Honestly to me it seems that the author was extremely unprofessional.
He just disappeared for whole days without letting anyone know.
In all the companies that I worked it was explicitly mentioned in the contract that such behaviour was subject to disciplinary actions up to dismissal.
Some remote teams are like co-located teams and work synchronously with set office hours. Other remote teams work asynchronously instead and individuals are free to arrange their work and life as they see fit. In the latter case, if somebody is working on a task that'll take a few days, not hearing from them for a day or two isn't unusual or a problem.
It sounds like perhaps he thought all remote work was asynchronous, but his employer wanted him to work synchronously. But it would take a severe communications breakdown for that to get to the point where a weekly performance review was needed. Normally, you'd talk about how this all works before the person is even hired.
But honestly, when he describes it as humiliating, having a problem with being managed by younger people, and characterising being "judged" by his bosses as threatening, it does give the impression that the prima donna label isn't far wide of the mark. It's absolutely fine for younger people to manage older people, it's not humiliation to have weekly meetings to resolve a performance problem, and your bosses judging your performance is not a threat, it's a mandatory part of their role.
>But it would take a severe communications breakdown for that to get to the point where a weekly performance review was needed. Normally, you'd talk about how this all works before the person is even hired.
Frankly, I'm not surprised. Often these expectations are not explicitly set. And often (probably more often than not), managers will let it get to the point of "exploding" and suddenly you find yourself in such a meeting. Many managers are uncomfortable with these conversations. They are often feeling defensive going in, and to counter that they will wait until they have enough "data" to have the conversation. But by that point, the damage is done.
Severe communications breakdown? Perhaps. Rare? Not at all.
I've never seen a remote setup wherein being unreachable for more than 1 day during normal work days would come across as legit. It sounds downright unprofessional.
It's not. You're judging asynchronous/remote working styles according to synchronous/co-located standards. There isn't necessarily any such thing as a "normal work day". Monday–Friday 9:00–5:30 isn't 100% applicable when your team members aren't in the same time zones or observe the same national/religious holidays. So long as they get the work done when they say they will, the exact hours they work aren't important.
No, I'm judging by my extensive experience co-working with remotes. No "time zone" makes it legit to be non-responsive for over 24h during work days. It's 100% ok to be not working but that's referred to as "day off" and should be communicated as such.
It's not just you that has extensive experience with this. Sure, some teams are managed synchronously as if they were co-located, but just because that's what works for you, it doesn't mean that is the only way to do things. You quite clearly have a concept of a standard work day because you keep going on about "work days". Not all teams are run that way. If you communicate to your team that you want them to work to set hours and they don't? Sure, that's unprofessional. But stop pushing the idea that your way is the only way and everybody else is unprofessional. Different teams have different norms.
I think it is misleading to label "expected to be responsive within 24 hours during the work week" as "managed synchronously as if co-located". Sure, there are even looser arrangements that can work great for some contexts. And it's absolutely the case that norms vary. But "within 24 hours" more-or-less puts all timezones on the same footing and is pretty far from co-location.
The article is vague about what the main problem was in the bosses view, which they must have told him at the original "needs improvement" meeting (they actually should have told him earlier in a friendlier setting, too).
If it was his non availability when expected (meetings/telecons) or missing explicitly agreed to deadlines, I agree with your non-professional label.
If he got a task to do in 3 days and delivered in 3 days he did just fine even if he was on a beach with the phone off the first day. In this case the failure is with the management who didn't know how to run a remote team (which is a rare skill, too).
It depends on what the work is like, too. In practice all of the most successful teams I've been on have been highly collaborative (i.e. reachable). The kind of team where everyone goes incommunicado for days on end working on independent deliverables tends to suffer from low velocity, poor team cohesion, and ultimately inferior quality. I'm collaborating with coworkers constantly throughout the day, including occasionally sitting in front of the same computer to work through something. Change latency from seconds to days and everything suffers.
While there was clearly a mismatch of expectations here, I don't think working in an asynchronous manner is necessarily unprofessional. And there's really not enough information in the original article to see how the mismatched expectations developed.
I'm not sure " To the degree that sometimes my bosses were left hanging, waiting for a day or more on my work." necessarily means what you're saying. There are absolutely ways to communicate that you need a personal day - or that something is delayed because [reasons] - that aren't 'just disappearing'.
If you need a personal day then use one of your allocated vacation days. It's still unprofessional to be springing these on people at a moment's notice rather than communicating them ahead of time, though.
If you aren't using a vacation day then you should absolutely be reachable throughout the entire work day, and disappearing for a day at a time is unacceptable.
If this were a problem, then his or her manager should have said something the very first time it happened. Waiting for it to happen multiple times and being on the verge of firing someone before telling the employee they didn't like it is wildly incompetent.
It's entirely possible (and this is pure speculation) that this was a pattern his managers observed, and one that continued even with regular corrective feedback. I've been on the managerial end of that situation and it's really no fun when no improvement is seen even when expectations (and consequences) are clearly and explicitly laid out. Some people just don't get it - but again totally speculation, may not really apply in this situation.
There could be reasons... one thing you might not have experienced is not having explicit management, and not even knowing who you /should/ inform. That happens from time to time.
This is possibly indicated by "bosses". Not having explicit line management sucks.
There is a really easy solution to the "no explicit management" problem: Just go to 1 boss and ask "When I want to take a vacation day, who do I talk to/what is the process for that?"
Works best if that is early on after joining the company. Or just ask the same question to HR, they would guaranteed know what the process is.
In my case, I had a supervisor magic-up a title promotion for himself based on seniority. He started telling everyone he was "the lead supervisor" including his peers. His peer, my direct supervisor, told me to escalate work/issues to the "lead supervisor" before our manager. When I did check with HR/higher management, they were flummoxed.
It does seem that was the case and then if you can simply say "please never disappear for the whole day without telling me" and that would be the end of it. I think there's more going on here.
"Please be reachable during normal business hours" is a very reasonable demand of remote coworkers. Most of the problems I've ever had with remote coworkers was with them not being reachable and consequently blocking team progress. These people inevitably got poor performance reviews and did not move up in the company, and some got fired.
When you can turn to your coworker next to you and ask a simple one minute question that unblocks you, but you can't reach your remote coworker for an entire day and you thus fail to make progress for an entire day because of their truancy, you begin to resent them really quickly. It doesn't matter if you're their manager or not; it's super irritating.
Did you communicate to them that their absence blocked work? If you didn't, they likely thought that there were no problems and continued in that behavior.
Part of what makes corporate America suck is the kind of passive aggressive resentments that never get expressed. Suddenly the remote worker finds that everyone hates him and has no clue why.
You are making a lot of assumptions on what is "professional".
A contract is an agreement. There are companies paying very high salaries to very low - expecting very high commitment to very low - in various combinations.
