Ask HN: Has working remotely harmed your career growth?

There’s a lot of talk about remote work nowadays. But has the lack of being able to be with co-workers harmed your career over the long run? Especially if the team is a mixture of remote and co-located people? How have you tried to mitigate that?

I've had both positive and negative experiences at different companies.

ProTip: It really helps when your manger is remote as well. It's harder to bias themselves to preferring local employees that way.

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.

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's manager was located so you could meet them on a regular basis.

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't have the ability to go to meet-ups or build a network (outside of LinkedIn, which doesn't really count). So now I'm out of a job for the past 9 months, and don't have a network either. No idea how to rebuild my network at this point, just kind of out of ideas.

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.

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.

I was remote for almost the entirety of the last 5 years. This is just my experience, YMMV.

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.

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.

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.