Talking to girls and negotiating salary are two things that us computer folk are historically bad at. We're actually bad at lots of things, but these two are u

Talking to girls and negotiating salary are two things that us computer folk are historically bad at. We're actually bad at lots of things, but these two are unique in that rather than finding ways to get better at them, we instead proclaim them to be Impossible Things For Computer Programmers To Learn and refuse even attempt to get a little bit better at them. This is really strange. If you were bad at writing Objective-C code, but it was 2008 and knowing how to write Objective-C code would let you answer "Yes" to any of those dozen emails a week you were getting offering $150/hr to write Objective-C, what would you do? Would you perhaps spend a few hours learning how to do it? Now what if you were bad at negotiating? "No way. Negotiating is evil. They should just pay everybody the same. That'd be fair." Or dating? "No way. Talking to girls seems hard and scary. And I'd actually have to walk over there and talk to one of them." But here's the thing. It's only hard because you've never done it. Go do some of it and you'll find it's really not that bad.