--- title: "Are courses\\consultants a waste of money?" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2009/3/2/are-coursesconsultants-a-waste-of-money.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2009/3/2/are-coursesconsultants-a-waste-of-money.html" published: "2009-03-02T01:07:19" updated: "2009-03-02T01:07:19" tags: ["Community"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "People will pay you to learn – no matter what you do in your developer life, people will pay you to constantly learn. It doesn’t matter if you’re a developer, team lead, manager, consultant, speaker, IT Guy or anything…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Are courses\\consultants a waste of money? By Roy Osherove March 2, 2009 In [Community](https://osherove.com/blog/category/community) **Historical article** · Originally published March 2, 2009; technical details may be outdated. People will pay you to learn – no matter what you do in your developer life, people will pay you to constantly learn. It doesn’t matter if you’re a developer, team lead, manager, consultant, speaker, IT Guy or anything – whatever you **choose** to do in your career will be a learning experience. The courses I teach on TDD are never the same between instances. Each one if a bettering of the one before it, because things change between them: reality changes, my understanding changes, preconceptions are broken, and new ones are formed. So yeah, people will pay for my mistakes, as they pay for any mistakes we all do during our career. Being afraid of being wrong is not a reason to stop doing something – doing is a way to learn. Can you say that you wasted money on learning VB6 courses a 8 years ago? does it matter? That’s how things just are. If someone teaches a course on TDD, which then turns to a course on BDD – does that mean that you wasted your money on those earlier TDD courses, that you were actually **paying** for that someone’s mistakes in perception? what about the opposite? IF I as a consultant were teaching someone to do X and a year later I realize it should have been Y all along – does that mean I’m a scam artist? or that I took advantage of someone? If so – every developer and consultant on the face of the earth should stop working right now – because we live in a reality that keeps changing as we learn from it. It’s all in the doing. that is where the learning lies. and growth comes from actually being wrong, figuring it out and bettering it. There **are no courses that are always relevant**. at the minimum they need small alterations. not to mention changing in full. ## More in Community [All posts in Community](https://osherove.com/blog/category/community) - Mar 17, 2009 ### [ALT.NET Israel – Meeting II 2d and 3rd of April](https://osherove.com/blog/2009/3/17/altnet-israel-meeting-ii-2d-and-3rd-of-april.html) - Mar 4, 2009 ### [We need a new slogan](https://osherove.com/blog/2009/3/4/we-need-a-new-slogan.html) - Nov 17, 2007 ### [CodeBetter without the Bellware - Good or Evil?](https://osherove.com/blog/2007/11/17/codebetter-without-the-bellware-good-or-evil.html) - Nov 15, 2007 ### [Free MS Press books for a 5 minute screencast](https://osherove.com/blog/2007/11/15/free-ms-press-books-for-a-5-minute-screencast.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/