The better you are at your job, the better PostHog is overall!
Books
Everyone at PostHog is eligible to buy books to help you in your job.
The reason we think books can be more helpful than just Googling stuff, is that the level of quality has to be higher for them to get published.
You may buy a couple of books a month without asking for permission. As a general rule, spending up to $50/month on books is fine and requires no extra permission. You can use your books budget towards audiobooks and podcasts as well, if you prefer.
Books do not have to be tied directly to your area, and they only need be loosely relevant to your work. For example, biographies of leaders can help a manager to learn, and can in fact be more valuable than a tactical book on management. Likewise, if you're an engineer, a book on design can also be particularly valuable for you to read. Additionally, we host a monthly book club called BookHog, and the budget can be used for those books as well.
Training budget
We have an annual training budget for every team member, regardless of seniority. The budget can be used for relevant courses, training, formal qualifications, or attending conferences. You do not need approval to spend your budget, but you might want to speak to your manager first, in case they have some useful feedback or pointers to a better idea.
We strongly encourage all non-technical team members to take some kind of entry level programming course - it's part of our 'everybody codes' culture that everyone can at least understand very basic concepts around software development. Codecademy is a good place to start and they cover many of the technologies we use, such as Python and React.
The training budget is $1000 per calendar year, but this isn't a hard limit - if you want to spend in excess of this, have a chat with your manager. Where the costs are higher than $1000, please give Charles a heads-up, so he can increase your card limit.
If possible, please share your learnings with the team afterwards!
Time spent training others
Time spent talking at conferences and user groups, and time spent coaching others at organizations like Code Nation, is part of your training. You're not expected to use your own time for this. We think that activities like these help you get better at your job, advertise PostHog, and help increase the diversity of the tech industry - all things we value!
It is expected that that you would spend up to half a day a month on these activities. Like the training budget, this isn't a hard limit. If you think you need more than that talk to your manager.