Conquering Corporate America
medium.com/conquering-corporate-america · Group blog · on HN since 2014
Satirical Medium publication offering tongue-in-cheek workplace advice on seeming smart in meetings, emails and engineering jobs.
What HN saysHN links it when discussing meeting behavior; its '10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings' is quoted and reposted in comments.
24HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
20stories submitted
81story points
3 months agolast shared
2014people per year2026
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- 13Mark zuckerberg gives up family home job facebook users remain unimpressed 7c086bac3ae71 people · first shared 2016
What HN people wrote when they linked it
FullMtlAlcoholc · 2017-02-07
> However it also looks incredibly rude and zoned out, but if I'm not doing it, I'll probably focus on the visual details of the person talking and my mind will wander to some random topic that comes to mind. Anyone have any tricks to help them either not look rude, or to concentrate on some audio without wandering off during some topic?
Work remotely :). Shit like this is why I transitioned out of the modern office and work 100% remotely. You could try somehow concealing what you're writing and look up every once in a while to look like you're taking notes. You're spot on that the visual details are a distraction. I concentrate better when I look at something boring, like a piece of paper. Perhaps this is why I find trying to take notes on a computer an exercise in futility.
A bit off topic, but if you care more about the optics of meetings rather than getting something out of it, here are a few "tips" [1]
* Translate % metrics into fractions and vice versa. Honestly, there are quite a few people who understand 1 in 4 better than 25%
* Tell everyone to "take a step back". This is genuinely useful when people start chiming in with comments or questions that should be taken offline. For bonus points, once you silenced the free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness that the meeting has devolved into, follow up with "What problem are we trying to solve here? BAM, you're the smart guy asking the "important" questions here.
* Ask "Will this scale", for everything. Especially if…
spider-mario · 2026-08-13
“Guys, guys, guys, can we take a step back here?
What problem are we really trying to solve?”
https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/10-tricks-to-appear-sm…
aantix · 2019-01-02
10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings
https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/10-tricks-to-appear-sm…
jexe · 2016-04-27
I'm sort of surprised by the level of cynicism the HN crowd has. Call me naive, I'd like to believe that he's trying to do something good with his money without letting shareholders steer FB into a typical wall street short-term balance sheet game.
Reminds me of https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/mark-zuckerberg-gives-…