From Medium:
It started with a Venn diagram. Sarah Cooper was sitting in a meeting at Yahoo. It was her first job in tech. Adults varied the cadence of their nods and encouraged each other to “take a step back.” During a lull in the conversation, a brave product manager walked to the whiteboard and drew two imperfect, intersecting circles: the universal symbol for I’ve Got A Brilliant Idea.
What was on the inside didn’t matter — everyone started arguing over the diagram anyway, debating its labels and the size of its circles. Sarah took note: The product manager had successfully Appeared Smart in a Meeting.
Seven years later, Sarah reflected on the incident (and others like it). She distilled them into one of her first posts on Medium: 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings. It ricocheted through Slack channels worldwide, making all of us a little more self-aware about how we do our jobs. From overzealously agreeing with each other to asking whether the questions “on the table” are really “the right questions for us to ask” — we’re all just trying to look good under unflattering fluorescent lights.
Judging by the success of that first post, it was obvious there was an audience for a new kind of corporate satire — not The Office, but… The Slack. Rather than cubicles and commutes, Sarah focuses on pretentious engineers and the everlasting awkwardness that is videoconferencing.
Link to the rest at Medium and here’s a link to 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings: How to Get By Without Even Trying
PG enjoyed some aspects of working in the corporate world, but these posts reminded him of why he sometimes zoned out in conference rooms.