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Comment by mercutio2 | Hacker News Reader

The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild.

If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide.

But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?

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With most of my managers 1:1 have always been a way for them to catch up with what I’ve been working on, despite doing a standup every single day so that the team knows what each other is doing.

I have standup every day so my manager knows what I am doing so my 1:1s are:

- General sentiment about problems with the team and company that bother me but that I don’t have a solution to yet or decided how to bring it up with the team.

- Fun / interesting projects I unilaterally decided to dedicate my working hours towards that I never asked permission to work on. Sometimes it ends up being something cool that my manager wants to join in on or promote to a bigger effort.

- About our lives and what's going on.

So basically useless unless you need to schedule a meeting with them

That's assuming an awful lot, mainly about how we no longer need human connection or context with other people to be able to succeed as a team. When I took over as an engineering manager, it took a couple of 1:1s per person but actually being interested in them as fellow humans made a huge difference. One of my reports, a former teammate who I really liked and got along well with, was carrying serious depression around every day. Learning that gave me a chance to help him out, discuss my experience so he knew he wasn't alone and let me make space for him to breathe.

Which made him a more productive cog in the machine fellow human-bot!

Nothing says human connection as much as scheduled meeting and necessity to have scheduled meeting to get or provide context.

If the general mussings about a company, causual fun project and a little small talk about life require scheduled meething, you dont have those human connections with the team.

Did you considered that people understand difference between human connection, relationship and being one of mandatory duties/meeting with someone who is actually apart and disconnected?

>Nothing says human connection as much as scheduled meeting and necessity to have scheduled meeting to get or provide context.

I understand your point, but that also describes a date.

I dated only people I already had human connection with. I did not went to dates because company process said I should or I thought it will make my partner more performing, but because I wanted to be with that person.

We also did quite a lot of spontaneous unplanned stuff.

Nothing quite says “guy that weirds out his coworkers but doesn’t know it” quite like this. Solid statement.

Depends on the size of the company and/or where you fit in the organization. If your manager is also the owner then there is something to be said about keeping a friendly relationship. If it is some middle manager several layers deep who doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, then yeah, it's a waste. That time would be far better spent speaking to the CEO or board of directors.

It's beneficial to have someone to bounce things off of, to provide feedback, or to share a degree of personal information; it can be helpful for my manager to know that I have a lot of family stuff going on this week so I may be intermittently available, less productive, or working different hours.

It's also an opportunity to get on the same page about stuff or clarify things that might be a bit too long-form for a daily standup.

My 1:1s with my team lead vary between three minutes and 45 minutes; if there's a lot to cover, we cover it, if there's only one thing we discuss it and hop off. If there's nothing or if one of us is busy we just skip it.

I think the real benefit is that that time in my team lead's calendar is always blocked off for me if I need to use it for something so I don't have to wriggle around other meetings, appointments, etc. to get a slice of face-to-face time about something that doesn't feel 'important enough' to schedule a meeting for but which wouldn't get discussed otherwise.

No there are topics that are not important enough to bring up (yet) so they don’t warrant their own meeting, so you need a soft place to bring them up with low expectations.

A 1:1 is like asking to get lunch with someone — you don’t have anything specific to talk about but it puts you two together to talk about random things.

Unless you meet new people by exchanging printed lists of your interests and activities and marking which ones you are interested in, but the rest of us don’t tick like that.

> So basically useless unless you need to schedule a meeting with them

Back in the day of 5 days in the office, this kind of connection happened through osmosis, not really necessary to schedule.

In this day of everyone remote, if you don't intentionally schedule time to just connect, it'll never happen.

I used to be a believer in daily standup plus bi-weekly sprint planning, but lost faith with the (possibly cargo cult) methodology I was trying to follow. Adding 1:1 in with that would be far too frequent, and probably far too little real content in each meeting.

Did productivity actually change dispensing with those meetings? Probably not by much, it's hard to say empirically because task estimation was always a wildcard.

Qualitatively, I think a good balance is twice-weekly standup, bi-weekly long form. It adds some structure and regular communication, I think it helps people feel better and have a bit more relationship. But I supplement this with frequent invitations to talk about product ad-hoc, talk about tasking ad-hoc if you feel you're not productive, and schedule more pointed meetings with me whenever I'm free. Which is almost all the time, because I need to not be in meetings in order to get work done or spend time thinking.

