As a manager, it’s your responsibility to give your people feedback on a regular basis to help them grow, and follow up. You need a regular place to talk about these things.

Performance conversations are not once a year, they’re regular and routine.

On the flip side, if someone is not meeting performance expectations, you have to be having those conversations early, coaching / supporting so nothing is a surprise at review time, or worse… if you have to fire someone, they deserve the opportunity to fix the issue first so you want to be telling them where they stand and why.

On technical questions, sure - don’t save them for a 1-1, but I am able to be a sounding bound for my engineers when they mention what they’re working on, and I give them guidance. Sometimes they go, “oh yeah I’ve already thought of that, it won’t work for this reason.” And sometimes they go, “huh, I didn’t think of that. I’ll look into it”