Ask HN: Has working remotely harmed your career growth?

Working remotely pretty much destroyed my career for two reasons: (1) my networking opportunities plummeted to zero and (2) I was fired for reasons I believe could have been avoided if I had worked in an office and had stronger relationships with more co-workers.<p>My remote job was at a fully distributed company with good compensation.<p>I worked there for about five years, receiving only positive reviews.<p>Groups in the company worked in a very silo-ed manner — there was not a lot of work overlap or cross-team communication. But I loved my team and work so it was fine with me.<p>Once the company started struggling, they re-organized our group several times, and eventually a non-technical manager with more seniority than me was brought in.<p>Although I was highly effective, well-reviewed, and never had issues with other managers, the non-technical manager and I dealt with all of the classic issues that come up in this scenario: unrealistic deadlines and expectations, scope creep, etc. I tried to deal with this in an ego-less, professional manner, but he took our issues personally and lobbied HR to have me fired.<p>At that point, after all of the re-organizations, I was the only dev left on my team, and my other managers who I had good relationships with had moved on. I had no one to vouch for me. I believe that if I had worked in an office, in a less silo-ed manner, I would have had more opportunities to network with other developers within the company and my accomplishments would have been more visible, which would have at least allowed me to switch teams.<p>Instead, I was quietly led out the back door and disappeared.<p>In a remote company it&#x27;s a lot easier to be fired. It&#x27;s a lot more difficult to resolve interpersonal issues over IRC than face-to-face. There is a huge amount of value to passing people randomly in the hallway, by &quot;the watercooler,&quot; or at a social event. These kinds of relationships are critical and are just not replicable via remote work.

Working remotely and having more control over my schedule (they don&#x27;t always come together) allowed me to work on my side project until it was making enough money to cover my living expenses.<p>The only problem is that now, after running my own business for a few years, I cannot phantom the idea of going back to a regular job. In that sense, my career as an employee is over.

I&#x27;m 10.5 years in, and I think what really killed my career growth opportunities is the cost&#x2F;benefit analysis of going back into an office. Far too many jobs still require you to be present to warm a seat. And depending on location, my estimates are $10-15k+ in costs alone for transportation and food (lunch), and that doesn&#x27;t even take into account potential childcare and other costs. The first credible job offer I&#x27;ve received in several years only wanted to up my pay by about that amount, and my existing employer nearly matched it, upping the bar even further.<p>This is of course on top of the social deficiencies of working from home, and lack of networking opportunities that it presents. It gets lonely sitting at home all day, even if there is family around. That&#x27;s not the same as having like-minded coworkers to speak to.

I&#x27;ve worked remote ranging from 100% to 30% most of my career. I&#x27;ve also built a business with 100% remote workers, and currently work for a &quot;some people remote&quot; business.<p>My advice to anyone considering this is if you are currently in a company that is designed and built around face to face office communication - run, don&#x27;t walk. You will almost always be a second class citizen that is slowly forgotten about. It&#x27;s simply how humans work, and while I&#x27;m sure there are outliers I don&#x27;t find them very interesting.<p>If you do decide working remote is important to you, I would suggest looking for a job where the entire team, (especially) including high level management, works remotely at least the vast majority of the time. These situations tend to work out rather well if you have the CEO&#x2F;CTO at the top of the company holding remote work as a core company principle.<p>The communication structure of a remote worker vs. office worker company is vastly different, and companies ran remotely <i>must</i> establish very clear communication policies that look wildly different than normal. I&#x27;ve never seen a combination office&#x2F;remote organization actually do much to change these policies when the first team goes remote - with completely predictable results.<p>One of my rules when I ran my company remotely was that practically everything was talked about in public chat channels so anyone could search&#x2F;scroll up and read 30 minutes of backscroll to see what the emergency&#x2F;whatever of the day was. I found some folks flourished in such an environment, but some folks absolutely detested it since they couldn&#x27;t deal with being &quot;called out&quot; for a mistake in public. When those &quot;mistakes&quot; start being hidden in private chats is where fundamental cohesion problems start within remote teams, in my experience. Those sorts of things sort of simply permeate naturally through on-site teams, where there is no such action for remote teams if information remains segregated into a zillion private interactions.<p>I love remote work, and hope to one day build another remote-based company since I miss it and have some further ideas I&#x27;d like to try implementing to make it even better.<p>If I had to make one point it would be that remote companies need to be fundamentally designed and organized differently than non-remote companies and this fact is rarely recognized by most.