Honestly, I don't begrudge anyone a job. If people want to do SWE as a performative role, I'll detect that fairly quickly and let it be, even people under me if I were to climb the org chart beyond the first rung. They actually do serve some benefits to the company and to society, as long as they are amicable and respond positively to requests. I'm eventually going to tune them out for serious/urgent development work, and no one can make any guarantees about protection from layoffs, period. C'est la vie.

If people are driven to achieve more, love engineering products, and enjoy working with technology, it's going to be obvious. We will end up working together to solve problems like gravity creates stable orbits. But I can't realistically only hire those people, or run even a medium size company with only the vital few on payroll. It's statistically unlikely, that's why a unicorn startup is a unicorn. Statistically most SWE roles exist outside of that... right? Like after IPO, in big companies where some amount of bureaucracy is just a fact of the size of the machine.

EDIT: twice weekly standup, although I guess bi-weekly can mean both every other week and twice a week?

The general academic lab model is still the best I've seen and experienced. People sign up to present at the weekly lab meeting if they have something to present, 1 person per meeting. There's maybe 10 mins of quick bringing things up at the beginning of lab meeting before the presenter starts, if you have something short to share or general announcements. Specific project groups will have their own direct meetings on their own schedule that makes sense to them with the pace of incoming results to discuss.

When you do daily standups or mandatory everyone says something type stuff, it does something damaging psychologically. You end up scrambling to get things together for the standup to not look like you are a fumbling idiot, when it would have been better to take a few more days with a clearer head, less cortisol in your blood, and output and share better work.

Going directly from a research lab with a healthy and collaborative culture to an agile scrum factory in the private sector was one of the most jarring experiences of my life.

Everytime I speak to an academic who is trying to make the same leap this is something I always warn them about.

> When you do daily standups or mandatory everyone says something type stuff, it does something damaging psychologically.

Yes, very much. The most stressful times I've had at jobs were when I felt necessary to have an update every day at a silly standup. I'd have a panic attack most late afternoons about having enough "content" for tomorrow morning standup. That is super toxic.

I'm ok with daily standups, as long as it is clear it's just a moment to mention anything you want the team to know or rant about something that's annoying you, but it's perfectly ok to say "nothing to update" most of the time.

Currently I manage a team and we do daily standups. I'd rather cancel them, but the team wants to do them so we do. I often say I have no updates partly because it's true but also to set the example so the team members don't feel any pressure to give updates unless there is a specific detail they want to share.

That’s an anti pattern of management - the 1-1 shouldn’t be a status update. There are times you want to brief your boss on things that are important to them, but if you’re just going over your tickets, that’s a waste of time (unless you’re using that time to get technical guidance on your tickets).

There are lots of lousy managers out there, and you can’t control that - but you can set the agenda of your 1-1 yourself if they don’t have one. It’s your 45 minutes with the person who signs your checks, use it to your advantage.

Search the net for questions / topics to manage up in 1-1s.

I often ask my manager for feedback, ask about expectations for promotion, career opportunities, ask advice on problems I have, ask how I can get my thing prioritized, brief her on something I think she should be aware of and what I need from her, etc.

Don’t let your manager turn your 45 minutes into a waste of time.

I lead teams of Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and Platform Engineers. My direct reports drive their 1:1s; from the need to have them in the first place to the agenda when we do.

We have standups for our team as well as the larger team and we are in constant contact with one another throughout each day via IM. Why would we need to repeat the same shit in a 1:1?

I consider their 1:1s THEIR meeting. If they want it, I'm there; if they don't and want to work, great.

As such, we almost never have 1:1s and my team continually leads the organization w/the highest overall as well as manager satisfaction. It's been this way at each and every company I've worked for and is likely why all but one inherited direct report has worked with me at multiple companies before.

> if they don't and want to work, great.

Interesting thought, I had never considered cancelling if they don’t have anything. Thanks for that.

My thought was always, “I want to give everyone that time no matter what, and if they don’t have anything, then I go to a list of questions I have for every 1-1 if we have time. Stuff like, “how are you feeling with ${latest_company_happenings}?” or “how do you think the team is doing?” or “are you interested in the work these days, or burnt out?” or ask them about some problem I’m trying to solve for the team and how they’d approach it.

Ala: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-update-the-vent-and-t...

Empowerment of your team is the single most impactful thing you can do for them. This is one small way of making them feel that they truly have autonomy.

>“how are you feeling with ${latest_company_happenings}?” or “how do you think the team is doing?” or “are you interested in the work these days, or burnt out?”

That is the worst questions to ask to the experienced people. You cannot share your negative feelings, so the answer should be socially acceptable bullshit.

