231–240 of 307 posts
The lack of humility among tech folk is astounding. Why dont you ask yourself why the 10x'ers/doers/high-impact people aren't setting up their 3-trillion dollar company if they are so darn effective by themselves? Perhaps becaus they'll need the "bureaucracy" to interface woth the rest of the world to get things like "money" and "contracts" and deal with the legal system...as well as ensuring their work is aligned and cohesive.
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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 yoursel…
This is why so many people find themselves in performative 1 on 1s: It's assumed that the time must be spent, so managers and reports alike start searching for things to fill up that time.
The best 1 on 1 formats I've had were quick and to the point. We cancelled or ended early if there was nothing to discuss that hadn't already been discussed.
The worst were a game of finding things to talk about for 50 minutes because some manager read a few management books and decided they must fill up the time to bond with employees. So we'd go through silly questions from lists from books or do bonding exercises while I had to pretend to smile and enjoy it.
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Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever. Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just mak…
And that's why command economies fail. They fail in the same way that firms do, except that because the whole economy is one giant firm, you can't get the you need to remove entrenched bureaucrats until the situation gets so bad that you have a revolution or lose a war.
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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 m…
So basically useless unless you need to schedule a meeting with them
A 1:1 is like asking to get lunch with someone — you don’t have anything specific to talk about but it puts you two together to talk about random things.
Unless you meet new people by exchanging printed lists of your interests and activities and marking which ones you are interested in, but the rest of us don’t tick like that.
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Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason. I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs. If you think the on…
The quote that I heard was "the purpose of a system is what it does", which was to a degree kind of revelatory. The example I heard was McDonald's ice cream machines. What is the purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine? To make ice cream? No, they break down all the time, they're actually pretty bad at making ice cream. The purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine is to create billable service calls and ensure sup…
thank you, i believe this is closer to, if not exactly, the original wording.
>The purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine is to create billable service calls and ensure support contracts
this is spin, but does have truth. i think people dramatize the quote too much towards conspiracy or alternative intent.
I think the best way to interpret the quote is to remove intent and purpose from the system entirely and keep it somewhere above the system. i think it is really meant to undermine any purpose you think a system intrinsically has. it is a collection of tools and processes that have inputs and outputs.
Responsibility for how a system is used and what it accomplishes stays with the people using it. When you know what the consequences of using a system are going to be and you use it anyway, then those consequences are what the purpose of your action is, regardless of what it might seem like the system was initially designed to do.
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> 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 interfa…
> the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_. How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.
But generally speaking, it's a chance for you to speak about your work to the person writing your performance review, and get feedback, which may be in short supply otherwise for various reasons.
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> If you need 1:1 to talk about technical questions, something is horribly wrong. And I would expect pwrformance feedback to have its own set of meetings. With this approach, I hope you are not a manager.
What do you mean? Even at companies with strong 1:1 cultures it’s bad practice to save technical questions for 1:1s (shouldn’t be delaying them until the weekly slot) and performance reviews are scheduled separately from 1:1s because it shouldn’t take the place of normal communications. It’s an additional meeting with separate agendas.
The performative annual review meetings can be separate, sure. But managers should be discussing with their directs in 1:1s sufficiently that no criticism or praise contained within is heard for the first time.
The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild. If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide. But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meeti…
Being the rockstar doing all the technical work can also be performative. I'm currently working on a CTO team that is supposed to "disrupt" a big org. There's a lot of emphasis on demoing and sketching things out a mile wide and an inch deep. I think there's some merit to it but a lot of it is kayfabe. Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to…
Kayfabe is the best way to describe it.