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Comment by beaner | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a naive question but do you really need 1:1s every week? At my first startup we did them like every 2 months and it was a treat. If you needed something in between you just asked for it. At my second company even once every two weeks seemed sort of ridiculous, at first it was a welcome excuse to not work for an hour and eventually they just got boring and took me away from things I liked working on.

I think somebody's going to say "you or your manager were failing to extract what you could from those meetings, that's why they seemed useless," or something like that. But I really just think they weren't necessary to do that often.

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I don't think 1:1s have to be weekly as a hard rule, but it's a good starting point.

If bi-weekly works for you and your reports, do that. However I would argue that 1:1 is the one area you shouldn't try to minimise - as a manager, spending time coaching and developing your reports is a large part of your job. The time you spend on them should be highly valuable. If you or your reports think 1:1s are a waste of time, something is going wrong and you need to change how you do that.

If we're talking coaching then having a weekly learning session would be good. It would be even better to share it with more people and have a mini lesson. I wouldn't call it 1:1, even if I did similar things because the company we worked for mandated 1:1s religiously and we were out of things to talk about.

If a 1:1 is just a way to surface problems with the employee and plan skills progression, weekly is way too much. Even monthly, there is hardly something new going on, in my experience.

I think this happens because of deep issues with how companies operate, which is a frustrating and painful issue to deal with upper management.

The problem with skill progressions in most companies I've seen is that they're something meant to retain engineers, while what engineers are hired for is to build a product. Once you're not a junior engineer anymore, you have probably seen all the technical tasks you can do. What are you going to learn next? Functional programming? Cool, it will come in handy to fix pixels on buttons.

Some companies are better than others. From what I've seen, it's worse where skills progressions are basically irrelevant for promotions and raises and the only factors that matter are product related.

It's hard for an engineer to get the time out of their busy schedules. I've seen two types of engineers. Those who don't care about their career and spend as much company time learning something to show off at their next interview and those who care so much about the product that they don't have time. I'm sure just the notion of these factors being in play influence the way mentees portray themselves to mentors. If you don't trust your mentor and you know there is no punishment or reward for not learning whatever skill is important to learn, you'll just say you didn't have time to learn it and focus on the product.

Engineers are always busy but IME their schedules are typically clearer than managers; be careful!

I promote explicitly scheduled focus time (ex: 4 hours twice a week of "GSD"). Also a good manager will know when they really don't need to probe on current health & status and happily call a meeting early. I wish more meetings ended with "we're done 30 minutes early!"

> However I would argue that 1:1 is the one area you shouldn't try to minimise

It should also be a scheduling priority. A 1:1 may not seem super important, but it's often the only time an employee will have to talk with their boss. Repeatedly cancelling it (especially last-minute) is an indicator that your employees are not a priority and that can destroy trust and kill morale.

100% agree. If you are a manager, dont cancel 1:1s unless it is a legit emergency. if someone schedules over it, tell them you cant do it because you have a 1:1 and you dont reschedule those. These are the most important meetings on a managers calendar. any org that treats them differently will not be as successful and employees will not feel as supported, as they could be.

I rarely get anything from my 1:1 which is one hour every two weeks.

Most reasons for the call could be replaced just by emailing agenda items to me, and allowing me to respond with any issues, then based on that and what is on the agenda we could decide to have a call but most of the time we wouldn't. And if we did to get past something in particular, it would be like 10 minutes not 60.

My manager is not technical though and can't really coach me about much. It seems strange that 1:1 time would be used to coach and develop technical staff -- what do you mean by this exactly? Some kind of training?

I think in general you'll get out what you put in. 1:1 should be your time, your agenda. If it's a status meeting it's being done wrong. If you aren't setting the agenda and bringing things to talk about, goals to discuss, questions, etc. I think you are missing out. If your manager isn't pushing you to bring those things (many don't, but should) take it into your own hands. Shows that you own your development plan, and that is always a plus.

Manager is very open and always asks me to bring any issue I have, asks me about it on the calls etc. I do bring things to talk about when I have them. Which is not very often because most things I have can be done far quicker and more precisely with a written record I can refer back to on slack.

I am not the one who schedules these 1:1 meetings though. Manager is. Cardinal rule of meetings should be only schedule them if you have an achievable goal for them which is not better achieved with email or IM. And the goal can't be "talk about X".