Are you burnt out? Yes? Sorry to hear that! I'll put a high attrition risk to your name in the system.

Like asking during the job interview the question: Why do you want to work here? I need money and you have an open position! But you cannot answer that to pass the gatekeeper.

> That is the worst questions to ask to the experienced people.

God what a know-it-all. This is just a vent without substance by someone that I can safely assume hates his job and his manager.

This very much depends on the place and the level of maturity in how you share the negativity. Good managers will try to understand and help you, that's a large part of their job.

Also, if you are a high performer then being an attrition risk isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's in the companies best interest to try keep people who are important.

This is such good common sense that it’s foreign to so many people.

The 1:1 is great when needed. It’s a waste of time if everyone is already communicating everything. The most efficient teams communicate effectively without having to force it into recurring, pre-determined time slots. Topics like performance reviews and career progression are better discussed in quarterly meetings dedicated to that topic, not a weekly time slot with a fluid agenda.

I would love practical advice on how to say to a manager "I'm not deriving any value from this recurring 1x1 meeting, can we move it to on-demand?"

My 30+ year career has not revealed a way to achieve that yet without repurcussions. However much I'd prefer it.

I realize I’m different than many leaders out there; I came up through the ranks and do everything the way I wished it had been rather than the way it was.

As such, I’m entirely open to any and all feedback from my team. I certainly wouldn’t be offended if you just asked; I’d do my best to accommodate it.

What’s the worst that can happen? They say no?

Worst that happens is they get silently offended, while being political to you at the same time and secretly undermine your performance reviews during calibration meetings without you even knowing or just not standing up for you that much during this time will be enough due to stack ranking etc.

This - I've had a manager who was pretty ineffective, and if he wasn't doing 1:1s he'd feel like he was failing at managing. Easier to just talk in circles with him.

The meeting isn't for you. If it were, you'd have been the one scheduling it.

First place to start is to determine what value the other party is deriving from the meeting. Zero in on exactly why they want to have the meeting. From there, you can put your problem solving skills in action to determine if there is a better way to deliver equivalent value.

However, keep in mind that it is likely that the value you are delivering is your company during that time. A lot of hiring happens because the people involved want to have 'friends' around them.

> The meeting isn't for you.

Wild how many different definitions of a 1:1 are in this thread.

Most of the other commenters are emphatically saying that the 1:1 is for the employee, not the manager.

The fact that nobody can agree on what the 1:1 is supposed to be is emblematic of all the problems that have been rolled up into the way that 1:1s are being cargo culted in modern business enivronments.

Employees talking to managers is good. The way we've turned it into a cargo cult performance where nobody can agree on what it's supposed to be but people will attack you for suggesting alternatives (see some of the weird comments shaming people in this thread) is why they've become so hated.

It's starting to remind me of the way Agile went from a human-first light touch philosophy to becoming a heavy, process-first ideology that starts replacing good planning with a bunch of rituals.

I only see one definition, which is the same definition it has always had: One person talking to one other person. Hence one to one for short.

There is no disagreement about that. The only difference in your case, as opposed to experiences others have had, is the dynamic between those two people. You are not seeking a meeting or want to have a meeting, thus the meeting is being called only for the benefit of the other person.

Let's simplify this: Nobody calls a meeting they don't find any value in. If someone is asking you to join a meeting, it is for them. It might also be for you if you both can see value, but that was said to not be the case in your case. When only the other party finds value, you are going to struggle to cut them off without some pushback, but this is where you can determine what value they are trying to get out of the meeting and see if there is a better way to deliver it.

> Search the net for questions / topics to manage up in 1-1s.

This is why so many people find themselves in performative 1 on 1s: It's assumed that the time must be spent, so managers and reports alike start searching for things to fill up that time.

The best 1 on 1 formats I've had were quick and to the point. We cancelled or ended early if there was nothing to discuss that hadn't already been discussed.

The worst were a game of finding things to talk about for 50 minutes because some manager read a few management books and decided they must fill up the time to bond with employees. So we'd go through silly questions from lists from books or do bonding exercises while I had to pretend to smile and enjoy it.

It is totally acceptable to use a list of questions to give you ideas for what to talk about. You might learn something you didn’t know if you didn’t ask.

For example, most managers aren’t having “career” convos with their people regularly. It’s fine to use a question bank if it helps you kick this convo off and get to the heart of the matter.

If your 1-1s have been performative, I guess shame on either the manager, you, or both.

