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Comment by peterbozso | Hacker News Reader

We do it like this at GitLab and it's very effective: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/

> Consider encouraging direct reports to keep their 1:1 document open in their browser throughout the week

A bit unexpected, doesn't seem healthy to me. Surely there are more important things happening in the average week other than career progression?

EDIT: I better stop reading this as I've always liked GitLab, but am catching some heavy Lumon vibes :D this is one of the possible agenda items: "SING - if added, the person who added it leads a singalong with all willing participants in the meeting" (at https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggeste...)

Is there really anything more important than career progression? You're there to get paid; your manager is there to help you get paid more.

In my book, yes. Things like delivering value to customers, building great products and doing work that you'll be proud of. Career goals are quite often orthogonal to those.

> Is there really anything more important than career progression?

In a particular company? Yes, most things are. In my professional life? Yes, but career progression ranks pretty darned high. However, my career progression is a layer of abstraction above whatever company I happen to be working for, and can really only be effectively managed at that level.

> your manager is there to help you get paid more.

That's not the most important thing I want from my manager. The important things I want from my manager are making sure I have what I need to do my job, making sure that I am not being unnecessarily hampered in doing my job, and making sure that I am working in sync with the rest of my team and other teams toward a common goal.

In other words, the most important thing a manager can do for me is to keep the skids greased.

If you want to get paid more, then don't engage the company for "career progression". 90% of that stuff is designed by HR for "engagement" to keep you on the hamster wheel. A lot of that stuff at my company is kept under the retention category in HR, which tells you all you need to know.

If they like you, you will get promoted anyway rather than engaging in that sort of stuff.

If you want more money, get a better job.

This sounds horrible.

Once a week is way too often in my opinion, and the whole setting is much too formal.

I prefer 1-to-1s to be informal without agendas. Once a month is enough. It is a time to build rapport and trust and obviously it has to be "synchronous" and in person if possible.

I used to do every other week with my previous manager and I feel like that was an appropriate pace. Unfortunately my new manager wants to do it every week and that's definitely way too frequent.

That looks like a lot of work.

Could be worse, like a meeting with more than two people.

Wow, that’s really helpful and quite inspiring to see an org doing it like this. Thanks for sharing!

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