And even if everyone completely ignored them when they direct messaged their teammates... why do nothing. Why not dig in and figure out how to get it to build and update the Readme? I don't understand why someone would just sit there and do nothing instead of trying to fix the problem.

I did that once and then rewrote the repo. Everything was fine for months on our team until another team merged their exact copy with new changes that broke what I was doing. Everyone senior left my team and it looked like I was doing nothing for 4 months. Communication should come first and the manager needs to step up.

I agree that communications is important and was the primary thing wrong here. It was more that even on top of that, they just sat there doing nothing vs. at least trying to be productive and figure it out for themselves.

And didn't you have backups of that repo?

Sure I have backups. The other group took a copy of the repo and changed it over a three month period and never checked back in. The versions were very different and merging my copy in was difficult and required a rethinking and rewrite.. in the end it became three separate components. All of this happened during a management change so the timing wasn't perfect.

It also appears to assume that someone could help them. There are plenty of times where knowledge of a project or component is simply lost, either the developers don't remember or are gone, it's one of the costs of employee turn over.

The reason is pretty clear, the worked remotely and so had no means to physically reach out but instead had to wait for people to reply on mail.

OP said slack. DM is as simple as doing "/msg @joe.blow I'm blocked, can you please help me?". If no response, go to @joe.blow's colleagues. If still no response, go to their boss. If still no response, go to their bosses's boss. Repeat until you run out of people to escalate to, at which point you find another job.

If they are willing to pay a blocked remote worker for sitting on their ass doing nothing, why should the worker rock the boat so much that they burn all bridges at the company and finally have to get a different job? Remote jobs seem somewhat hard to come by and can be a sweet deal.

The company needs to take at least partial blame here.

No need for worker to do that. But that's then their conscious decision and they shouldn't express their frustrations over it. On the other hand, if they want to make a progress, they should escalate appropriately.

Note that I am not convinced that this is the case here - I simply don't have enough information to make the judgement.

So someone wanting the system they are a part of to work appropriately without them having to be an excessively aggressive asshat about it needs to swallow their frustration entirely and not even vent about it on an online forum?

Wat?

Even!more than that, at some point you start including "You are paying me $xxx/day to do nothing productive because I'm unable to get 15 minutes of time or even acknowledgement of requests from persons X, Y and Z."

My other thought was to file blocking bug/defect issues on the relevant software because obviously if it can't build in the first place it's certainly not passing QA.

Some of this may get to the level of passive-aggressive or aggressive-aggressive bridge burning.

Direct message doesn't require physical contact.

When I mentioned mail, I meant email which is exactly as easy to ignore as a DM.

100 percent agree with your post.

Unfortunately most people I have met do not think like this.