I don't have a strong desire to push back against it. My schedule is not one that is full of meetings, and most of the ones I do have are interesting and enjoyable technical ones. And the manager is a nice person who means well and probably gets pressure from above to schedule them. And blabbering on for 30 minutes per week isn't terrible. It's just not at all productive or useful for me to be spending that long on a 1:1 as far as I can see.

Just a thought, but maybe your manager does have a goal for these meetings? Maybe checking on your wellbeing, keeping an eye on your engagement etc? I can get a lot from a casual chat with someone. Just because you don't personally benefit from a meeting doesn't mean someone else doesn't.

For my team members, one of my reports started an agenda doc with the things they wanted to talk about allowing us to stay focused, I add things to the doc too and it works really well. When we have nothing on the agenda, we don't have the one on one. It worked so well, I now do it with all of my reports (and the peers and management types that I report to).

He generally puts together an agenda and does ask about how I'm doing, always asks whether I have any problems or want to talk about anything.

Don't get me wrong at all, he's a lovely person and means well. The 1:1 does not irritate me as such, my week is not loaded up with meetings. If that was different, I would gently try to change things. I also think he is getting pressure from above to meet various metrics like 1:1 time.

I just don't get much out of it that couldn't be replaced by a couple of minute slack or email once in a while when things come up. And I accept it might work well for others.

It’s hard to give concrete recommendations because everybody’s company/role/background is different, but two things that really stand out to me:

1. As parallel posters have pointed out, yea, if your 1:1 is spent reporting task status / receiving task direction, woof, that sucks. 1:1s are (as you’ve found) a horrible medium for that, in that they burn your time, your manager’s time, and also are a high-delay channel for that information. In my experience, a good 1:1 is meta-level feedback. I spend a lot of my 1:1s discussing what’s likely/unlikely to come over the horizon in the next 3/6/9 months, both in terms of projects and my personal growth.

2. There are plenty of coachable skills that are not technical, and the average engineer, in my experience, tends to climb the IC ladder via tech skills and then plateau because their non-tech skills are an undeveloped muscle. This is how tech ends up with so many very skilled programmers that have to be hidden in a dark corner because when they talk to another team they accidentally piss everybody off or they get pissed off. As a mundane example of this: I have worked with several developers over the years that write awesome code, but if somebody from another team pinged them and said “hey, can you work on $project”, would just say “sure” or “go pound sand” based on their personal mood w/o any concept of how to prioritize that ask. Time management and prioritization are amazingly important non-technical skills that an effective manager can help coach.

No it's not reporting task status. Some times a high priority issue that he was asked about in some other meeting by a project manager for example that I haven't made good progress on, he'll just mention it. Or just a friendly "how is <this> project going?" how is "<that> interesting feature you are working on going?" chat. Which is fine it but not necessary to be in a 1:1.

I'm not one to believe I can't be taught anything new or training has no place (technical or non-technical), but I don't really see how a 1:1 is an appropriate place for it. Shouldn't it be offered as some training, perhaps even in a group setting to maximize use of time (which is how we organize informal training sessions between the team on topics one might know a lot about), perhaps even offered as a formal training course run or paid for by the organization?

So I don't see what the 1:1 itself is achieving in any of this.

Does your organization not offer internal or external group training opportunities? They’re great, but I’m not sure why you’re presenting them as mutually exclusive with individual coaching.

> Does your organization not offer internal or external group training opportunities?

It does.

> They’re great, but I’m not sure why you’re presenting them as mutually exclusive with individual coaching.

I'm not, it just sounded to me like time management and prioritization were skills better taught in training courses or group sessions.

I'm still not clear on what this coaching really looks like, or why it is appropriate for a regular 1:1 call.

Coaching generally differs from training in that it’s drawn from actual ongoing circumstance. So you can go to a group training on how to manage your time, where somebody teaches you techniques for prioritizing requests. But a good manager can notice if you’re getting burned by bad prioritization and spend time coaching you based on the specific circumstances you’re hitting.

Well I'm a bit skeptical whether they would or whether it would be better to suggest actual structured courses for me. But either way I don't see how that justifies regular 1:1 when I don't get said coaching. Send a message mentioning their thoughts and ask if I'd like some help with it, and if they think they are the one to give it and other team members would not benefit, great organize a regular call for a few months or do it over slack or whatever.

As I said, I have no problem with a call for a said purpose with an achievable goal. "1:1" is not a goal though, nor is "talk about <x>".

Yes, kind of like training, except it doesn't have a set agenda like a training session would, but is instead rooted in the circumstances of what's going on at that time. Any questions your report has? Anything they are struggling with? Any feedback you have for them? What are they working on longer term and how that's going?

