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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.