[kelnos]

The author mentions they have nearly 10 years of experience in the field, so assuming they went to college and got their first programming job soon thereafter, that puts them around 30-32, so fairly solidly millennial, if maybe on the younger side of it. Not that this matters; I'm always dubious of generalizations based on made up things like "generations".

I definitely got people-pleasing vibes, and I agree the whole "making my screen look neat and tidy" and "engineering my arrival time to the meeting" bits were too much. If I had an interviewer who cared about or was impressed by those "metrics", I would consider that pretty shallow.

Based on that first performance review they got, my feeling is they had a bad manager. I agree with the manager that communication is a crucially important part of work, but you don't give someone a low rating when they completed an otherwise wildly successful project. That's just cruel and demoralizing. You can attack the communication problem without demotivating your employee and possibly hurting their career progression.

Whenever a poor performance review is a surprise to the employee, that alone is a management failure. Don't wait until review time to discuss problems; bring them up immediately and try to address them. Maybe by the time the review comes up, the problem will be gone. And if it's not, the employee won't be surprised by the reasons behind a less-than-ideal review.