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 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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

[dead]

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.]

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

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