Dell workers can stay remote – but they're not going to get promoted | Hacker News Reader

Dell workers can stay remote – but they're not going to get promoted

businessinsider.com

57 pointsrntn42 comments

It's important to be aware that in some orgs, being fully remote may potentially impact your promotion opportunities, even if not explicitly stated in a policy.

In my personal experience, after going fully remote, my manager implied that it could limit my ability to advance, and that ended up being the case. At least in my company, face time with leadership seems to carry weight when it comes to promotions. For me, the benefits of remote work were worth the potential tradeoffs in career advancement. Regardless of your stance on remote work this is the reality.

I've also been on several teams post-COVID where the majority of members were remote. In my experience, when issues arise on remote teams, it's usually attributable to other underlying problems, not the remote work itself.

Even when working remotely, the promotion system seems to work at whoever sends the most slack shout-outs.

The more I work, the more I realize the management and the execs never have any idea of what's happening in their company and just rely on noise signals.

That's how they got into those positions, so they select for folks who do the same, either directly or indirectly.

That seems excessively cynical (and self-excusing). The reality is it’s incredibly hard to measure engineering work even in the best case scenario, never mind something as abstract as software and in as opaque an environment as a modern remote/hybrid workplace.

Seems more likely they’re relying on bad heuristics because it’s hard to do much else?

I never got this explanation. In all teams I was so far, it was clear to everyone on what is individuals performance. It is just managers were pretending not to see, as it would involve them making hard decisions/work. My working theory that, in most medium to large companies most management people are not interested in success/financials of company as they are mostly salaried. Actual success of a project is secondary to fraternizing with the right people.

Okay so your theory is that managers know who would be good to promote, but they literally pretend not to and simply choose someone they’d like to hang out with instead?

Sounded more like like they choose who their bosses like so they don't have to do as much convincing, to me

i have witnessed exactly this first hand

Your "extremely clear" is subjective and not measurable, which will become a problem esp. when trying to compare across individual teams.

Why do you need to compare across teams? Management often create an elaborate once a year process with peer feedback to justify the lack of action. Even then, nobody will write truly negative feedback.

If you are manager of a team, you see individuals output in the form of PRs, bugs, tickets and team activity. Instead of wasting time on one to one, managers should just review people work.

What I often see is a combination of:

  1. It is human nature to promote people that you like. People that play the game will gradually get influence and be promoted even if every project they did was total disaster.
  2. Underperforming developers are promoted to underperforming managers. This save managers from firing a person and keep team output constant without need to hire another competent developer.
  3. Driving organisation change and pushing others to do better is a career suicide. You will be universally disliked as you will highlight other people incompetence and force them to work and make risky decisions.
 4. People base salary is not based on performance, there is just no incentive to do well. Main reason why startups are successful is size and stock options distributed to employees.

> Why do you need to compare across teams?

Line managers of individual teams usually can't promote people. They can recommend someone for promotion and vouch for them.

Usually an organization has some quota for promotions. How do you distribute it? One promotion per team? But what if the teams are of different quality (for various reasons). The best dev in one team can be worse than an "average" dev in another team. You don't want to penalize the excellent dev just because they are part of an elite team.

Bingo!

No, no. They select based on what they know. If they’re as busy as any of the managers I know, beyond the lowest levels, they are certainly not making any time to inspect the actual work that anyone is doing, so they’ll base their decisions on what they know, and the people that shout out what they are doing or have done the most will be the ones they’re aware of doing anything.

right before i rage quit my last position, i got dinged for not being “active” enough in some of the slack channels monitored by “leadership”

That's fine. Just work to sabotage the org because they have a discriminatory noninclusivist and inaccessible policy. When that stops then stop the sabotage. Keep in mind that many people - especially marginalized people and neurodiverse people - are dying or living in poverty because companies are like this.

Eventually those kinds of companies will die or change, and we have an opportunity to exert pressure to kill or change them. The best thing is it can be completely deniable and still leave you getting promoted.

