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Comment by eudamoniac | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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