If you’re scheduling meetings without an idea of what to talk about, that’s a problem.

Looking up ideas to discuss with your manager is a good idea. If you are being scheduled for time slots and have to search for ideas to fill it every week, that’s a symptom of a broken meeting that should be reduced in time, frequency, or both.

> I guess shame on either the manager, you, or both.

This culture of shaming people who aren’t doing the performative thing of filling up the meeting time is why so many of us are so tired of this rigid 1:1 dogma. Business and communication practices should meet the team’s needs, not be a game of following steps you found on the Internet about what to talk about in meetings.

Schedule meetings when communication is needed. Stop wasting everyone’s time by searching the internet for conversation ideas for arbitrary meetings.

question bank ?! lol, no wonder people complain about being performative.

If you have nothing to talk about, cancel it

I have had multiple managers and the thing is I wouldn't expect a truly honest answer from my manager ever, so to me it is also just all performative ritual that I have to go through and would rather avoid. So it does feel like waste of time to me. And I also feel like I have to be careful, because honesty has most of the time just yielded me useless work in the long term. It is easier to pretend everything is good, than to point out issues as it will i variably lead to a rabbit hole of nonsensical work.

> because honesty has most of the time just yielded me useless work in the long term

Are you sure it's useless work, or growth opportunities?

A good manager will be handing growth opportunities to you often. I had one employee once who for every new opportunity just rolled their eyes and asked if they have to do it? I'd tell them the work was not strictly required for their current role, but if they wanted to grow their visibility in the company and thus promotion support, it could be a good opportunity. They never wanted to do any of it so never did, never got any visibility and thus never any promotions. Up or out, so eventually they were out.

I feel like I have got promoted fast enough. More than what is considered a "terminal level". I do say yes to high value growth opportunities so that is not the case. In fact I think because of how I act during 1 on 1s is helping me with that, because I am causing no headaches to my manager with honesty.

Basically I am just trying to figure out how I can cause no extra work to anyone and being optimistic to my manager about everything while really I am not.

But it means that I am brainstorming bulletpoints that I think are best to achieve that beforehand, and it is performative.

That’s you, cool no problem I would like chatting with you just to catch a breath.

But there is Mallory who will tell on everyone on the team some dirty stuff.

There is Karen that is trying to undermine Louise because she has bigger boobs than her - yeah she won’t tell it outright but each one on one she would try to indicate she is not doing great job.

There is Henry who thinks he is a fucking rockstar genius implementing features 10X faster than all the pleb and demands rise every freaking one on one but you know that every feature he did had to be scrapped and replaced.

Oh did I mention you cannot just fire them but you have to kind of like of make them continue working. Maybe you can shift someone to other projects, maybe after 3 months or 6 months of documenting them being an asshole you can fire them.

Obviously you can’t offend any of them because ten you will get fired much faster.

The problem you're talking about isn't 1:1 meetings, it's having a toxic and dysfunctional team of assholes at a shitty company. In that kind of environment every interaction with people is awful, 1:1 or not.

Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week.

The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing.

All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.

Why does this have to take place in a meeting? Why can't it be in a team slack? What value gain do you give talking an engineer through what's bothering them? Are they not capable of that independently of you?

A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.

Yeah, if blockers are coming out in 1-on-1 meetings, that’s a really bad sign

For the company, yes. But not for the manager - who now has insanely actionable stuff.

Usually people clam up and are not vocal during group meetings. I am not one of them but it's super common. 1-1s allow people to be more candid.

I am not against 1 on 1's, but making that a regularly scheduled thing as if that adds value is kind of what I am arguing against. If people don't feel comfortable voicing something unless it is in private to their manager, that suggests to me two things - the manager/leadership is not fostering a collaborative environment, or the person needs to work on that (with the assistance/support of their manager), which I see as a manager's primary value gain, empowering their employees.

Managing via 1 on 1's sounds (to me) like a complete waste of everyone's time and a little bit toxic. It also can create an environment encouraging people to go around each other and backstab rather than collaborate. I have been in a lead position before, I'd be very concerned and probably have a series of chats with any dev that sat on something like a blocker until we spoke one on one, or only felt comfortable speaking one on one.

Some things do need to be spoken privately, and they should feel comfortable doing so/scheduling it, but a regularly scheduled thing as a way of managing, unless I am completely misunderstanding GP comment, is crazy to me. Of course I am speaking strictly manager/lead -> developer. A manager managing managers is probably quite a bit different and does require scheduling 1 on 1's regularly to align and adjust, but I wouldn't really know, because I've never been in that role.