I was remote for almost the entirety of the last 5 years. This is just my experience, YMMV.<p>My first job had a remote team that I was promoted onto. They had a _very_ healthy culture that ensured remote people did not feel like second class citizens. I grew a ton and never once felt like I needed an office to be with my coworkers.<p>Using the soft skills I developed there, I continued to get new jobs as I grew and each one was an upgrade and also still remote. I never felt like it shorted me. But, without that incredibly solid base from my first gig and knowing how to handle being remote and create a good culture around it was key.<p>Now I work in-office in New York City and love it, I might go back to remote some day, but the pay increase (cost of living considered, even) was too huge to not go with it considering how much I love this city.

I&#x27;ve had both positive and negative experiences at different companies.<p>ProTip: It really helps when your manger is remote as well. It&#x27;s harder to bias themselves to preferring local employees that way.<p>Positive: I worked for a software company that had a solid mix of remote and co-located (in the office 3-4 days a week) employees. People and offices were located around the country. Since there were a solid number of remote employees, things like picking up the phone and web meetings were never an issue. No major issues with career or visibility. When we had a massive restructuring, many of the people I worked with moved to other remote positions and that helped me move on as well. Important: Traveling and meeting people in person really helps others remember you exist.<p>Negative: I worked for a company were there was an obvious headquarters. All decisions came down from there, and anybody who wanted to have a upward career in the company eventually moved there. Being at an office location outside the headquarters definitely stalled your career, and being remote was even worse for your career. Even people who had the option of being remote would come into the local office a lot for visibility reasons. Even if you were remote, it was useful to be near an office where your manager or manager&#x27;s manager was located so you could meet them on a regular basis.

I worked remote for 10 years. No promotions because all of the higher jobs required a physical presence in the office. In the last year, they shuffled me into a department that under-utilized me. Then they laid me off.<p>No real complaint, though. I was paid well, got a nice severance, and really didn&#x27;t want the stress of climbing the corporate ladder anyway. Now I&#x27;m self-employed, part-time. All is well.

Absolutely it has for me. For 5 years I worked on a video store website as the sole developer, every few months having the two founders drop by to look over my code and tell me how terrible it was. Living in a remote suburb of the city, I didn&#x27;t have the ability to go to meet-ups or build a network (outside of LinkedIn, which doesn&#x27;t really count). So now I&#x27;m out of a job for the past 9 months, and don&#x27;t have a network either. No idea how to rebuild my network at this point, just kind of out of ideas.

The nice thing about remote work is that your downside interactions are minimized also. I find it easier to vent in a room alone about some bone-headed reason why a pull request is rejected, as opposed to an office situation where people could feel slighted over just my blank facial expression.<p>In some cases, even when I have nothing vested in a project, I feel like people get slighted by my lack of enthusiasm. (This is true even if I am willing to accept management&#x27;s decisions. A sort of &quot;disagree and commit&quot;, if you will.)<p>I face none of these problems as a remote worker, and I think this is a net positive.

I live in a small city in the US, and remote work has provided me opportunities for career progression and networking that would otherwise be impossible for me unless I moved my family somewhere else.<p>The key for me has been to work for distributed companies rather than as one of the few remote workers on the team. This seems to make all the difference in the world.

It&#x27;s important to look at the company you&#x27;re joining and how they are organized. Are they truly committed to building a distributed company? Where are the centers of gravity in the team? Have other people who are remote been promoted to management roles?<p>For our company of 30 people (I&#x27;m CEO), we&#x27;re committed to being remote-first (we still have 5 people colocated at the HQ). However, the HQ is not our center of gravity. We&#x27;ve hired and promoted people who are not in or near HQ. They are Directors and VPs and the lead fully distributed teams. My goal is for us to provide more opportunity, give you more interesting work to do, and help you advance your career relative to other opportunities you might find where you are.<p>There&#x27;s no way it&#x27;s the same as being colocated in the bay area, but overall we think we can provide a more fulfilling life both inside and outside of work.

