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Comment by visos | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr:

"Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for 9 months. Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment).

Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction and experienced less turnover, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell. "

Pay attention to the last sentence.

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The study just reinforces what everyone knows after working a few places with office politics, that promotions for performance (and raises) are often due to how much people like the recipient.

When you just do your job and don't socialize, it is significantly harder to get promoted.

Remote is not the route to promotion. It does many have other benefits. Make this choice consciously.

Maybe in a big company that doesn't have a majority of remote workers or somewhere that remote is a new concept. The company where I work is ~70% remote and has been since the beginning and there has never been an issue with promotions dependent on being the office or not. A lot of this may have to do with our relatively flat hierarchy though, a "promotion" with us is mostly a raise and going from Junior dev to Senior dev, and the only positions "higher" than that are executives. I definitely could imagine PM type positions being harder to get as a remote employee.

Assuming office politics/relationships are the reason for this, this effect would of course be eliminated if everyone was working remotely.

Yeah, this is why I wouldn't work from home. At least, not full time. If you're not physically at the office people tend to forget you.

Are promotions what you're optimising for?

You can have a nice career in this industry without ever receiving a promotion from an employer. It's easier to handle promotions on your own by switching jobs from time to time. It's a lot easier to negotiate a new gig that pays $20k more per year than it is to negotiate that as a raise from your employer.

In my view, if my company overlooks me for promotion because I'm living in the countryside, skipping three hours of daily commuting, and otherwise enjoying a much better quality of life, that's not something I'm going to worry about too much. If I fall behind market, I'll bring it up with them and move on if necessary.

It's not just promotions. It's pay raises and bonuses. It's influence to get on the most interesting projects.

Also, everywhere I've been that had layoffs the telecommuters were the first to go, regardless of their skills. The managers don't feel any personal attachment to you.

I'm with you. I had clumped raises and bonuses in with promotions as "things not worth fighting for within a company." If you want more stuff, you go find another gig. That's just how it works in this industry.

Interesting projects would seem to work the same, in my experience. They're out there. Just not necessarily at your current company.

Also note that productivity gains doubled to 22% when workers were allowed to self-select.

Came here to note this as well. That sentence is extremely revealing.

I've heard similar studies about shift work. The night shift can be more productive, but the day shift get all the promotions.

Management comes in in the morning and sees night shift people when they're exhausted and slow, then sees day shift people finalizing night shift team's work in the first hour of the day.

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