You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a 1:1 vs a public environment.

You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting.

You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quickly figure out that any ad hoc meeting is going to be a problem for them and then have anxiety about those, even if its going to be a positive meeting for once.

Have you never heard people joke that their boss asked them for a quick chat and they thought they were getting laid off?

> You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters

This is reframing the discussion a little bit. I said up thread, certain things need to be discussed in private, but why would it be on a regular, frequent cadence?

As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for? If someone requires negative feedback on like, a once a week cadence, I'd be very concerned that employee was a good fit or being managed wrong.

The longer the period in between reviews the larger the gap can become between the manager and employees perception of the employees performance.

Personally I don’t think once a week is absolutely necessary but I tailored it to the employees. I let them choose a cadence with a maximum of once a week and a minimum of once a month and had a mixture of choices amongst my team.

Some people also want to feel heard, but I had to balance that out with my other responsibilities and couldn’t guarantee I could drop everything to talk, so I carve out the time on my calendar and also made it clear that we could drop the meeting that week if both parties felt it was unnecessary

> As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for?

Absolutely not, no. The opposite of that. You never want to hear negative feedback for the first time at an annual review.

You don't want to be giving negative feedback every week, sure, but you do want to give feedback as close to the behavior as possible. Otherwise, you're just letting someone fuck up for months when they could be learning

> Why can't it be in a team slack?

Only a few people can adequately explain themselves through slack.

It doesn't help that a lot of managers are _bad_ managers, and don't/can't/don't know how to run a tight 1:1.

the point of the 1:1 is to provide a high bandwidth way of getting worries and steers from employees to management and direction back to employees. if there is nothing to talk about then cut the meeting short.

> Why does this have to take place in a meeting?

Conspiracy theory (which I believe in): because calls or in office meetings are not persistent and they are not recorded, but chat messages are persistent. Anyone can say they didn't say something, it gets harder in writing.

That's not a conspiracy theory, that's intended behavior.

You want your reports to feel safe to tell you things, you (or they) can always shift to written later.

> The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out.

I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to.

At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved quickly. If it needed a meeting you got everyone together as soon as they were available or you messaged your manager to get it in front of the right people quickly. If you saved things up for the next recurring meeting then it was a problem.

When I joined a corporate-style company, that immediate and direct communication style was discouraged. Everyone was so busy with their meeting schedules that you were burdening them by bringing something up out of the regularly scheduled time slot.

The 1:1s had a performative agenda you had to follow with the classic ten minutes of obligatory chit chat or ice breakers before it was acceptable to bring up the work issues that you had been holding on to for 3 days for this scheduled meeting where it was permissible to bring it up.

All of the managers thought it was such a brilliant invention that this 1:1 format was surfacing the “REAL shit” that was “INSANELY actionable”, as if this was the only way to communicate. It seemed so absurd to me, having come from high performing startups where everyone just communicated to get their job done and was coached if they weren’t. Now I had to queue up all the issues and then follow the weekly ritual of chit-chat first, business second before I had a chance to bring it up in the culturally acceptable time slot.

I think these rituals are really comforting and provide a sense of routing and predictability that some people like, but I also think it can become a performative replacement for good communication when it becomes THE acceptable way to surface the real issues.

The thing is, "everybody just communicates" really does break down when the size of the organization grows past some limit. Everything is easy in a ten-person company, but that absolutely does not scale to a 1000-person company.

1:1s are designed for 1000-person communication. They're used by small groups of people like a manager and their team.

I've come to the conclusion that if I ever start my own thing again I will 100% ban all standing recurring meetings. Maybe an exception for projects-in-progress with a firm end date, but I'm on the fence on that one too. Zero high performing teams I've worked within - or led - has had such form of structure.

Standing meetings tend to devolve into performative uselessness. And they add stress, interruptions, etc. And worst of all - they tend to let people have a false sense of accomplishment afterwards.

1:1's I think can be useful for a certain type of employee, but should be 100% at that employee's discretion. The only use I see for them for that type of person that they have a predictable slot held open on their manager's schedule in the event they need to actually execute it. Most of them should be skipped or there are probably other issues in the employee:manager relationship.

I understand I am the odd man out when it comes to "meeting culture" but the more I get stuck in a myriad of standing meetings the more I have ossified my opinion on this subject. Meetings are not productive work. The older and more experienced I get the more useless I think they are.

A random meeting called because there is an issue to discuss and get a decision made on? Totally fine. Those are useful.