My experience - I worked from home for 10 of the 15 years (so far) of my career. My biggest advice for anyone going this route:<p>- keep active in the industry; keep making contacts; attending meetups&#x2F;conferences etc ; prioritize networking. Its easy to fall into the work from home and never network&#x2F;socialize with others in your field. This is critical if you need (it will happen) to change jobs.<p>- if the job is remote and the company has a central office where some (or all) of your co-workers work from, make an effort to show up frequently so everyone knows you are alive. If you are not seen you risk being forgotten or at least considered forgotten.<p>- Don&#x27;t move so far away from industry hubs (or cities) that you are tempted to stop networking. In other words living in BFE can be a <i>very</i> bad thing unless you have already built a good network and&#x2F;or have very good discipline to do it.<p>BTW I screwed up on all of the above and now I am paying the price. :( So, don&#x27;t do what I did ;)<p>HOWEVER - with all that said. I really wish more companies would encourage WFH at least a few days a week. As a matter of fact it would be great if it was incentivized to push companies to do this. This would have a <i>huge</i> impact on traffic, stress, employee health and still give the opportunity for in person collaboration (which AFAIK is the main reason companies claim to hate it). I think it is insane that this is not even on the table especially in places like the bay area...

I worked remotely as a contractor years ago. It didn&#x27;t last long. I blame myself completely and looking back, I lacked the maturity and emotional intelligence to do so successfully.<p>The second time I worked remotely a few years later, I officially worked at a satellite office but my team was located about two hours away. I did great with my own team but couldn&#x27;t break through the politics and old boys club - not really old boys but they all hung out and had unofficial meetings and all of my ideas had to go through officials channels.<p>This time around, I usually work remotely 2 or 3 days a week. I&#x27;m the tech lead for my department but I also need to get some coding done. I over communicate with higher ups just so they know what I&#x27;m working on. With the level of autonomy I have it&#x27;s easy to silo myself and bring code and ideas from down high if I am not disciplined.<p>I also notice anytime I&#x27;m not there for awhile, like when I went on vacation for a week, a bunch of contracting consultants started pushing their ideas around and were derailing our architecture based on their &quot;theories&quot;. I have to be in the office to make sure I keep things on track.<p>In the positions I usually go for now, face time is important. It&#x27;s a balancing act between getting things done and building relationships.

The noticeable career effect for me was (and is) severe job opportunities pool shrinkage. I can&#x27;t mentally go back to 9-5 @office - that translates to ~95% of jobs off the table.

Working remotely improved my career indirectly: through careful use of the time-rich and low-overhead lifestyle remote work afforded, I developed a far broader skill-set through starting my first business in a challenging foreign environment.

I&#x27;ve been working remotely for the past 10 years, and only the first year of that was with a totally remote organization.<p>It&#x27;s very important that the organization is well equipped to handle remote workers (i.e. more than just one or two people are remote). The local people in the company should take pains to make sure that the remote people are included.<p>As a remote person, it&#x27;s important to make sure that you communicate often. Deliver well, talk to people, make yourself visible by being a part of things that matter. Look for ways in which things could be better, because they always exist.<p>Make sure your manager knows your career aspirations, and let them help you with that.<p><i>Do</i> spend time in the office and with your coworkers when you get a chance. I&#x27;ve made 4-6 trips per year over the past 9 years. Face time <i>does</i> matter, so take advantage of it!<p>At many (most) companies, there <i>is</i> a ceiling for remote workers. If you want to be a VP, you&#x27;ll almost certainly need to be at headquarters. I have had engineering, management, product management, project management, and architecture roles remotely, though, so there is a lot of possibility available!

Yes strongly, in comparison. But I also live in one of the last countries on this planet that still has good compensation offers for regular employees. The conditions one faces in working remotely are probably more and more common.<p>Here&#x27;s the thing: If you are in your twenties, are offered decent office jobs, and you don&#x27;t have a wealthy family to back you up, choose office over freedom. Later when you put something aside you can try to get some freedom without risking going broke.<p>Freedom is no fun without backup. Freedom also means free to get exploited.

