I spent six months documenting which coworkers get interrupted and which ones never do and the pattern maps almost perfectly onto who gets promoted - Silicon Canals

"For six months, I documented interruption patterns across roughly 200 meetings involving four different teams at a mid-sized tech company. I tracked who interrupted whom, how frequently, and - this is the part that haunted me - how the room responded. Did the interrupter get eye contact? Did the interrupted person get the floor back? Did anyone notice at all?"

"Here's the short version: the people who were rarely interrupted were, almost without exception, the same people who advanced. The people who were chronically interrupted - sometimes three or four times in a single update - were disproportionately stuck. Same titles. Same level. Year after year. This held across teams, across meeting formats, across managers."

A six-month observational study tracking interruption patterns across 200 meetings in four teams at a tech company revealed a stark correlation between who gets interrupted and career progression. Employees who were frequently interrupted—sometimes three to four times per update—remained stuck at the same level year after year, while those rarely interrupted advanced consistently. The pattern held across teams, meeting formats, and managers, suggesting interruption reflects how the room instinctively treats certain people as interruptible rather than correlating with speaking volume or actual status. This structural dynamic appears to operate invisibly within organizational hierarchies.

Read at Silicon Canals