Please let me know where to send my CV. :) 10000% agree with this. Not all of us need a weekly reinforcement that everything's okay. And if we actually need something, we can speak up without consulting Google Calendar first and waiting for a scheduled safe space to speak up about it.

> At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately.

1:1s are not about addressing issues, most certainly not any issues that need addressing immediately.

If you have an immediate issue, open an incident or file a top priority bug, or whatever is the process at your company.

1:1 adds value if the managers spends most of the time actually managing and 1:1 is a place where he gets part of input for that. 1:1 with lead that spends most of the time doing 1:1 is pointless

> what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?

Actually managing. The listening to devs and sitting on meetings is pointless if you are not actively using those meetings to organize, prioritize, plan and execute parts of plan.

1:1s add value to a point, but I’ve worked at one company where the fixation on 1:1s started replacing useful communication.

Like you’d try to talk to someone about an urgent issue and you’d be told to save it for your upcoming scheduled 1:1 on Thursday because they don’t have any time until then. Why don’t they have any time? Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.

1:1s started as a good way to formalize manager to report communication on a predictable schedule. This is good if the team isn’t regularly talking organically. Some company cultures take it too far and turn it into an excuse to make recurring meetings the focus of all work. I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people.

All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.

Middle management was always congratulating themselves on the success of their 1:1s because they said it was when they heard about all of the real issues they didn't know about. They didn't realize that by making themselves unavailable except for the 1:1s they were forcing this result.

It was even worse when the problems involved multiple people or teams, which was almost always the case. Now you had to wait until Thursday to talk to your manager about it, who promised to add it to the agenda for his 1:1 with other team the following Tuesday. Then in that 1:1, the other team lead would say he'd bring it up with his schedule 1:1 with the person the Friday after that. It was like every communication queue only got processed once a week, so each hop added more delay. The managers would always tell is it wasn't supposed to be like that, but trying to direct would get you hit with "Let's talk about this in our next 1:1"

The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.

If you haven’t seen calendars stuffed to the gills with performative 1:1s then this is all probably hard to believe, but it happens. Some companies got so fat with middle management that performative meeting rituals were the primary use of everyone’s time and you would be chastised if you tried to break the mold.

> Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.

Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.

> I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people. ... All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.

Yes, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them. But what you describe does not sound like a 1:1. At most it's a cross-functional meeting, and should have multiple people from both sides.

> The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.

It sounds like someone got halfway through the ManagerTools guidance on 1:1s and decided they could improvise a better solution and failed. The purpose of 1:1s is to build and keep relationships, and they encourage this chitchat as relationship building, but the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_. If you want to talk about work that's great! The best way to build a relationship is working towards a common goal, and work is pretty much the only expected common goal anyways. And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda -- if a manager wants time on a direct's calendar they can always ask for more, but the reverse is much harder.

> the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_.

How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.

Thats fine, though if you do that forever you'll probably harm your promotion chances. Which, if your goal is just to get by, sounds fine?

But generally speaking, it's a chance for you to speak about your work to the person writing your performance review, and get feedback, which may be in short supply otherwise for various reasons.

I don't know why I'd ever want a promotion, and I haven't ever got one. I did turn one down once. A promotion is like 5% more pay for way more work and a bunch of corporate bullshit along the way. If I want to move up I just change jobs.

My last promotion from level 3 to level 4 was a 50% increase in pay basically, with no change in responsibilities or scope.

That’s because you were already working at the next level. Your promotion was just a recognition of that.

> How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.

Easy, send a message prior to the meeting "Hey, I have no topics to cover this week, so let's skip it and save the time".

Done.

I worked at a place where the manager had, at the height of the organization's growth, five reports. He couldn't handle that many 1:1's so, at one point, he made them into a "group" 1:1. Of course, that made no sense. Eventually his manager reversed the decision. I'm honestly sure what he did all day, but he eventually got laid off.

The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's. Eventually the company was acquired and the practice was "installed" by the acquirer.

> The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's

The problem with this is we will ask, “if you want to talk about career progression, or go over a technical question, or talk about performance feedback, how do you get that from your manager?” And one might say, “just Slack them or ask them for a call.”

And the problem is that you now have created an environment where the voices the manager hears the most are the squeaky wheels, the people who can play politics. You don’t want that as a manager - you want an environment where you can get the best from all your team and everyone has the opportunity to get the benefit of a structured communication cadence with their manager, regardless of who plays politics.

