[otoburb]

Absolutely agree with this. Two sides of the spectrum:

1) I've noticed that of all the remote positions in various departments, marketing is the one that is almost always co-lo. They tend to have the most say in product direction (duh) and in turn strategic, company-wide policy changes.

2) Sales is the counter-example here. I've seen talented remote sales people rapidly and deservedly climb the corporate ladder. However, the catch is that they tend to have brutal travel schedules (which they'd probably have anyway if they were in corporate HQ), so it's arguable whether they are reaping the same benefits of working from home as other remote workers.

[rogerbinns]

Note that sales people are usually trivial to measure. Look at their quota and their sales and you are pretty much done. With other departments it is considerably harder.

[otoburb]

I agree with your basic premise that it's harder to objectively measure other departments as easily as sales quotas and top-line revenues.

However, I'd like to provide some additional metrics that I know other field organizations [have] use[d] (including ours):

Services - Professional Services (PS) margin, bookings, customer satisfaction scores, normalized mean project completions, budget ($ or hrs) actuals vs. estimates

Support - mean time ticket resolution, ticket volume, Maintenance & Support (M&S) margin, cust sat scores, # feature enhancements

You and every other HN reader know that all metrics are flawed in some way, but I'd still like to point out that although Sales quotas are easily judged, many organizations struggle to quickly/easily quantify the frequency with which sales people sacrifice longer-term sales for short-term quarterly wins.