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The article assumes all learning is academic from authorities and never from doing. WRT doing at only $280/mon at a reasonable billing rate I could burn thru m
by VLM 10y ago
The article assumes all learning is academic from authorities and never from doing. WRT doing at only $280/mon at a reasonable billing rate I could burn thru my learning budget on a saturday afternoon and barely keep up with the times much less get ahead.
The other problem is it assumes all learning is of the mind, but if you get it in your head to get involved in physical aspects of the field, then some FPGA boards and oscilloscopes and next thing you know you've blown your budget until 2030 unless you're careful. Arguably even "mind only" developers who buy anything more than a raspberry pi should account for their annual $3000 mac laptop and $500 phone (and its $1200/yr of phone service) and pretty soon you have no budget left over just buying hardware alone.
- Namrog84 10y agoThere is definitely a fuzzy line on multi-use items though. I buy my computer for many purposes, not just a singular objective. Otherwise my budgets would all be overblown. My PC is more than just learning, it is for personal use, work, gaming, tv, movies, education, entertainment, communication, and so many different things. If purchased for any individual one of those, it'd be quite costly.
- wkoszek 10y agoYou're right, I was thinking about software engineers in software field when writing this. But I actually came from embedded field, and I did use embedded boards and some equipment before, and there are ways to get it cheaper. Development board is maybe $400-$500 and the scope, if you lease it or buy it via monthly payments, should fit in this 5%.
- Eridrus 10y agoEven when thinking of software you sometimes need special hardware or software, lots of recent machine learning tools need a GPU to run well, so that's another $500+