1. Stick to people and/or companies already famous on the Internet, either as Net celebs or because they're in today's news. Sergey and Larry doing anything is gossip — photos are even better. A bank intern would have to do something really crazy to be news.
2. Tell us something more specific than "She likes the booze." Tell us something unique and entertaining she did while drunk. Something David Duchovny would do on Californication.(Illustration by HowStuffWorks)
   
   
3. When in doubt, hit Send. We'll sort it out. Some readers worry too much that we've already seen it. That's not a problem here. Worse, you might worry we'll cost you your job. That's a valid concern. But we've got over twenty years' total experience at protecting our sources for national publications. I know how not to "burn a source," in newsroom jargon, as reflexively as I know that I began the previous sentence with a conjunction. We know your manager reads us. It's in the server logs. So yeah, trust us. People say Valleywag will stab you in the back. That's a lie. Valleywag will only stab you in the face.

1. DO appear on Twitter as a real person. Be like comcastcares, not Wachovia.
2. DON'T let your PR firm do the tweeting. A customer-facing employee like comcastcares is best.
3. Who to follow:
   DO follow people who follow your company's account.
   DO follow people who tweet about the company more than once.
   DO follow people who talk about the company's space.
4. DO reply to people who direct-message you. Be engaged and responsive. Be personable. There's nothing worse than sending someone a direct message on Twitter ... and hearing nothing back.

The core issue isn't compensation, it's trust. This article at Infoworld explains the shift in perception many IT employees experience: As they become more senior, they become a threat rather than an asset. Something to be protected against, rather than being the protector.

Moreover, IT people often feel they're not being told the truth about the organization they serve. Are stock options about to tank? Is the scandal denied in the press actually true? Will the techies be blamed for project failures to save face? Is the CEO who demands weekend work busy packing his golden parachute?

It's a cliche, but it's true: IT people live in a logic-driven world. Privileged, encrypted, confidential information and access-restriction procedures are fine with them. Lies aren't. Computers don't do lies. Yet the same human boss who tells an admin how valuable he is to the company is often planning to cut him loose. Terry Childs went berzerk because he knew the cost-cutting managers piling more and more work on him were also looking for a way to chop his $126,000 salary from the payroll.

The solution isn't perks, it's candor. If management is playing a game of Advanced Strategery against the IT department, a foosball table, free lunches and drycleaning will only add to their sense of indignity. Yeah, they're kind of ungrateful that way. But if your admins feel pressured to continually re-justify their existence to managers they believe are brazen liars, why is it such a surprise that one of them will look for a way to turn the tables?

• Don't hope for much. Past experience tells us those laid off will not be treated well. EDS has been known to time layoffs to minimize severance paid.
• Leave when you can. Given the prospects of a skimpy severance, you might as well get out sooner rather than later. EDS has a sordid history as a service provider. Although the guys in the trenches are long gone, the management culture that brought you the $8 billion Navy-Marines IT debacle is alive and well and is now moving to a new host environment. Trust me — another six months at the company will not add anything to your resume. Start your job search now.
• Aggressively market yourself. Polish the resume on standards like Monster and CareerBuilder. Make sure to also hit specialty sites like Dice.com, Cybercoders, and Jobfox. Update your professional networking pages. LinkedIn is an obvious one, but have you thought about your college's alumni directory?
• Clean up your online persona. Yes, most employers don't actually waste time checking your social-network profiles. But why take chances? Play it safe and delete anything even vaguely unprofessional from your Facebook and MySpace pages.
• Attend mixers and job fairs. Not because you'll get a job there, but just to get practice interacting with other people. Your next job will require more face time, not less.
• Meet with the headhunters. You may not love them but they can be effective. Visit your friends at Robert Half and the other usual suspects.
• Keep your sense of humor. HP's layoffs are large in scale, but you're not the first person to endure a flurry of pink slips at the workplace. Some of the revenge stories written by other people in the same situation are epic.