Building your careers is 99% about making contacts. You make contacts much easier when you are all there in person. Once you have a good network it is a lot easier to work remotely.<p>To mitigate issues the best thing is to live in a city with a good community oriented around your specialty. That way you can take part in user-groups, small conferences, etc. That is you can network in-person, outside of work. It also allows you to find local jobs where you can start in person and transition to remote.<p>Also focus on small to medium sized companies. Companies where you can make a visible impact and there isn&#x27;t as much of the politicking as there can be at larger corps.<p>The worst thing is to live somewhere remote, not near jobs or a community. You don&#x27;t want to get in a situation where you have no options if you need them.

Did both for quite some time: Working remotely means getting thing done, getting into flow, and being productive. Working on-site means building strong relationships to people which might be key for one&#x27;s further career development. I guess latter is more important when it is about increasing the personal market value.<p>Not saying that you can&#x27;t build stromg work relations remotely but it&#x27;s just different.

I&#x27;m based in New York City, and I&#x27;ve been working remotely for a company based in San Francisco for two and a half years now.<p>Personally, I find it&#x27;s been overall a net benefit to my career, though that&#x27;s not to say remote work is for everyone, or that every company is structured to provide career opportunities for people who work remotely.<p>I actually wrote in more detail about my experience and the things I&#x27;ve learned in the process which have helped make remote working work well for me. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adityamukerjee.net&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;remote-work-2-years-in&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adityamukerjee.net&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;remote-work-2-years-in...</a>

I certainly feel that if I were not remote I would be in a better position by now. Being one of the few remotes of the company makes me feel like I&#x27;m missing out on some of the office dynamics that enable your career growth. Maybe in teams where there are more remote positions this is different, but that&#x27;s how I feel.

I’ve worked as the only remote employee for an NYC-based company for over a decade.<p>In terms of within-company career, working remotely (unless everyone does) will impose a drastic cost on possible advancement. And in my case, a hard ceiling on my title.<p>Why am I ok with that? Because if you view your career in a broader context, not necessarily specific to the company who currently pays your salary, there are trade-offs. I have less commute, but less mentorship. Etc.<p>It really depends on the company, and also how you view your career.

Yes (fewer available jobs, harder to progress), but not working remote would have harmed my life satisfaction.<p>I figured that I can always work on fun projects in my spare time and find fulfillment this way, especially since living in a country where the cost of living is terribly low allows me to have a bunch of free time. This was preferable to living somewhere where I can have a great career but not much else I liked, so that&#x27;s the choice I made.

Not at all. Having remote work experience has helped immensely with finding new and better companies specifically looking for remote workers.<p>Even if it had, I&#x27;d still take this extra time with my young kids over a raise. Every. Single. Time.

Yes. Less teamwork, less knowledge sharing. I feel like I&#x27;ve been progressing professionally much slower than when I had the chance to interact face-to-face with various colleagues from various departments on a daily basis.

Work-from-home varies from company to company. Corporations that have a strong WFH culture seem to handle it better than places where a remote worker is &quot;the exception&quot; and &quot;the faceless voice on the phone&quot; at every meeting.<p>Speaking personally, it&#x27;s been great these past 5 years. The advantages of remote employment are substantial. To me, it&#x27;s worth about $20K a year.<p>I haven&#x27;t experienced the harm to my career that some have mentioned, but maybe I&#x27;m just lucky. My group is a tiny &quot;intrapreneurial&quot; startup within a large corp. and we are judged more on results than on just showing up.<p>Advantages of working from home:<p>- 10-15 hours a week of extra time to use as I wish.<p>- saves thousands of dollars a year in commute expenses, wear &amp; tear on the car, etc.<p>- extra security and convenience of someone being at home all day<p>- more flexibility when raising children<p>- exercise at noon, then shower (no more &quot;Do I skip the morning shower and hope I&#x27;m not too smelly at the office before I head to the gym?&quot;)<p>- set up your workspace exactly as you like it.<p>- you can shake things up once in a while, and go work in a café<p>- you can travel more frequently and work from whatever location, to save your vacation hours or avoid having to ask permission.<p>- the coffee is exactly the way YOU want it<p>Disadvantages:<p>- off-site workers are less visible, hence require strong management support to avoid problems others have detailed here<p>- too easy to gain weight<p>- spouse or children are distracting<p>- &quot;work day never ends&quot; syndrome.<p>- you miss out on &quot;five minutes in the hallway&quot; quick check-ins and over-the-shoulder teamwork