There are some situations where you really don’t need 1-1s but these are rare edge cases (Jensen Huang is famous for not having them… but the people that report to him are senior enough to report to the CEO of the worlds largest company. So they don’t need much supervision.)

If you need 1:1 to talk about technical questions, something is horribly wrong. And I would expect pwrformance feedback to have its own set of meetings.

Second, scheduled 1:1 is not a mechanism to avoid politics. People who can play politics better are as much advantaged as they are without it. They will simply know better what to say and do in those 1:1.

> If you need 1:1 to talk about technical questions, something is horribly wrong. And I would expect pwrformance feedback to have its own set of meetings.

With this approach, I hope you are not a manager.

What do you mean? Even at companies with strong 1:1 cultures it’s bad practice to save technical questions for 1:1s (shouldn’t be delaying them until the weekly slot) and performance reviews are scheduled separately from 1:1s because it shouldn’t take the place of normal communications. It’s an additional meeting with separate agendas.

> performance reviews are scheduled separately from 1:1s

The performative annual review meetings can be separate, sure. But managers should be discussing with their directs in 1:1s sufficiently that no criticism or praise contained within is heard for the first time.

"Annual reviews" are another joke. They're, more often than not, a huge time waster for everyone involved. I've seen performance evaluation forms with such convoluted questions, they were obviously the result of insanely muddled group think.

As a manager, it’s your responsibility to give your people feedback on a regular basis to help them grow, and follow up. You need a regular place to talk about these things.

Performance conversations are not once a year, they’re regular and routine.

On the flip side, if someone is not meeting performance expectations, you have to be having those conversations early, coaching / supporting so nothing is a surprise at review time, or worse… if you have to fire someone, they deserve the opportunity to fix the issue first so you want to be telling them where they stand and why.

On technical questions, sure - don’t save them for a 1-1, but I am able to be a sounding bound for my engineers when they mention what they’re working on, and I give them guidance. Sometimes they go, “oh yeah I’ve already thought of that, it won’t work for this reason.” And sometimes they go, “huh, I didn’t think of that. I’ll look into it”

I will agree 1:1's can potentially be useful, however, having them on a weekly basis often is way too frequent. I can count on one hand the number of useful 1:1's I've had over the past 10 years.

You don’t need a meeting scheduled every single week just in case the person might want to talk about career progression that week.

Many teams can and do function well without rigid weekly 1:1s. The best performing companies I’ve worked for didn’t have anything resembling scheduled 1:1s. Everyone talked to their managers during their work and managers were available for conversations if you asked.

It’s interesting to hear from people who have only experienced these rigidly structured 1:1 situations who can’t understand how anyone could communicate without scheduled 1:1s.

> Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.

I agree wholeheartedly, but this company culture had different ideas than you and I.

Their idea of a 1:1 was that it was the formal and correct way to synchronize people. It wasn’t limited to managers and their reports.

This shows up a lot in companies with matrix-style org charts. You end up with product managers and designers assigned to 3 different teams and setting up 1:1s with their managers and certain ICs to sync. Then their managers set up 1:1s with the managers of the other teams. Instead of being a tree it turns into a giant graph with edges everywhere.

> And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda

Now imagine this multiplied by 10 1:1s. That’s almost two hours of a manager keeping people captive on Zoom repeating stories from their weekend. Now imagine this practice was semi-standardized as the ideal way to run 1:1s at this company, so each employee had to spend the first 10m of every 1:1 with their manager, their product manager, their design lead, their team lead, and other people following the template listening to their weekend plans. Now imagine that you get pressured to reciprocate because after they spend all that time talking about themselves they need to ask about your weekend and pull a response out so they don’t feel awkward.

Sounds insane? It was! I almost wouldn’t have believed it until I experienced it. I couldn’t believe how many people at the company acted like it was normal and good.

> es, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them.

I was in a manager role at the company I’m describing. I got reprimanded on my performance review for not having enough 1:1s and for declining 1:1s with people who were not my reports (they tried to claim I was shutting them out and preventing them from doing their job)

Trust me, the problem was not a lack of managers. It was the giant interconnected graph of too many managers trying to set up recurring meetings with each other because that was the expectation.

If I had not witnessed something similar myself, I wouldn't believe it either. How many "sync" meetings do you possibly need? How does anyone get any actual work done with all this going on?

> Sounds insane? It was!

Well yes, it sounds insane.

It is good to connect at a personal level. Talk about your weekend, family, hobbies. This might happen naturally in an office setting, but with everyone remote on zoom, it's helpful to make it a habit. For most people these human connections are super supportive.