(Photoillustration by Jackson West)

• Your best bet is to move to Nevada. There you'll find affordable, sunny space to prototype, a pre-existing tech culture in the Reno area, and no state income tax.
• The disruptive tech in solar power is curently thin film, or copper indium gallium selenide. It's used to make thin, flexible panels unlike the thicker, heavier silicon panels currently found on roofs around the Valley. Thin film cells are currently less efficient than silicon, but the technology is ripe for breakthroughs in design and manufacturing. That's why VentureWire reports at least three companies that landed $200-300 million in funding in the past two months. Lux Research estimates that $671 million of the $2 billion invested in solar thru July went to thin film technologies.
• TreeHugger's metaresearch suggests that solar is pricier than wind power to get the same electrical output from an installation. For you, that's good!

Rule No. 1: Convince the video's participants that the end product will be less embarrassing if they don't worry about being embarrassed while they make it. Get your people to either commit themselves fully to the project, or stay out of the way. Vimeo's companywide lip synch of Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" wouldn't work nearly so well if the girl listening to her iPod at the beginning didn't keep such a straight face. Know what else doesn't hurt? Actually memorizing the lyrics.

Rule No. 2: Get the heavies involved. Digg's "Groove Is In The Heart" from Mark Trammell wouldn't be nearly so worth watching if CEO Jay Adelson didn't start rapping two minutes in. Tocquigny's video featured only interns, making it seem like the real executives didn't take the PR project seriously. What kind of example does that set for the monkey-see-monkey-do younguns?

Rule No. 3: Plan meticulously and practice. Here's "L'amour a la française" from AOL France. Note how precisely the performers hit their marks. Note how cleverly new singers appear on the screen. That's dedication, people! (It probably didn't hurt that the most of these people knew they were about to be laid off and probably spent most of their remaining time working on this video.)

Rule No. 4: Learn to edit. Facebook code monkeys — here dressed as White Ninjas for the company's annual games day festivities — aren't actually supersneaky ninjas; that they appear as such comes from careful editing. A hint: Editing usually takes longer than filming.

Rule No. 5: Feature the most attractive coworkers prominently. Sure, a companywide video will probably include everyone from the company. But give the longest shots to the most attractive office-workers, like the girl listening to the iPod at the beginning of the Vimeo video or the swirling blonde in the middle of the video below made by Leonardo Dalessandri's production company, "Tambureddu." Also, be a little cynical and use a frame from one of those shots for the clips' still frame, which will appear in searches and embedded placements in blogs.

People like this are not sick. Most people really never think. Most people just go to work, do the same old thing, and go home. Our programmer can’t *stop* thinking. Our programmer looks at social situations and doesn’t see how they connect to his current stable of pet projects. This guy operates on raw intuition. He never stops thinking about the big picture.

Clean up your rhetoric a little. Acknowledge that the guy has a point. Be up front and clear or you’re nothing but a used car salesman to him. People have to communicate a finite self-contained need. He needs a chance to show off his “super powers."

Handing some micromanager authority over his to-do list is dangerous: there are more dependencies and variables than what anyone else will see or care about, but that are critically important to our programmer/”genius”. In an ideal world, he’d have “June Cleaver” at home to make sure he has dressed himself properly. He’d have an accountant and a secretary. At work, he’d be steered, not “managed”. Once a year, he’d have the chance to work on a two-month project that he prototypes and architects himself where he has the chance to be appreciated as the “genius” that he is.

To combat this problem, Google released a new feature for Gmail that lets users login and use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), but it's not automatic. Here's how to set it up:

1. Log in to Gmail and click "Settings."
   
2. In the General tab scroll down to "Browser connection."
   
3. Make sure "Always use https" is selected and save changes.

Seems kind of odd that Google wouldn't set this up automatically but, hey, at least you can access your email — unlike those Apple dorks, right?

1. Show your product within the first 60 seconds
Don’t spend five or ten minutes "setting the stage" or "giving the background." If you don't have a product to show, don't take the meeting.

2. Take less than five minutes to demo
All the tiny little features, you don't have to show them. Larry and Sergey wouldn't open up the advanced search.

3. Leave people wanting more
It's up to you to make such a compelling core product that they are intrigued enough to explore it.

4. Talk about what you've done, not what you're going to do
Steve Jobs doesn't waste time on what Apple's going to do. Weak startup leaders immediately start talk about "what's next.” What really matters is the core functionality.

5. Understand your competitive landscape—current and historical
I've had three or four companies pitch me on [products that unknowingly re-implemented] Third Voice—the controversial "Web annotation" service from Web 1.0.