I&#x27;ve been working mostly remote for the last five years in three different organizations. I can&#x27;t say that it&#x27;s harmed my career.<p>In the first one, all my peers were remote and we established close and lasting relationships that remain beneficial to this day.<p>In the second, corporate HQ was local, but my manager wasn&#x27;t, so I rarely went to the office. It was the nature of the place not to have good relationships - seriously dysfunctional. Remote or not was the same, and I preferred to save the commute time and not soil my karma.<p>In my current gig, my hiring manager was remote but left, so I&#x27;ve been visiting the office every week or so to have a better relationship with my local new boss. I work in a large team, but everyone I deal with is remote (sales for a very large company) so those are the important and long-term valuable contacts.

I work remotely because it gives me the highest odds of finding work to do. Some clients are local, but most of my clients are 1000+ miles away.<p>I work remote because anyone that meets me quickly figures out I&#x27;m not an &quot;ideal&quot; employee, meaning my mindset is very much entrepreneurial. Remote work is a great way to use my skills, expose me to many techs and approaches, and focus on getting shit done.<p>Remote work doesn&#x27;t harm my career growth because I don&#x27;t really see programming as a career. I give value for the money I&#x27;m paid and I move on to the next thing.<p>When I&#x27;m done working for the day, I go eat, come back home, and do other work to make money. When I&#x27;m not programming, I do other things.

Yes and no.<p>No, because going remote opened me up to opportunities I previously didn’t have. It has been fantastic for my experience in terms of communication, mentoring, and in learning new roles (e.g taking responsibility for infrastructure).<p>In that sense, my career has blossomed!<p>On the other hand, I believe that progression would be a struggle because remote work can create such a massive comfort zone that it takes a lot more effort to break out and network than it does if you’re co-located. It can be very isolating and difficult to break out of that lonely routine.<p>With hindsight, I wouldn’t go remote again unless I had the full network of both professional and personal support to healthily sustain it.

Yes, if the company isn&#x27;t already really distributed. In my case, I was an on-site developer for years, transitioned into management, then moved remote. As time passed, my management got more and more annoying as clearly they&#x27;d have preferred I be local. It&#x27;s particularly tough for things like hiring. As a manager, you typically want to meet the candidate, so you do the intro and exit portions. That&#x27;s hard to do remote, and somewhat less effective when trying to hire to a local office.<p>Unfortunately, the old saying &quot;out of sight, out of mind&quot; comes into play. And the more out of sight, the more out of mind.

Remote != home. If you lack social interaction or networking, join a co-working space.

I&#x27;ve been working remotely with UK companies from Belgium since 2010. I&#x27;d worked with both companies in the UK before I left. Both companies are great and treat remote workers well. But I knew the people well before I went remote.<p>They pay me to keep doing what I do. I don&#x27;t see it as some kind of career path.<p>In the side I&#x27;m continually doing coursera courses and learning other languages or computer science fundamentals just in case the jobs change.<p>It&#x27;s a pretty lonely existence and really hard to work consistently, but you get to see your kids grow up.