Learn how to sabotage without being caught in the crosshairs - for instance consider reading and reflecting on the CIA simple sabotage manual, until you just naturally apply it in your sleep:

https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

Or...get a different job? No need to start the revolution, just vote with your feet.

I prefer to vote with my feet by kicking the company in the shins repeatedly until it improves - it's for its own good and for the good of the stakeholders.

That's how I gained control of my current organization. I ousted the unreasoning capitalists and made it a completely remote worker own commune. Soon we'll be open sourcing our product.

How did this go, do you have that written up somewhere? Sounds interesting, but from the way you write here, also mildly toxic. I'd be happy to learn some details and that my impression was just wild prejudice based on reading too few words.

pretty weird take, am neurodivergent and recognise showing up for my role is important for opportunity.

nobody is living in poverty bc FAANG promote more people who are f2f, that’s silly.

not every role is for everyone

In my experience many promotions require some kind of grease games that I am not willing to play along anyway, even on site.

Plus promotions mean even more work selling the soul into the company, no thanks.

> being fully remote may potentially impact your promotion opportunities, even if not explicitly stated in a policy

Exactly. People go to lunch together, for a drink afterwork, or chat in the lift, a manager or other worker might have a technical question/problem and ask someone near them or at the coffee machine.

Whatever policy and advancement process is in place at an organisation - a lot of choice is at the human level (even in the most egalitarian organisation) and more visible people will get the opportunities.

Not being eligible for a promotion at your current company doesn't mean you can't get a promotion.

I've switched companies 4 times so far in my career. Let's call entry-level "entry." The first one came with a double-level promotion (entry+2). The next one came with a demotion (entry+1), although they paid me more. I went on to get promoted twice at the new company (entry+3) working on-site. After that I stayed at the same level moving to the next company (entry+3) working remote. Then going to the next company I got another promotion coming in (entry+4). So I've only been promoted within the company twice, and my other two promotions were from switching companies.

I'm getting good performance reviews, but it's looking like entry+5 may be a ways away for me at my current company. I've already been contacted by a recruiter offering me a chance at landing an entry+5 position with another company, but I value the culture and the type of work I'm doing at my current company more than the level-up. In particular I can work from home most of the week and come in for meetings here and there.

Early in your career "N+1" is important, but at some point there's a lot more to your overall quality of life than simply chasing the next "N+1." I know some truly miserable people who constantly obsess over getting promotions, and getting those promotions often doesn't seem to make their lives any better. Some of them have just ended up getting bigger mortgages, and now they're under constant pressure to keep performing at the level they clawed their way up to just so they can make their payments.

I said it before probably in here, it was always about power dynamics and never about productivity, those are the same managers who would have no issue to hire remote consultants and outsourcing the work any day, but if you are an employee, then you should go through the same humiliation rituals they went through before, they find it hard to comprehend that someone will be promoted and praised without those rituals first, like useless meetings, stand ups, arse kissing, you name it.

> It is common for teams at Dell to be spread around the US and even other countries, according to BI's senior source at Dell, who works across the organization and has access to employee data.

> "Every team has people in at least two states, some in three or four. I can't think of one team where everyone is in one location," the person said.

> That means that even if commuting distances are feasible, many won't be able to collaborate face-to-face with their teams in the same office.

> Another Dell worker told BI: "I would support that if I actually had team members that were local and would actually go on-site. With us being so spread out around the United States, there's really no point in us going in. I'm going to be in a room with a bunch of people who don't know how to do my job or how to help me."

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This is where Dell's actions become completely unjustifiable to me.

I am a strong believer in the power of working in-person. Before the pandemic, I worked at a company of around 20 employees. After the pandemic, we went "hybrid". This setup was more convenient for sure, but it wasn't the same as occupying the same space every day.

But that's just it—before the pandemic, we were in the same space!

Once you split a team across different locations, that team will be working remotely regardless of whether employees are at home or in some satellite office. Everyone is still logging in to Zoom meetings and communicating primarily via Slack.

I think it's totally reasonable for Dell to prioritize in-person work, but they cannot do this by definition until teams are grouped according to geographic location. This is probably extremely difficult to do retroactively.