6. Short answers are best
Answer questions with the most concise answer. [Then stop talking!]

7. PowerPoint bullet slides are death
Slides that are not boring include charts, product shots, feature set tables and the like.

8. How to use this new device called the phone
When presenting over the phone use a handset and a land-line only! Mobile phones and speakerphones sound horrible, disrespectful.

9. How to handle questions you don't know the answer to
No one has an answer for everything, except b.s. artists. Feel free to say you don't know.

10. Always confirm the time of your meeting/call, and always be 15 minutes early
[Start off on the right foot.] Send a simple email saying "Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow at your offices at 123 Main Street at 3pm. If anything changes you can reach me on my mobile at 310-555-1212." Show respect by being in their lobby or on hold on the conference call five to 15 minutes ahead of time.

• If you're an employee who's paid hourly and has filled out a W-2 form, you are probably non-exempt. In which case, you are entitled to time-and-a-half after eight hours in a day or the first eight hours on the seventh continuous day and beyond, and double-time after twelve hours in a day or eight hours on the seventh continuous day.
• For salaried workers, there are three classes of exemption. If you are an "executive," you are exempt from overtime. Executives are involved in the management of the company, have at least two subordinates reporting to them directly, have the power to hire and fire employees or recommend such actions and are allowed to make independent decisions that impact the business.
• The "administrator" exemption only applies in cases where an employee is administering the business affairs of a company, directly assists a proprietor or executive, or works independently and exercises discretion on non-manual tasks that involve special skill or technical expertise. However, if you're in the process of producing goods and services that the company sells, you're probably not exempt. This class of exemption is often abused.
• The "professional" exemption is one that's often abused at technology companies, because accredited engineers or others doing "learned or artistic" creative or intellectual work is exempted — but only if they make over twice the state's full-time minimum wage in salary, which is over $33,000 a year. And this is meant to apply to individuals, not entire classes of employees at a company (hence the quantity of class-action suits when companies apply the exemption too broadly).

To be clear, I can't speak for anyone on the Gartner chart above. But I can offhand think of a half-dozen tech companies whose founders spent anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000 per year to keep an analyst "on retainer." In theory, they're paying for the analyst's firsthand counsel. In practice, they're paying the analyst to talk about them to the press and put them into reports. More than a "widespread practice," it's a standard business expense factored into the budget, just like the employees' health plan.

This is the food chain of what passes for fact in the Valley: The company pays the analyst, the high-paid analyst talks up the company, the low-paid journalist runs the analysts' quotes as instantly obtained "reporting." If I wasn't so bad at following instructions, I'd be cruising for an analyst gig right now.

Don't believe me? Try getting Jupiter or Forrester to give you even a partial client list.

(Magic quadrant of business-intelligence vendors by Gartner Research)

The time it takes before the main text and/or images load matter, too, because most readers will start reading the page as soon as there's something to look at, rather than waiting for everything to settle into place. Dave Winer's Scripting News is a living lesson in speed over flash. I hit Dave's site once a day because I know it'll take under 10 seconds to load the page, scroll down it for Valleywag-grade dirt, and then move on to another site. Yet for whatever reason, I've never been able to personally convince anyone to lighten up a heavy front door. Oh, everyone who cares uses RSS now. Tech people have the best excuses for laziness.

Segar, who was also diagnosed with Asperger's before a death from unrelated causes in 1997, wrote that "like it or not, as an autistic person or someone with Asperger syndrome some jobs will be more suitable than others."

Segar lists computer programmer and architect as suitable careers. Mostly, Zuckerberg's job is a combination of those two. The tough part is that as a company founder and CEO, Zuckerberg has to be Facebook's chief spokesperson, which is really a sales job — and one Segar lists as especially difficult for those with Asperger's. It requires one to be an excellent conversationalist, a particular challenge to those diagnosed with the syndrome.