No, it hasn&#x27;t harmed my career growth. My career hasn&#x27;t been that long yet, though. Whether it harms yours depends on what you&#x27;re optimizing for. It also depends on other career prospects where you want to live.<p>&lt;my experience as a remote software developer&gt;<p>I&#x27;ve only worked for one company full-time after graduating and transferred to 100% remote after moving out of state for my spouse&#x27;s work. In the span of time that I worked remotely, I became something equivalent to a maintainer (&quot;core reviewer&quot;) on a decent-sized open source project, got promoted to a senior dev at a fairly large company, and helped launch an internal analytics service. I also have a network of former coworkers and open-source contributors that will help me find another remote job if I need one. My skill set is well-rounded, and I enjoy my job.<p>In terms of what I&#x27;ve given up, my salary is lower than what it would have been had I worked in a major hub like the SF Bay Area or Seattle. I probably pair program less than I would have otherwise. My soft skills have slightly weakened, but that may just be this profession. Outside of work, I&#x27;ve also had to work really hard to maintain a social life and stay mostly healthy. An extroverted spouse helps a lot. It&#x27;s very easy to slip into not leaving the house or not exercising, and I&#x27;ve seen quite a few people develop both mental and physical health problems from the lifestyle. It&#x27;s not for everyone.<p>However, costs of living where I am are much lower, so I feel very lucky. About 6 weeks time off next year is great, too. I&#x27;ve been fortunate enough to avoid the health problems I described earlier.<p>&lt;&#x2F;my experience&gt;<p>In any case, if you want to optimize for:<p>- Salary, regardless of cost of living - Larger professional network - Management track<p>then working in person in a tech hub is probably better.<p>If you prefer:<p>- Lots of freedom &#x2F; setting your own schedule (mostly) - Extra time (0 commute, you can use that commute time to work more &#x2F; improve your skills too) - Living wherever you want<p>then working remotely is pretty nice. Like other people mentioned, it&#x27;s also very important to find a company that does remote well.

In my time as a remote worker, long story short, working 6 AM to 2 AM for the media. About a year and a half later, they basically told everyone: &quot;Move and come into the office or get laid off.&quot; They claimed it would be better for communication, but still kept 2 offices, one in the middle of the country, and one more of the Western part of the country.<p>About 100 or so people were laid off. Me and one other person moved across the country and now work in an office. Hasn&#x27;t done anything to better our communication. However, I can&#x27;t complain.<p>I went from being a remote work with no health benefits, no vacation time, no 401k. It certainly had its advantages: I could go out and travel to different places, and as long as I had an Internet connection by 6 PM - 2 AM EST, everything was great.<p>As for moving into the office: they paid for my relocation, added 401k, health benefits, other benefits, paid vacation time, salary negotiation, and at least I only live about 5 minutes from my job.<p>So... I was upset to no longer work from home, but on the bright side: I got moved to a place where I could actually afford to buy a house. Got to experience driving across the country. Can&#x27;t say it harmed my career at all, but on the other side of the bright side: I have a house that I don&#x27;t get to be in for 8-9 hours a day.

I would say that living in the middle of nowhere has certainly harmed me, which is somewhat related if the reason you want to work remotely is to say, relocate from a tech city to a rural area.<p>I am slowly figuring out that the onus is on me to do things like, say, flying out to conferences so I can make up the difference. My advice would be to have a plan in place for dealing with geographic and self isolation before you accept the remote job offer.

Has it hurt my career? Maybe. I work for a small company &lt;50 people. Tech team of 2 people is remote, everyone else works at a main office.<p>As far as learning from others, I worked in office for the first 5ish years as a programmer. I learned a lot, but there is only so much you can learn in a tech department of 2 people. To offset this I secured a budget from my boss to purchase learning material, and go to conferences. In my personal time I occasionally go to tech meetups, and work on side projects. I am introverted so I wouldn&#x27;t attend conferences and meetups if it wasn&#x27;t for the fact I work remote.<p>Has it hurt my networking opportunities? NO! In fact it has helped them. The first 3 years after switching to remote, I made friends with programmers at several other companies, through the above mentioned educational stuff. These new friends at one time or another all promised to help me get a job at their company if I ever needed it. After that I started traveling. I went to 7-8 countries a year, living a location independent lifestyle. In just over 2 years I have made many new friends, and contacts. Some have taught me new things, and others have offered me contract work.<p>Has it hurt communication, and bonds with coworkers? Yes. With the other tech worker nothing much changed except he complains about my time shifted schedule when he can&#x27;t reach me at noon, and praises that same schedule when I fix a down server at 3am. :-D With the non technical workers there seems to be a disconnect. I have done several things to offset this problem. First I show up at the office for 1 week every year to reconnect. I try to bring everyone a small trinket from some far off place. While at the office I initiate a performance review with my boss. While out of the office, I do many small things. Things like, initiate some small talk before the end of a 1 on 1, reach out to a coworker with a call instead of an IM, etc.

