Boom, there was the Dotcom Bust.

It’s impossible to predict if this will follow: but I do predict a crypto winter. All crypto startups need hypergrowth in users/revenue to survive & success depends on mainstream adoption.

I expect some adoption: not mainstream.
Some characteristics are similar:

Dotcom Boom companies paid a *lot* more for employees, with the expectation of becoming millionaires in 6-18 months.

Same thing is driving the hiring success for web3 companies who are burning cash like there’s no tomorrow, paying above market:
Read 8 tweets

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