pizzahoe

I'm new to this weekly syncup thing with my manager and he already knows the things I work on through daily standups, the issues I've faced or things that have gone great through retros after every sprint.

This gives me little to talk about with my manager except personal goals sometimes, a bit about our lives in general, etc. I was wondering what you guys discuss and how do you make best use of this meeting?

So my company has a budget of around 200$ which would expire by the year end if I don't spend it on courses, books, trainings, etc.

I'm interested in knowing what you'd do or suggest. I'm in a full stack role and have tried the below.

1. Pluralsight has good material for many topics but they're outdated many times, especially for cloud topics.
2. Udemy has mostly up to date content and many really good creators but lacks coverage of advanced topics like pluralsight.
3. Coursera has good University courses but make little sense in real life development.

What are some of the ways you'd have spent this budget? What are some other sites worth looking into?

In my short career I've noticed that employers are notorious for underpaying you to the point that people with 3-4 years of experience are getting paid the same as freshers. The management always has an excuse to not increase pay or increase it very minimally. The best way to increase pay has been to keep moving every 2-3 years from one company to the next if switching means at least 1.5x or 2x the current salary.

This means major interview prep requiring solving leetcode style questions, solving system design questions, then some more. I just wanted to how often do you prepare? Are you always interview ready or start prepping a few months before switching jobs?