Having led the process from the other side, the more often your name comes up in a positive light, the better your chances. Odds are that OPs work simply wasn't mentioned much by his peers. The person you are replying to was absolutely on the money.
Promotions aren't a popularity contest, but they definitely are a popularity contest.
Yet what you are saying is a bit different from the person I replied to (which I do agree with your final line). We also only have the information that the OP states. These are asymmetric information games so it is a bit naive to claim this for any response. Especially simple explanations.
For us it was okta. Not only in their subscription cost, but also because using okta meant we had to upgrade most of our SaaS subscriptions to their enterprise package.
Got rid of it, hired 2 people with a small portion of the budget that was freed up and never looked back.
It's not offshoring in the same way as it was 20 years ago. They are remote employees, they go through the same hiring process as everyone else but at 50% the price. And remote work is much, much more accessible.
Remote workers located in HCOL areas of US and Europe have shot themselves in the foot. I see it especially in the market for native mobile development in Western Europe. Salaries decreasing, freelance rates dropping. There is plenty of work, but positions are filled with workers living in the South or East.
As hiring manager, if I'm going to hire someone who works remote, I will pick the person with the same skillset and experience at half the cost.
Timezones still play a huge part here as well. My team has several engineers who are at par compared to the rest of the team but they're a pain to work with due to a 10 Hour time difference.They may be paid 50% less but they're 50% harder to work with to no real fault of their own
It's because of the tax holiday Costa Rica is giving [0][1][2], and VMWare's acquisition by Broadcom (they had a massive engineering campus in San Jose, Costa Rica) leaving a lot of Support Engineers and C++ Engineers on the market.
Czechia, Romania, and Poland did the same thing in the 2010s, Israel and India in the 2000s, and Taiwan and South Korea (in electronics) in the 1990s.
50% of the price is quite nieve
It’s much less than that. No health care no benefits no pension. No employer side costs, currency conversion to your advantage. 15-20 % is the number that makes it worth it. Bell Canada achieved under 10% in the early 00’s offshoring support to India
Numbers I work with are ~45k for a senior software engineer in Hungary, Spain, Italy, Greece vs ~85k in France, Germany, the Netherlands. Fully loaded cost (tax, insurance) adds about 20-30% on top in West. South and East are considerably less.
You can find even cheaper staff but you're still competing for talent. I can pay someone in South or East a premium against their market and still save big compared to an average salary in West.
This is ignoring any other benefits you have as employer in South and East. Try to fire or lay someone off in France - it'll cost you.
I think your numbers for France are off. When I tried to hire there last year the burden of employer taxes and levies was ~70%.
That wasn’t the part that killed the deal though. My employer’s real worry was around how hard they believe it to be to fire someone who isn’t doing well in France.
Promotions aren't a popularity contest, but they definitely are a popularity contest.