Teammate has been slacking since a week: not joining standups, not joining calls, stuff like that. Upon asking , he does give info which is needed from him, over slack. He is a pretty good engineer and has won a company award this year.

Today manager scolded him pretty harshly. No direct slangs, but very rude tone and sentences like ‘do you need special invitation to your house to join this meeting?’ , ‘If you don’t want to work, just fuck all this shit’ and things along this line for 10 mins. Basically manager lost his shit completely.

I didn’t like the way he was treated. What options does my teammate have ? We’re based out of Hyderabad, India.

Could you address it within your team? Sounds pretty scary.

At the start of pandemic we "lost" a teammate. He was joining the Dailies ever more rarely and at some point our boss just announced that he was "gone" now, i.e. fired I assume.

Hope you can sort it out, before such stuff happens. Sounds like management handled it really badly.

So, manager's behaviour was pretty unprofessional. Your colleague was missing meetings, which is also unprofessional, but one doesn't excuse the other. Few options, your colleague could apologise to manager, let it slide. Could speak to hr and raise the issue, but will have to be honest that they've been missing meetings and will be asked why (meetings are part of the job, but if there's a problem, then speaking to hr is a good idea anyway)

Also, depends what employment rights are like in the area

He should talk to HR on his own and be open and honest.

Might get fired none the less - but if a manager acts out like that, I'd probably seek for a new job.

The manager should be fired for unprofessional behavior and creating a hostile environment. There should be zero tolerance for this. Your other colleague should be given a formal warning and be clearly told that more violations could lead to termination of employment, but it's highly likely that he/she is already mentally checked out from this place and is doing interviews.

Sounds like your teammate might be burned out or something. When I am stuck on doing some intense refactor to be honest I prefer avoiding any stupid meetings where 90 percent of information will be useless for me anyways. I dont want to spend 30min everyday for just to wait for my moment where I would say 'yeah still working on this'.

In that case I inform my team in our slack channel that I wont be able to join standup and most importantly I post my status update in there. If someone wants to follow up with questions they can always do that. I also make sure that my MR's are clean and my jira tickets are updated, so that basically even without talking to me I would be on the same page with teamlead/manager.

Now this manager guy seems like an unstable control freak. Trying to guilt trip and shame the dev infront of others just to force him to sit through probably useless meetings. I would start recording meetings with him so I would have proof when I go and talk with HR.