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?
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.
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...
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
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.
> 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.
The juxtaposition between being consistently rated as one of the top performers on my team, and still having to constantly scramble to justify my work in one meeting or another was the core reason I left my previous company. Right into the arms of another company cargo-culting the same nonsense practices, with the same nonsense results.
My current gig is a lot better in this regard, though not completely devoid of make-work (is there really any corporate environment that avoids this? I suspect not.)
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
[dead]
Any good thing can be done wrong, and if it can be done wrong, the it will be done wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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