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Comment by MichaelMug | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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