Remote Workers Are Losing Out on Promotions | Hacker News Reader

Remote Workers Are Losing Out on Promotions

wsj.com

45 pointslistenallyall47 comments

I work for a company that is 90% remote and I think there's a lot of nuance to this conversation.

Yes, if your job mainly consists of staring at your computer all day and you work primarily with others in the same boat, you are probably going to be more productive at home.

If you work with a large cross-section of people and/or your work is dependent on relationship building, you are probably going to reap benefits from going in.

If the majority of your company is remote, all bets are off and going in to an office (if one is offered) isn't going to do much for you. I'm the exception to this rule - I prefer to be in an office even if my work is semi-solitary; it's where I'm at my best.

And most importantly of all, the most effective environment depends on the person. A majority of people understand that and know what is best for themselves - we should respect that. The benefit from making most people more productive outweighs the cost of the few who take advantage of the situation. I wish more managers understood that.

Ah, the new attack line.

The cost for me to go in, on top of the lost time (it will add about 3 hrs to my working day), means the promotion I MIGHT get will probably not cover it - but the lost time with my family and my fitness will be forever gone. And my company has saved a lot by missing pay rises which people have accepted due to the ‘benefits’ of remote work.

I will stick to remote work for the time being - but in future I might be open to hybrid, for significant more money.

I was in a horrible position a few years ago. My manager and I were BOTH remote from the main HQ.

A VP joined, moved to the HQ and then systematically dismantled her. It was easy to do because he was on-site and she wasn't. I got caught in the cross fire.

It caused incredibly weird hidden and secretive politics to have this guy in the HQ with F2F access to all the "key people."

Politically it was "unwinnable."

If you want to "win" politics, have to go in. I personally didn't want to win, turned out badly for me. I just wanted to do work. Before I knew it, entire division a toxic political nightmare.

Remote work can hide extreme political disfunction from upper management. I dont know what they could have looked at to see the problem in that group. Remote work can hide a lot of toxic behavior.

> Remote work can hide extreme political disfunction from upper management.

Not arguing with your experience, but to me it seems you're angry at "hybrid" work, not remote work.

> Bloom’s research has found that fully remote workers are more productive than their fully on-site peers, but because remote workers miss out on casual in-person conversations around the office, relationships suffer, and their promotion prospects tend to take a hit.

I started remotely and then transitioned to hybrid, and I can definitely relate to this. I have casual conversations with many colleagues on other teams who used to simply be a name on my screen, or someone that I would never talk to ever since our workflow paths never crossed. However, I do know folks who are still fully remote and still receiving proper recognition, so it definitely varies company to company.

> However, I do know folks who are still fully remote and still receiving proper recognition

The ones who pick up slack and are hungry; absolutely.

WSJ didn't get the memo. Most "promotions" aren't worth it. You get more responsibility with very little boost in compensation.

You're better off switching companies.

In this economy?

but you have to accumulate those little boosts to eventually reach C or D level where the compensation reaches a whole new level. This is like saying it aint worth studying because you still won't be employable by the end of the school year

lol, you aren't getting a promotion to C level by hanging out in engineering.

Best case you'll be some IC that is paid as much as a team lead.

> Best case you'll be some IC that is paid as much as a team lead.

How about being... the team lead? And where do they go? You think they just become team leads and then retire?

I mean ..... yeah. The other path is becoming a manager. But no-one is really being promoted into the C tier.

Yes.

You can maybe lead larger projects, and bigger teams, but ultimately its not a path to C suite.

Path to C suite in tech is mostly founding, occasionally odd things like board membership, venture capital.

CTO?

What if you like the company you work at? It's no small thing to feel comfortable with the work that you do and the people that you work with. Even if a promotion comes with more responsibility and modest pay bumps, that's often better than rolling the dice on a new company in the hopes of more money and the same comfort level.

Many people also don't have hundreds of employers lining up at their door to hire them. Even if they are, it's not necessarily for a bunch more money.

That is very VERY dependent on the industry and the type of work you do.

Completely rubbish in some lines of service.

Yep, either the promotions come with massive jumps in responsibility and fuck all jump in TC, or you find yourself basically promoted into a dead end position anyway where further career growth isn’t possible (there’s literally nowhere to go). This is very common for engineers.

Moving job is usually the more effective way to get more money, and at the end of the day, it’s the money that matters.

The message is clear: stop working from home and come back into the office or we will punish you any way we legally can.

this

How can that be, this is an article from that leftist rag <checks notes>, the Wall Street Journal?

Good, I don't want any more responsibility.

