Jonathan101 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 23, 2020 9:31 pm
Almost nobody on the ship got promoted.
My understanding was that career advancement opportunities were EXTREMELY limited on account of, you know, being stranded on the other side of the galaxy and stuff. There aren't all that many vacancies to fill.
I'm sure a lot of promotions were handed out once they got back to the Alpha Quadrant.
Nobody got promoted, except Torres, Paris (twice), Tuvok, Chakotay. (Yes, the maquis temp promotions count) It's not a matter of filling a vacancy, because Harry was already doing the job. He's the senior most operations officer. He's doing the job, they just haven't given him the rank to match. Like think about it, when Janeway was deciding her temp promotions after caretaker because she needed to remake the chain of command the ops officer was overlooked but for some reason the Helmsmen was made a junior LT? It's not like Paris was all that experienced himself, he was kicked out of Starfleet during his first posting.
Fianna wrote: ↑Sun Feb 23, 2020 9:50 pm
Plus, if you promote him out of being an ensign, who's going to replace him at his ensign duties? Sometimes you need to keep talented people in low-level grunt positions, because you have a shortage of grunts.
Sure, Tom Paris eventually got promoted, but as Chuck likes to point out, Tom Paris is an expert at
everything. If only one person on Voyager is going to be promoted, it's gonna be him.
Why would he need to be replaced? Data was the ops officer on the Enterprise so it's not like those tasks are beneath a Jr Lt or Lt. Indeed the super advanced android being Harry's equivalent is one of the things that make Harry's lack of promotion so weird. Yes Enterprise and Voyager are different ships, so I wouldn't expect them to require the same rank, but it's really weird that on one ship it's a Lt Commander doing the job, and the other it's an ensign. The only way that makes sense to me is if Harry was considered already ready for promotion making his time as an ensign even more of a formality than it normally is. Like 100% Harry was given this posting because they knew he had the skills to take on more responsibility than a normal ensign, but the rules require a certain amount of time in rank before you're eligible for a promotion and they couldn't just start him off as a Jr Lt so they gave him something just on the edge of what would be considered appropriate for an ensign.
If you're talking random jobs that need to be done, Harry often does them alongside a Jr Lt and Lt, throughout the series we see everyone up and to including the Captain doing work that's not even ensign level, but that should be handled by the crewmen. So he'd probably just keep doing them.
