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1-on-1 meeting questions

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Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#131

Post by [deleted] »

hw wrote: post #129
koonsolo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strange, helpless way to look at the world. Employment is not a boss->servant relationship, it's a relationship where both parties gain something. You offer a service, and they pay for that. End of story. They act out? Then you find someone else who needs your services. As a programmer myself, I'm in this great position where there is a shortage of good developers, and plenty of companies searching for good de…

First of all, if your manager is any good, (s)he will already have replacements in the pipeline, given the musical chairs nature of the industry. Second, why aren't you already at a different job that pays you more instead of hanging that over your manager's head? Third, don't underestimate how many other good developers that are out there, looking for the next job. It might not require 6 months of training for the n…

[deleted]

Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#132

Post by nilkn »

lonelappde wrote: post #69
rwilson4 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I treat them as prompts. I’ll give my team as much fore notice as possible what the topic will be and ask them to really think about the question in advance. Otherwise the conversations are often shallow. My team often writes out their thoughts and we go through it, it’s been pretty successful I think!

That's giving them extra homework and stress on top of worrying about deliverables and the problems they already care about.

While I sympathize with your viewpoint, ultimately if your manager is trying hard to improve your life at work and you just find ways to convert that into a negative and a major source of stress, I can't help but interpret that as a huge red flag that needs to be examined in detail. Either you fundamentally have a bad attitude and are going to be unhappy and stressed no matter what even when your manager is going out of their way to help you, or there's something wrong with the way some projects are going, or deadlines are unreasonable, etc.

Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#133

Post by A_No_Name_Mouse »

kaens wrote: post #110
koonsolo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strange, helpless way to look at the world. Employment is not a boss->servant relationship, it's a relationship where both parties gain something. You offer a service, and they pay for that. End of story. They act out? Then you find someone else who needs your services. As a programmer myself, I'm in this great position where there is a shortage of good developers, and plenty of companies searching for good de…

> Employment is not a boss->servant relationship It is, for the vast majority of employed people. > it's a relationship where both parties gain something. For the vast majority of employed people, what they gain is the ability to continue to afford food and shelter. Most jobs do not afford the economic reality necessary to allow the employee a position of being able to afford to bargain as anything approaching an equ…

> It is, for the vast majority of employed people.

True. But with that sort of job you probably won't have regular 1-on-1's. You just get told to flip more hamburgers.

And it also depends on your own attitude what kind of relationship your establish with your manager.

Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#134

Post by karatestomp »

jldugger wrote: post #128
skizm wrote: post #61

As a grunt IC 1 on 1s are a nightmare for me. I never know what to talk about. All current project stuff is hashed out in or after scrum. Career development is more of a once per year thing (at least not weekly). If I had a problem with any of my team members I would have brought it up by now (assuming I thought others felt that way, I don't want to be the only one to bring it up or I'll be seen as the problem). For…

> Career development is more of a once per year thing (at least not weekly). That is unfortunate, even if it is the corporate default. There should be tons to discuss about career development. Where you are, what the criteria are for the next promotion, where you need skill growth to get there, how to acquire those skills and what you can do to demonstrate that growth, And each of those items has multistep breakdowns…

I don't know what people come up with to talk about for career development weekly. Monthly's a stretch, for me. I'm too busy doing the work at work—as with most people as far as I can tell, my "career development" is whatever looks-good-on-a-résumé problem or responsibility I can convince someone to give me, and that doesn't really happen once a week, more like once a quarter—and on my own time, fuck, do I ever not want to think about this stuff or wrestle with broken tools and bad documentation or any of the other awful, frustrating, unproductive crap that comprise the sorts of things (buzzwords) that make me command a higher wage in a year or two. I get plenty of that in 40 hours, meanwhile each day slips by so fast that I'm not going to dedicate meaningful time to doing "career development" outside maybe enough to pretend at having dedicated "career development" effort just for looks, which is, I suppose, maybe what the meetings are for. If I'm serious about doing "career development" it's fucking leetcode (which is not what they want to hear, yet is what they ask for in interviews, which is, to put it mildly, weird) or working at convincing someone to give me reports, so I can say I've managed X-sized team through projects of sort Y and Z, implementing processes A and B to positive outcome C.

That's the game. I'll get fulfillment from my kids and from books written by smart, insightful, observant people, or from walking around in nature.

Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#135

Post by ken »

koonsolo wrote: post #73
RotaryTelephone wrote: post #63

My 1on1's at a 100k+ international corporation always went like this: Manager: so how's it going? Me: great Manager: any issues? anything you want to discuss? Me: everything is fantastic! I'm very happy with my job :D Manager: cool cool... well let's do this again next month. Me: yay! I don't want someone in a similar situation like I was to get inspired by lists like these and go into their next 1on1 wrecking havoc…

What a strange, helpless way to look at the world. Employment is not a boss->servant relationship, it's a relationship where both parties gain something. You offer a service, and they pay for that. End of story. They act out? Then you find someone else who needs your services. As a programmer myself, I'm in this great position where there is a shortage of good developers, and plenty of companies searching for good de…

You are fortunate that the problems with modern software shops happen to align with the types of problems you can deal with.

For example, there aren't plenty of companies with quiet offices searching for developers. When I tell my manager "The noise in this new open floorplan office is killing my productivity", they say "OK, well, that's not going to change", and then we spend the rest of the hour rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. (Or they remind me of how they're spending money on me, in other ways I don't care about at all.) If I said "Hey fix your shit" they'd say "Every other software company in town has open floorplans too now -- good luck with that".

Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#136

Post by noobermin »

anonred wrote: post #120

Questions aside, I honestly thought the steps to submit a new question was satire... Contributing 1. Fork it 2. Run npm install 3. Add your resource to questions.json 4. Run node index to update README.md with your changes 5. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature) 6. Commit your changes (git commit -am "Add some feature") 7. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature) 8. Create new Pull R…

I visibly grimaced when I saw this. This is straight up ridiculous.

Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#137

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

anonred wrote: post #120

Questions aside, I honestly thought the steps to submit a new question was satire... Contributing 1. Fork it 2. Run npm install 3. Add your resource to questions.json 4. Run node index to update README.md with your changes 5. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature) 6. Commit your changes (git commit -am "Add some feature") 7. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature) 8. Create new Pull R…

If they ever make a website for the collected data, consuming JSON is less brittle than parsing a README file.

Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#138

Post by wiz21c »

>> Are you on track to meet the deadline?

So wrong if not put the right way... I'd prefer : I see you're struggling, maybe we could make your life easier by removing some work, accepting the quality to be a little less good, maybe we could just accept that some things will be late...

I usually get :you're late, tell me why. Then I explain. Then my manger says : "I don't understand"... Then I fail to explain the obvious : I'm f*in overloaded.

Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#139

Post by ssss11 »

koonsolo wrote: post #73
RotaryTelephone wrote: post #63

My 1on1's at a 100k+ international corporation always went like this: Manager: so how's it going? Me: great Manager: any issues? anything you want to discuss? Me: everything is fantastic! I'm very happy with my job :D Manager: cool cool... well let's do this again next month. Me: yay! I don't want someone in a similar situation like I was to get inspired by lists like these and go into their next 1on1 wrecking havoc…

What a strange, helpless way to look at the world. Employment is not a boss->servant relationship, it's a relationship where both parties gain something. You offer a service, and they pay for that. End of story. They act out? Then you find someone else who needs your services. As a programmer myself, I'm in this great position where there is a shortage of good developers, and plenty of companies searching for good de…

I think the approach you take comes down to your individual characteristics - personality and circumstances - how meek you are, how much you voice your opinion, whether you can risk speaking out or conversely can’t/won’t risk losing or disrupting the steady income stream. In the past i’ve been both of these enployees at different times mostly due to different levels of self confidence and frustration with the company.

But the point about “know where you work before you open your mouth” is wise I think.

Re: 1-on-1 meeting questions

#140

Post by michaelbuckbee »

ken wrote: post #135
koonsolo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strange, helpless way to look at the world. Employment is not a boss->servant relationship, it's a relationship where both parties gain something. You offer a service, and they pay for that. End of story. They act out? Then you find someone else who needs your services. As a programmer myself, I'm in this great position where there is a shortage of good developers, and plenty of companies searching for good de…

You are fortunate that the problems with modern software shops happen to align with the types of problems you can deal with. For example, there aren't plenty of companies with quiet offices searching for developers. When I tell my manager "The noise in this new open floorplan office is killing my productivity", they say "OK, well, that's not going to change", and then we spend the rest of the hour rearranging deck ch…

What about remote? It's kind of an offshoot of that (quiet place for productivity).
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