My thoughts exactly :-). Remote and fewer responsibilities are a win-win situation for some of us.

Interesting. I wonder if we'll get to the point where the climb-the-greasy-pole career types will be in the office 60 hours a week, while the folks who actually get shit done will be WFH for 30 hours a week (because that's all they need to actually get the shit done).

That seems fine! The end goal isn't just to climb the ladder, if people are happier with more personal freedom at the cost of a promotion, it's fine! Let them do that.

I think this is stating the obvious if you are eyeing a position in mgmt. Im ok with this.

However I feel like this propaganda to scare people back to the office

If my company allows me to work from anywhere in the US I'll be completely willing to give up any future promotion. My current level and compensation allows me to live a happy life now, probably even better if I moved to a place with lower cost of living. Sounds fair to me. (If things get worse, I'll find another job.)

Oh no whatever will I do not being promoted. My kids are going to hate me for not being a L9 at XYZ firm.

The time and QoL I save will always beat hypothetical missed promotions at a current employer. For me, I don't think there's an exception to that rule. If I want more money I can ask and if it doesn't show up I can leave.

As a remote worker on a hybrid team, I did get promoted, but I am also not surprised at all that remote would be promoted less often.

It really should not happen, especially for fully remote teams and/or companies.

Current company has built a comprehensive career management that encompasses even remote workers. It's a very objective and simple approach. The challenge comes with crafting KPIs with each employee as basis for promotions, but so far it has been paying off.

in 25 years i've only been promoted once and that was in 1999.

What steps do you feel you did or did not take to achieve promotion, or signal to your manager that this was something you were even interested in?

For most engineers, "promotion" means "convert yourself into a manager somehow", and I know many engineers who just aren't interested - to the point it wouldn't surprise me if this is assumed in many orgs.

Did you directly get promoted to CEO ;-) ?

I don't think I ever got one and I've yet to witness a fair promotion process, I'm not even sure those even exist.

Most of the time it's the "friends club" which gets promoted, either founders old friends or close colleagues recruited after. That makes sense I guess in terms of social relationships but I would rather prefer that they cut the BS and say it openly instead of pretending they have a promotion process.

That feels even more insulting having a review on the supposed past performance and knowing it's just theater anyways.

My advice here is that if you want to get promoted, just switch companies.

I would re-word this: "My advice here is that if you want more pay, just switch companies". Usually (maybe not as much in the current job environment), you can just change jobs, doing a similar job with a similar title, and get significantly more money, just because the old company only gave you meager cost-of-living raises, and the new company wants to fill a position and will give you the current market rate which is now greater than the old company was paying you. But I wouldn't call this a "promotion". Going from non-manager to manager is a promotion, and going from "junior engineer" to "senior engineer" is one too, but most job changes don't involve such changes in title. And even the junior/senior stuff these days is mostly fluff; you'll just get called "senior" upon being hired in a new place just because you have X years of experience, not because you actually earned that title through some promotion process.

I totally agree, and I would also add that some companies are like those North Korean officials with a ridiculous number of medals, everybody is "head of something" and decorated with as many titles as possible. All of that is meaningless.

Haha, yes I can relate, I've had two in 30 years. Just got the last one last year, while mostly remote.

To be fair, I never pay any attention to getting promoted. Most of my career growth has been through changing jobs and contracting. If I really want to do something else, I just look around. The chance that a suitable position exists in the company I'm in and I want to do it is fairly low.

(for on-site workers)

You are losing out on promotions based on:

- personality

- the soap you use

- looks

- your accent

- other non-protected statuses

What’s that supposed to mean?

That means being taller, affable, attractive, and hygienic will get you more promotions, ceteris paribus.

Wow, it's almost like humans have predisposition for attractive peers, ceteris paribus.

Off-topic, is archive.org no longer able to scrape these subscription articles?

Seems a considerable loss considering they sometimes change and retract articles. With no other result cached, it seems harder to keep newspapers accountable.

This is more a statement against managment than remote work

Thats what ive been worried about

Im full remote since covid but I think it would be easier to advance when onsite

Due to the paywall I can't read the article, so not sure if this is the case, but I can imagine two things happening simultaneously: the rise of remote in the past couple of years AND the tightening of the belt in tech in the past couple of years --> less promotions in general. This definitely leads to the perception that "because of remote" less promos are happening, which is not my experience (low sample size and local, though).

Is it just me or are these attempts getting more and more ridiculous?

Not just you. I expect to see this on my LinkedIn news feed soon given their RTO-pushing agenda.

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