He also offers tips for the afflicted on how to talk. Here's his most relevant advice on how Zuckerberg could avoid stalling when faced with the likes of Stahl:

• Be careful of stating the obvious.
• Listening can be extremely difficult, especially if you have to keep your ears open 24 hours a day, but you can get better with practice. The most important thing to listen to is the plot of the conversation.
• Be on the lookout for eye contact from other people as it can often mean they would like to hear your point of view.
• Body language doesn't just include gestures, it also includes facial expressions, eye contact and tone of voice.
• You might be one of these people who almost talks in a single tone without knowing it.Ask a trustworthy person if this is true and if it is you may have to exaggerate the intonation in your voice to emphasise what you say, but not too much. This will sound artificial at first.
• If you are a young man whose voice is breaking, then if you find it more comfortable just let it break for good. It may sound strange at first on the inside but it will be sounding much more natural on the outside. If you are worried about what your friends might think which should only be a short term problem anyway, it may be useful to take the opportunity of letting your voice break while you are changing schools.
• [For interviews] prepare as many possible answers for as many possible questions as you can but don't over rehearse or rigidify your answers. It is good to get help at this stage.
• Aim to be the assertive type, one who has an upright but relaxed stance, maintains eye contact when listening or speaking (for over two thirds of the time) looking at faces as a whole, can express his true feelings, and is interested in other people's opinions as well as his own.
• If you don't react to other people's body language with your own, they might mistake you for being unsympathetic.
• If you try to come across as being cooler, wittier, tougher and more confident that other people, then whenever you break an unwritten rule people might mistake it for nastiness. In this case, it might be in your best interest to drop your pretence.

• Give me the offer in writing?
  Good answers: “Yes,” and “Let’s work out the major points and we’ll give you a written offer."
• How does my compensation compare to my peers?
  Your peers: someone who joined at the same time and has the same title.
• What are my options worth?
  Know how many options you have and how they vest. You will have to pay for your options — an option strike price. High strike prices are more common due to high-valuation rounds (Facebook), founder cash-outs, and high 409A valuations.
• What percentage of the company do my options represent on a fully diluted basis?
  People think this number is important—it’s not.
• Can I exercise my unvested options early?
  Exercise options early to pay less taxes in an acquisition or IPO.
• How much money do you have in the bank? How long will it last?
  Investors call this runway. You have a job as long as the company has runway.
• What was the company’s post-money valuation in the last round?
  [Helps determine] the acquisition value of your options.
• What are the investor’s preferences?
  If the acquisition price isn’t greater than the investor’s dominate the board.
• Would I hire the CEO and board to increase the value of my options?
  Don’t join the company if you don’t trust the CEO and board to avoid opportunities to treat their stock better than yours.

This week, the HP vice president indicted for leaking trade secrets from IBM, his former employeer, pleaded guilty. Dude, UR DOIN IT RONG. Atul Malhotra allegedly emailed the goods to a coworker, drawing a big red arrow back to his own forehead. Ready to cash in on your inside info? Follow this six-step plan.

1. Be sure the secret is worth something. You don't want to risk your neck over info the company is already required to file with the SEC.

2. Pick the right potential buyer. Start with senior VPs or members of the executive team -– someone who can and will play ball.

3. Establish an anonymous Internet presence. Only do email from Internet connections that can't be traced back to you. Local Wi-Fi hotspots and unsecured home networks are your friend. Never use the same email address to contact more than one person. Don't just change addresses, hop from Gmail to Hotmail to Yahoo. Skyhook is developing a wonderful hybrid positioning system to pin down your location based on IP address. Keep that in mind.

4. Ditch email for prepaid phones from T-Mobile, available at your local Target, it a mark shows interest. But remember that if a 911 operator can find your location, so can anyone else. Check for security cameras in the area before you dial or take a call.

5. Use an untraceable method to transfer the info. British agents used Bluetooth or IR devices disguised as rocks to pass information. Get creative: A dropped USB stick, a misplaced folder, or a shared Google Doc all can work. The Madrid bombers created email drafts that others could access, so nothing was ever sent through an SMTP server that could be tracked. You needn't be high-tech. Aldrich Ames carried top secret documents out of the CIA in paper bags.

6. Hide the money. Never break omerta, lest you end up like Pink Cadillac Guy in Goodfellas. Living beyond your means always tips people off. It happened to Ames. And keep your mouth shut. James Hall III overshared with a Russian spy who turned out to be FBI. Earl Edwin Pitts' ex-wife and Robert Hannsen's brother-in-law helped turn them in. That's the downside of a successful sale: You sell the company's secret, but saddle yourself with one of your own.