alt Hacker News1:1s 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.