Not going to get promoted*

*By Dell

Most places have politics and limits around promotions. The best way is to self-promote into the role you want at another company.

Besides, your employer will drop you in an instant if they think it brings in profit. Why shouldn't you do the same?

I use to ask these in interviews without waiting for the answer:

Why do I want to work here? I mean, why do you [still] work here? Or better put, how long have you been working here? Over all that time, you've never looked for anything else? What is it that keeps you here? Comfort? Challenge? Fun coworkers?

If they look sad and say nothing I put my coat back on. The correct response for me is something like: We at acme inc are pushing the frontier of widget manufacturing! Sounds great, I don't care what you pay me, ill start Monday! See you Monday! Are we done?

Then we shake hands, I get up, turn my back towards them and while walking away I stick up my finger and say "push the frontier of widget manufacturing!" as if it is the coolest thing ever.

Monday morning I pick which job I go to.

Remote is a clear competitive advantage for both attracting talent and reducing cost. Companies that can’t hack it will be left behind.

Despite many people wishing it to be true, it's still very unclear what effect remote work (and the associated async communication) has on productivity. A couple of self-selected (and usually elite) companies are not representative of industry.

One non tech sales job I worked when the Regional Manager was someone that drove sports cars then the managers below all went out and bought sports cars. When the Regional Manager got promoted and was replaced by someone who drove an electric car they all went out and bought electric cars. Getting promotions is rarely about the work, they can always find ten idiots like me to do the work.

Your chances of getting promoted are limited anyway. Bank on the life promotion that you already have over the imaginary work promotion that you might be missing or on. If you are creating value worth promoting, then Dell will lose you to a competitor. It’s their loss.

Everytime I've been promoted I've been given disproportionately more work/stress/responsibility vs the increase in pay, sometimes not even any increase in pay.

Maybe it's not bad to not seek promotion and use it as a metric if career success?

It's an interesting approach. As usual, it sounds like a poor approach if you want to retain your best employees.

It's effectively saying "We're excluding qualified people from our jobs based on their ability/desire for commuting."

If that person's ability and/or desire to commute is a strong signal for an effective employee then, sure, go with this policy. I doubt that ability/desire for commuting is strongly correlated with being an effective employee.

A lot of people seem to be convinced widespread remote work means everyone making SF incomes and with SF career opportunities.

It's probably more like everyone making Pittsburgh incomes with 60% of SF opportunity.

"...or be able to change roles."

This is so absurd. If this is legal, it surely shouldn't be.

Remote work works.

I think the companies who do this think they’re being clever by soft-firing their less passionate employees and retaining their most dedicated and/or most easily influenced employees.

In reality they’re doing a layoff of their most competent employees who are best able to find work elsewhere from companies that respect their desire to work from home.

The idea that you can’t change roles or be promoted by being remote is particularly absurd.

How do management teams get to such a point where they’re so wildly out of touch like this?

I guess the only nice thing is that they’re being upfront about it so people know to bail/not join.

How exactly would you outlaw this?

I am currently an elementary school teacher. I am not allowed to work remotely, and this is as it should be.

How do you determine, by law, which jobs can legally require people to work on-site, and which cannot?

Well, it's not a question of whether people are allowed to work on remotely or not. That's not at issue in this situation: Dell's policy is that you can if you want. The issue is on what grounds people should be promoted. This may also be entirely at the discretion of the company, and any silly reasons it wants to use. Or, it may be classified as a form of discrimination, like refusing to promote someone because of ethnicity, gender, disability, age, or other categories. I don't know the law here, if it's even been settled.

Disability is the one most likely to crop up. If you really have difficulty getting to an office but are otherwise capable in your role then a court may see this as discrimination. Dell could just make exceptions for capable disabled staff.

The conversation statrted with people who currently work remotely for Dell - Dell has determined that those staff can work remotely but would not be promoted. Obviously elementrary school teachers are not in that group any more than Dell factory and warehouse staff are.

You want to make it illegal to not give promotions? What could go wrong!

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