Ask HN: What's your favorite corporate power move?

At $bigcorp we had a senior vice president continuing his phone calls in the mens room (toilet) at the pissoirs. I can imagine he saw himself doing a power move (I certainly didn't) showing how important or busy he is. He did wash his hands at least.

The response of "noted".

You do a little scribble in your book or tablet or whatever and look up and say "noted" and then just stare with a pregnant pause, indicating you are waiting for the next meaningless "concern" to be articulated.

Quitting. Especially effective in the Midwest U.S. where jobs are more scarce and employers tend to take you for granted.

I like to leave at exactly 5pm.

These just sound petty, not powerful

Scheduling an offsite or business trip to avoid trivial initiatives you don't want to deal with.

I enjoy being a nice person and not fucking over other people for my own personal gain.

The classic programmer corporate power move is wearing whatever you want to the office.

Having confidence in myself and my own future. Enough so that I can say exactly how I see a situation and I can deal with the consequences whether positive or negative.

How are these power moves? They transfer your power to someone else? Showing up late for a meeting purely to waste time tells the other person you are extremely inconsiderate and someone they should actively avoid.

If I value my time, why would I spend any of it around you??

The rest of these things are just extremely rude, I cannot understand why you'd call them 'power moves'. They show insecurity and a desire to destroy the company you work in, not 'power'.

Employ or feign total ignorance of operations so no one can expect a raise, because the boss/manager doesn't even know what you do here.

Assume loyalty only from those whom you have directly hired; remove all those who predate you.

Make a strict deadline, but merrily add features at your whim, when the deadline is missed, then act astonished "how could this have happened?"

Elicit sympathy from your underpaid minions for crashing your Porsche again while auto racing.

Working from home

From the comments, seems there is confusion on what you're looking for. I sense sarcasm in your request, i.e., 'What are cargo cult things one can do to show power?' But some responses are more genuine. If you make the ask clearer in what you're really looking for, it'll make it easier to decipher the responses.

My 2 cents...

Being the only remote employee when the rest of the company is onsite.

Refusing to sign NDAs and non-competes

"Per my previous email" is my favorite. I usually attach the prior email that answers the question.

Giving my boss a heads up that I was gonna quit if things didn't change. Things didn't change, so I quit. They had almost no other technical staff so they called me asking to fix "just a couple little things". I quoted my rate at 300$ an hour, minimum 20 hours. They balked. Three days later my former boss calls me and agrees. I ended up billing 80 hours.

Pretty much every scene in the movie Margin Call.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhy7JUinlu0

The "Hard CC" isn't a power move its how things get done. I constantly check in to make sure I'm doing my job right and when I am and the problem isn't fixed, its time for it to be someone else's problem.

source: working in Support.

"What I'm hearing you say .." and then say what you want to happen.

I don't know if it's a power move, but I like to reiterate all verbal communications in a follow up email to the person(s) I was conversing with, prompting them to ensure I understood everything correctly. While it's more of a CYA thing, the power move comes into play when they try to feign ignorance on the topics of the conversation, and I can use their written words to set the record straight (or just have a record of what I may have understood, but they failed to clarify by not responding to my follow up).

The re-org in which dead wood is shunted off to an out-of-the way planning or strategy assignment.

Extra points for dotted-line reporting to another strategy person. Further extra points if the planning assignment is not funded adequately and/or has no personnel authority.

Being late isn't a power move, it's just makes you look disorganized and disrespectful. This would have 100% the opposite of your intended effect with me.

Real power moves are exercising real power: saying no and being able to back it up, expressing a dissenting opinion, solving problems and providing real value, brining in money, controlling budgets or headcount, threatening to quit because you can/will, leading by organizing people to get something done, articulating a framing for situations that cut through the BS, understand people's motivations and what's actually going on, etc. These moves "take up space," but don't confuse taking up space for power. People with actual power won't.

So get to those meetings on time.

CC boss is called "escalation" and is useful if direct requests don't work. It's not throwing under the bus, its ensuring accountability. CC boss on the first request is usually unnecessary.

Showing up late to meetings is indeed a "power move" but not respectful. Its the same as "busy bragging", talking about how much work/meetings you have. Both these are completely lame.

The biggest thing I see is holding the floor in meetings, even timing your words and sentences to prevent interruption. This is sometimes necessary when making brief, complete points, in a very aggressive environment. I like to teach people how to break into the monologues.

I didn't start doing this because it was a "power move" although its been pointed out to me that it was since.

My company like big 20 person meetings where my portion of the agenda may only be 5 minutes long.

The rest of the meeting I will listen to what is going on, chime in when relevant, but I keep on coding so I can meet my deadlines. This bothers some people who think your full attention should be on the meeting, but honestly it just isn't required for me so I multitask.