a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff. please find previous editions here.

• salary negotiation, negotiating never makes (worthwhile) offers worse. this means you need what political scientists call a commitment strategy: you always, as a matter of policy, negotiate all offers. this also means you do not start negotiating until you already have a yes-if (yes-if we agree on terms). do not start negotiating from no-but (no-but we might hire you anyway if you're really, really effing cheap). recommended
• lessons from a silicon valley job search, it's a great market to be an engineer, but finding the right job still requires a lot of time and effort. spray applications anywhere and everywhere you like the look of, and see what sticks. a little organisation will go a long way, but a little over-thinking will quickly make you go insane. recommended
• engineer's guide to us visas
• don't scar on the first cut, policies are codified overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again situations. a collective punishment for the wrong-doings of a one-off. and unless you want to treat the people in your environment as five year-olds, "because the policy said so" is not a valid answer
• a rant about women, it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations i am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. they aren't just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. they are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can't say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world
• cargo cult agile, it's unfortunate, though - and a little ironic - that a set of methods created to reduce meetings and waste is being abused to increase them. stand-up meetings are a neat tool, but they're hardly the core of agile development. beware cargo cult agile. don't use stand-up meetings to avoid real communication and collaboration