I&#x27;ve worked remotely since late 2004 with one six month exception. It&#x27;s hard to answer questions like &quot;did it hurt my career&quot; because there&#x27;s no control group to test against. What I can say is that it has worked out particularly well for me, and part of that is because I don&#x27;t have any particular ambition to rise up in management (I&#x27;m a dev.) Although I think it is possible to advance a career into management working remotely, it is probably more difficult to build the personal relationships necessary to do so. If, on the other hand, you&#x27;re like me: quite satisfied with coding in silence in a spare bedroom without other people around, it&#x27;s perfect. I get to do what I want, I don&#x27;t have to commute, and the office rumor mill isn&#x27;t a big factor in my life. I will continue to work remotely for as long as I can pull it off.

As I read over the comments I couldn&#x27;t help but think this was a normal thing to happen to people in office spaces. People not getting along with higher up and being fired&#x2F;held back. People not knowing how to &quot;play&quot; the game so they never move up. The wrong people being chosen for positions over others even though they didn&#x27;t deserve it. I think working remotely makes it so you have to put effort in places that would naturally happen in cubical farms. Small talk and showing interest in people outside of work life seem to go much farther then being a good worker. Making every experience people have with you a pleasant one. Making people feel like they can tell you their dumbest idea without fear you will slap them for saying something stupid. These seem to be key to moving around in a company vs any other way I have experience.

I hit a ceiling working remotely at a previous company. They flat out said they wouldn&#x27;t advance me any further as the sole remote employee. I had 5 managers in 3 years in that same company—I think eventually everyone who knew my track record left the company, so there was no one in the office to vouch for me.

I&#x27;ve just taken a new position which is interesting in this regard. I work out of an office in Singapore, but my team is distributed all over the Asia-Pacific region, separated by thousands of miles. Even when I&#x27;m in the office, I&#x27;m effectively working remotely from my team. Consequently, I&#x27;m slowly visiting all of the local offices where they&#x27;re based just to build a face-to-face relationship and the invaluable rapport that comes with that interaction. Even the senior executive in the office, the president of sales for the region, works remotely and rarely comes into the office. Sometimes, it&#x27;s just the nature of the role. Still, nothing replaces face-to-face communication, so if you have the opportunity, be sure to engage in it every chance you get.

It depends a lot on the project and your immediate team situation. As an example of what’s possible, look what happens over pull requests, email, and chat in open source projects. Shared goals, shared communication mechanisms -&gt; stuff gets done, networks are forged, conferences arise, people have beers, people get jobs. Now, corporate work has much different structure and goals, so you have to watch out.<p>I have had very high growth remote work periods when I was engrossed in a good project and working with a boss who consistently engaged with me electronically (despite being in the office himself) and pushed me.<p>But teams and projects change. Unless remote connection is really engrained in the company, that is when growth does not come so easily but requires intentional effort outside.

Never spent a day working at the office. Been working for ~5 years, then switched to freelance\consulting. It is 100% true that remote positions really impact your networking, so you have to compensate by attending conferences as much as possible. However, it also makes you a lot more independent which forces you to look for other opportunities such as independent consulting and possibly creating your own business, which, in my opinion, is a good thing.<p>So yeah, remote work definitely harms your career growth in terms of an employee, but also enables you to discover other opportunities, which improves your personality.

Yes.<p>For reasons I won&#x27;t get into, I went remote after working for a company for a couple years. What I gained in flexibility I lost in advancement opportunities. In my view, unless you&#x27;re a very rare commodity, the workers closest to the organization are the ones most likely to be promoted.<p>If you value flexibility, work remotely. If you value advancement, it&#x27;s probably best to stay at HQ (if that options is available to you).

I’ve been doing remote for the last 10 years. I’ve worked from home a lot. But also took the time to travel, which was awesome and I met a ton of cool people, which is networking too.<p>But recently I started working from a coworking place. And that’s great too. It’s only an 8 minute walk, which I love as it helps me to reach my daily step count. And I get to talk to some interesting people.

I’m mid 30s and have been working remote for the last couple years.<p>The company has traditional offices, but I’m one of the few employees working remote (note: that I used to work at the office)<p>Since relocating, I’ve been promoted several times in significant ways and genuinely feel connected and valued at the office.<p>A lot depends on the company &#x2F; team I guess. But for me, there’s been little downside and tremendous upside.<p>YMMV

I would say it hasn&#x27;t hurt me, but while I work remotely, I don&#x27;t work from home. I have found a coworking space where there are a ton of independent workers like myself.<p>This allows me to have the flexibility of a remote job, but the social benefits of an office ( and without the drama in my case). I have also found it invaluable for networking.

