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.

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.

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.

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.