Your customer is the person handing out raises, promotions, key assignments, etc. The person who makes it to happy hours will have the edge, fairly or not.
Raises, promotions and the like are not the way these days to make significant chunks of cash. It's job hopping every 1.5 to 2.5 years. In this case, there is no need to worry about promotions.
The way to rise in your career is to work on a string of high-value projects, not to slave away on the same codebase for years. When a VP has a great idea that needs a prototype delivered in 2 weeks, who is he going to go to? The engineer in the next office who he sees in the microkitchen every day, or the engineer working 2 timezones away who he never sees and doesn't know exists?
I think remote work will be a great option for the next 2-3 years, and then once the pandemic has receded and folks start switching from fear to greed mode, there will be distinct advantages to being near people with large budgets.
I got more from reading the source code of Emacs, Ultrix, Dynix and TeX,then eventually NCSA Mosaic and Linux than I ever did from almost any other "senior staff" that I ever encountered.
I would hope the same is true of the comparison between reading the source code of Ardour and meeting me in person.
You live in the middle of nowhere and appear on Zoom calls. The rest of your team meets with company leaders in person. Who do you think has the best relationship with the leadership? Not saying it’s impossible to do this remotely but when others don’t it becomes very very hard. Applies to everything, not just sales. Full remote works until someone breaks the chain, then everyone working remotely is at a disadvantage.