I have been working remotely doing the last 10 years, but only partially.<p>We do projects with distributed teams, including the customer teams, so it is impossible to get everyone on the same physical location.<p>Never do 100% remote, at most 50% max, always keep a sane mixture of on-site and remote work, soft-skills and networking are quite important.

Not for me, it hasn&#x27;t. I&#x27;ve been working remotely for ten years and making over twice what I was making when I started. I&#x27;ve been promoted several times and in the two job searches I have undertaken over this time period, both resulted in quick offers.

depends on your definition of &quot;career&quot;. there&#x27;s nothing preventing you from getting to a senior architect&#x2F;staff engineer&#x2F;senior consultant etc type level working from home.<p>if your goal is to be an actual manager (not to be confused with a PM) then yea wfh can impact that prospect. most companies I&#x27;ve dealt with (not all though) explicitly required anyone who had direct reports under them to either be in the office every day or at least be located within a reasonable distance from the office and come in couple of days a week.

I really miss the social aspect sometimes. Hangouts and Slack just don&#x27;t substitute for real human interaction.

Absolutely. And I&#x27;d do it all over again.

I&#x27;ve been working remotely from home for the past 7 months, I live in Vilnius, Lithuania (so the local job market is way more limited than in SF, London, etc).<p>I think that it largely depends on the company. Because remote work doesn&#x27;t Just Work -- it requires plenty of regular effort to make that happen. Some companies excel at that, and others, well, suck at it. So if you consider doing, ask a lot. Ask a lot about processes, how decisions are made, why the company decided to go remote, etc. There, you can&#x27;t really generalize everything under &#x27;remote work is good for you&#x27; or similar. Just like working from an office doesn&#x27;t automatically mean that it&#x27;s good for your career.<p>If the company went the remote path in order to access untapped talent from around the globe, communication is heavily written and async, that&#x27;s great. Ask for specific examples, as pretty much everyone says &#x27;yeah, we are all about written communication!&#x27;. If the company provides money to setup your own private home office for maximum comfort and productivity -- even better. That shows that they really care. After talking to a few companies and comparing them, it&#x27;s easy to tell where a company falls on the &#x27;good for remote&#x27; spectrum.<p>Is it sustainable long term (7+ years) is a whole different matter and I don&#x27;t have an answer to it. Probably completely depends on the person.<p>To answer your questions<p>&gt; Especially if the team is a mixture of remote and co-located people?<p>I work in such environment and I&#x27;m very happy. But I understand how in some cases it can end up really badly. So just do your research.<p>&gt; How have you tried to mitigate that?<p>Just do your best to pick the right company. Because if you join one which isn&#x27;t great for remote work, then it&#x27;s unlikely that you&#x27;ll be able to change how it works.<p>This is my personal experience so far:<p>Pros: * More available jobs, especially for something which is not full-stack web-dev (SRE side of big data&#x2F;analytics is my niche). Which is great for developing my technical skills and adding some lovely things to my CV; * I feel overall more positive about work and life in general, which is a result of good time flexibility, not having to commute anywhere, setting up a solid home office, etc. While not directly related to career, this huge! It reduces chances of burning out and similar negatives as well.<p>The main and very obvious con is non-existing serendipitous networking with people. But that&#x27;s largely due to my own choices - I could go to a co-working space, etc but I chose not to. Living with my gf helps with having decent social life. That works for me.<p>So all things considered, that&#x27;s a solid net positive.<p>And, I guess, obligatory plug, we&#x27;re hiring :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heapanalytics.com&#x2F;jobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heapanalytics.com&#x2F;jobs</a>

Yes, but I mean, how much money does a person need? Why do I need to advance up the ladder? I just don’t see the point. I like living my life how I want. If I could do that without a job at all, I would.<p>Don’t get me wrong, it has its downsides other than the career advancement thing. But commuting and sitting in an open office with no privacy does too. On balance I prefer it. If you’re lonely, get a dog.