Ask HN: What do you talk about in 1-on-1s with your managers?

As an employee I found that the topics varied depending upon the current workload and stress level associated with it. If it was easy, quiet times we'd just shoot the breeze for a few and then call it good. If things were totally nuts they ended up being brainstorming sessions. The in-between times were when I made sure that my supervisor knew what my career goals were and how I was setting about reaching them when time allowed.

As a manager I schedule them once per month with my team and for 30 minutes and don't stress if they run short or long. It is their time to tell me about anything that they need to talk about. Most times we have a short, 15-minute chat and call it good. Last month I had one dev tell me that they were stressed beyond belief, not sleeping well, not eating well, and not happy. I've made sure to keep in touch with that one more often and provide help where I can (lower stress issues, mention company programs, etc.) IMO weekly gets old really fast and the manager should be able to recognize that and adjust accordingly. You do that for new people (like yourself) until they get settled in and are working as expected on code. After that you dial the meetings back gradually until they are as unobtrusive as possible but still within company requirements.

I'm currently a high level IC, and this is what we talk about:

1) Pleasantries about our kids/family/how our last vacation was/etc. for a minute.

2) Any questions I have for her, which usually mean questions about corporate policies or procedures, or questions like, "I need to know about project X, who would be a good contact", or things like, "I need to accomplish Y, usually I would do it like this, but how is that done here".

3) Any context she has for me that she got at higher level management meetings that I need to know.

4) Occasionally status updates on projects she is every interested in or that her management is asking about so she can be ready to answer them.

5) Every fourth or so meeting (roughly monthly) we talk about career development, projects that might be good to get involved in with high visibility or impact, etc.

When I was a manager managing more junior folks, they were something like this:

1) Talk about family/friends/etc. sometimes for 20+ minutes, however long they wanted to talk. Especially during COVID, I was sometimes the only person they talked to during the week.

2) Demo of their work since the last meeting -- UX demo or code review, whatever they want feedback on, if anything. Then I would give them product feedback or code feedback.

3) Context for their next task. They would either tell me what they want to do next or ask me and I would give them suggestions for next tasks and why each is important to the business and let them choose.

4) Anything else I can help with.

For senior folks, we'd usually skip #2 unless they wanted specific feedback.

The commonality was context. I operate better with more context, and so do people who work for me, so I see the main job as a manager is a conduit for context -- why are we doing the work we are doing.

A 30 minute weekly 1on1 meeting sounds like a waste of time to me. Monthly, maybe. Quarterly? Fine. Ad-hoc when needed? Ideally. Personally, I opt out. My recommendation is to talk about making them less frequent if you (as expected) have nothing meaningful to really talk about.

I don't really understand this sentiment. Management joining or not should have 0 effect on standup. They should only be there to hear what folks are working on and or also to give their own updates.

Manager Tools is a good podcast.