I've never managed senior people, but for junior to mid engineers there is plenty to talk about most weeks. Occasionally there isn't, in which case it's just a 10 min checkin, but the weekly opportunity to raise anything is quite important.

1:1s that are status updates or things that could be resolved over email are definitely an anti-pattern.

An hour seems like too much, but scheduling 30 mins, and leaving the subsequent 30 mins free in case something significant comes up during it, feels right.

Trust erodes surprisingly fast, so even if there’s not a whole lot of substance to discuss, a consistent time to shoot the shit or whatever, is worth the time out of your week. I’d be very worried if I joined a place and there weren’t weekly 1-1s with my manager.

It does depend on company stage though, if it’s very early and the team is small enough to not need these supporting tools, you can probably get away with less frequent 1-1s.

>> but scheduling 30 mins, and leaving the subsequent 30 mins free in case something significant comes up during it, feels right.

Yes! this is an obvious (in hindsight) but pro move. You never want to cut off a direct report in the middle of an important, emotional discussion because "Hey, sorry got another meeting, peace out!"

To the GP: 2 months is too long between real 1:1s, this sounds like more of a career direction discussion or a skip-level with your boss's boss. Or if you're in a really small team/org you might be discussing 1:1 material far more frequently/casually without realizing it. I STILL like explicit, strict 1:1 schedules though because it's time owned by the IC who guides the conversation while the manager listens and figures out how they are going to solve the questions presented. I do very green juniors, people on performance improvement plans and those I'm mentoring for leadership positions every week; everyone else on 2-week schedules. Longer than that makes me nervous, out-of-touch and it's really hard to build personal relationships.

I agree. I had a manager who was really hard to pin down for one on ones. Whenever I asked for performance feedback he said I was fine but surprised me with a poor performance score at the end of the quarter and a bunch of improvement points. This is a great way to demotivate an employee, especially when performance scores are tied to bonuses etc. One on ones are a GREAT time to let employees know if they slipped up or you noticed something they could do better in future.

I personally don't understand 1on1s. I never had them in the teams that I managed and I never wanted to implemented them. They seem like such a huge wast of time. We do have some global talks about raises and global performance every 6 months, but whenever there is an issue or there is something to discuss, we do it as soon as possible. For me they seem like some sort of ritual to show that you are connected to the team or that you care, but I think you show that by actually being there for the team all the time when they need it. Even when we have our 6 months meetings, most of my colleagues just say that we always talk, there nothing much to say extra. The other excuse is also that the team is too big and you need 1on1s to you can have a chat with everyone. If your team is too big, then you might have bigger issues than that, or you just need to delegate so that other people that work closely together take over some of those responsibilities.

worked in a place that did these... I think monthly. for "problems" it was a time to review/discuss some issues that came up recently but that may not have been important enough at the time to interrupt the other party (interrupting a big concerted 'push to live' effort was usually not a good idea). And, it gave you time to reflect on some of those issues, perhaps see patterns, and discuss those.

It was also an actual time that someone carved out specifically for the purposes of talking/listening, instead of things being interruptions. "My door is always open" is fine, except... they're still doing other stuff, and whenever you raise an issue to someone, it will almost certainly be interrupting something else.

Lastly, it was a time/place where you could explore some other ideas that weren't necessarily in any pipeline or backlog.

"you show that by actually being there for the team all the time when they need it". Someone can't simply always be there all the time whenever someone needs it. The urgency/importance level isn't always the same on both sides, and someone is being interrupted. I'm not meaning "save every single issue for a planned meeting 2 weeks from now" but ... scheduled time that is intended specifically for discussion purposes has utility on its own.

My first couple of jobs, the only time you'd ever talk to "a manager" of any sort was when you were in some sort of trouble. If/when you'd get asked to go speak to a manager... it was anxiety inducing, whether it was intended to be or not.

I do bi-weekly 1:1s with my people. Rule 1 of people management: everyone is different.

Some folks need 20 minutes, some want the whole hour. Some have bullet points to discuss, some just need a chat. When the pandemic hit the 1:1 became a place for some people to have vital social interaction. There's others who want to show off their work and receive guidance on next steps.

Reading through all these comments it seems like a lot of people have robotic managers who don't care about people at all. A good manager uses a 1:1 for understanding their needs as an employee and building trust.

I want to ensure my employees are productive, and the 1:1 is the best place to find out how.

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