the time when she wore dirty shoes and almost made a nice lady cry

Rebecca over at Modite likes her, and thinks she gave the Madison networkers some good advice. But why is Penelope Trunk so mean when she tells readers (most of the time) to be nice? (Now, as Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval will tell you, that's good advice.)

And why does she wear dirty shoes (see hyperlink to mean, above) while constantly promoting the importance of appearance?

the one where she says you're a loser if you don't know what everyone in your industry makes

The snide and exaggerated tone in this post, "When a Mouse Click isn't a Career Move," are exactly like the contempt Penelope Trunk showed to a group of (mostly) women at the Blogher 2007 conference. Read here about how she was quickly proven wrong when she emphatically told the group that you "can't get a book from a blog."

My thoughts on this post are captured by this commenter on Yahoo Finance, where Penelope posts regularly (to the dismay of many who consider her advice to be ridiculous):

What is Penelope's problem? .... she does her usually catty put-down of others "If you don't have a lot of contacts, you don't add value". PT's concept of "adding value" is constant networking; that may be true in a sales job, may be good for advancing one's career, but there's more to adding value than having a big rolodex. And who asks their friends how much money they make? As to "quality of life" being about whether there's a Nordstrom's in town, give me a break. The trouble with PT's columns is that they are all about her; she's basically giving advice to herself, or to someone with EXACTLY the same values she has. Since very few people live a similar life to Penelope, and few have the same values and interests that she has, her advice is only useful to perhaps 0.1% of the potential readers, if that. And often when the reader IS from PT's exact demographic, her advice is just plain BAD (such as advising people to take long lunches, skip meetings, take unscheduled days off without asking, call fellow workers on the weekend to make them work, etc.)

Better advice: As always, take her counsel with a tablespoon of salt. Use online salary comparison tools to get a general sense of your profession or industry, and also use personal connections.