9. Bring up the same fundamental company flaws every staff meeting. This is very easy to do because there are so many and they hardly ever get fixed. "Testing is broken because..."
10. Provide vivid postmortems of problems in meetings and emails. Again, this is so easy to do (and, oddly, greatly appreciated by management).
11. Block out tons of time in Outlook for "faux meetings". You must be important to be so hard to schedule.
12. Leave complex voice mail instructions: "If this is for ORP, contact Joe. If this is for Europe, ping me at...". Makes you look way more important than you really are.
13. Always have lots of complex diagrams on your white board. Change them often.
14. Always have lots of paper plastered to your wall. Change it often.
15. Publish & email explicit status reports often. Make it look like you're the only one who really knows what's going on. "I talked to Mary and she said we have to..."
16. Write & deploy lots of "generating" software that writes other software and runs cron jobs. Make sure your initials are perpetuated on logs everywhere.
17. Always walk quickly. Never have enough time to talk. "How's it going, John? Catch up with you later. Late for a meeting in dev..." (Bonus: always carry important looking papers/folder)
18. Always be on your cell phone. (Not texting or surfing; that make you look like a slacker. Always talking loudly and urgently: "No! The other log program!")
19. Always leave food on your desk. Only busy people never have time to finish what they're eating.
20. Always have treats to share with others. They may not realize it, but they'll probably never allow themselves to notice any of your possible apparent faults.
21. Get your name/initials on as many tickets and documents as possible, even those with only one line of code of just a quick comment on some little thing. People subconcisouly measure in quantity as much as quality. ("Wow, Ed's really been busy lately!")
22. Never use the words "but" or "can't". Put others down (thus elevating yourself) without offending them.
23. Always say things like "Yes, of course," "I am at your service," or "If you ever need help, let me know," You don't actually have to do anything. Just say that you will. People will remember it as if you actually did something.
24. Never chit chat in the break room, hallway, or social get-togethers. Don't accidently destroy your carefully cultivated "too busy" persona.