You can't force it though. Some people don't work that way. A manager must adapt to each style. I have employees who like to talk for hours about everything, so I'm happy to do it. I also have one employee who is very matter of fact, only brings up a specific issue if they need me to do something about it and that's it. I know nothing about their life outside work but that's their preference so that's ok too. They are one of the highest performers in the team, it's just their style.

I have a fraught relationship with 1:1s. Some days I curse the MBA who came up with this. Some days I'm rather ambivalent. Doesn't help that I'm naturally introverted and 1:1s is just a leech on my limited social battery. It's rather telling that IME 1:1s are the first meetings to be cancelled when the schedule tightens up.

I'm not outright saying they are useless but 1:1s won't make a bad manager good and they're a nice bonus when your manager is competent. In the latter I actually get career and professional guidance.

Any good thing can be done wrong, and if it can be done wrong, the it will be done wrong.

Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.

In startups with less than 50 people (and I am being generous on the number), everyone talks to everyone all the time, so there is no need for these moments to extract key info to fix/improve situations, identify topics to push, ...

But once the company is just large enough, there is no way you're going to interact with everyone in a meaningful manner (n^2 relationships and all that), and the simplest solution is intermediaries and 1-1s.

[also, being sarcastic is unhelpful.]

But 1 on 1 meetings are not crossing team boundaries, they are always within the team which is pretty much always smaller than 50. There's no reason the team cannot "talk to everyone all the time" just because other teams exist. But instead this communication is replaced by meetings even though the ability to talk hasn't changed.

Beautiful thought but really hard in real life. Do you talk to all members of the family, deeply, every day? Most would say no, so you need to open the spaces to do so.

Managers DO cross team boundaries though, their peers are other managers. I can't talk to the 100 people in my department every week, but my manager can talk to their 9 peers, who each talk to their 10 reports.

Precisely! And this is true not just for managers but also higher-level ICs. Its ok for Senior and below to be team focused, but moving to the next level means broadening scope and that means talking with people, regularly!, outside your immediate team.

And at larger companies, teams and groups are often geographically distributed if only in other buildings and office locations.

But the initial claim was that 1:1 meetings "add value to the team". I can believe that they add value to the manager's manager, but they are not adding value to the team of the person being met with.

Yeah has anyone discovered sociocracy?

https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/

Startups don't have as rigidly defined team boundaries. It wouldn't be uncommon for people to take up tasks and responsibilities that would fall under some other team with a different manager.

In larger corporations, teams are insular - members aren't rewarded for doing work outside of their domain, and would be punished for letting another team do their job. Some members are so indoctrinated that they won't respond to any communication outside of their team, unless it's through their own manager.

1:1s don't have to be strictly manager:report

I'm a staff eng and have 1:1s with other managers I don't report to and my peer staff/principle engs in other reporting chains and they are some of the most valuable meetings I have to keep connected with what other teams and the rest of the organization is doing, what's going well, what they might need from me, pain points, initiatives, etc. And of course just to build and maintain rapport across the org, which absolutely pays dividends.

I do these less frequently than with my direct manager, but still on a regular cadence, typically once a month or every other month.

I would hope that people, having dealt with LLMs for a few years would understand that its all about context.

In a 25 person company, context is easy, assuming even half arsed communications. Its possible to hold the state of the entire company in your head.

That scales to about 50. after that it becomes hard. then you start having team meetings and the like.

Even at my old startup we had 1:1s when we were ~25 people. it was a great way to get additional context that was otherwise hidden

And changes happen at pretty much all levels of scale. Even once you get well past startup size the times of structure and processes required for a 10,000 or 20,000 person company is much different from a 1,000 or 2,000 person company.

This is only "Funny" in the sense that it's "funny" that a high-performing startup can run the entire thing on a single huge Postgres instance and that mysteriously stops working after you hit a certain level of scale. Relationship count scales quadratically as you scale headcount. A single poor relationship can sour an entire team or worse. When your team is 5 people, it's trivial for e.g. the CEO to have the state of all relationships in the company in his head. As a company grows larger it gets harder. Once you surpass Dunbar's number it's virtually impossible. The function of 1:1s is to scale this.

How many start ups fail vs how many are successful, again?

nearly all big companies have failed too just on longer horizon

Yeah, but the parent was implying startups are a priori better because of how they do meetings differently.

Really depends on the team etc. I don't think every team needs to have 1-1, certainly not weekly as a mandate.

The best cultures I worked at didn't have 1-1 series by default

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