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How to get the most out of your 1:1s

erik.wiffin.com

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Re: How to get the most out of your 1:1s

#181

Post by gkop »

swframe2 wrote: post #180

I have seen 1:1s used more strategically by employees who have 1on1 with managers outside their team. These employees often get promoted quickly. Note, at performance review time, employees are stacked against each other. If the other managers know you well and are giving you advice then chances are they won't push back if your manager ranks you highly. In addition, employees are ranked by how much they influence oth…

Yes and

- You can catch new leaders and senior ICs on their way in the door and make yourself helpful to them, which makes a positive and memorable first impression

- You build relationships that make you more effective in your role

- You accelerate the dissemination of knowledge across silos

- You exercise control over the flow of information to help the organization meet its goals

- You learn how power flows through the organization

- You discover other teams that you may want to work more closely with, or take steps to avoid working with

- You become better able to empathize with other teams because you have a human connection

Re: How to get the most out of your 1:1s

#182

Post by poisonborz »

softwarebeware wrote: post #149

How to get the most out of your 1:1s: cancel them. ;) You almost never need a recurring one and talking about something if/when it's relevant and in context is always better.

Except that's not how it works for a lot of people. If you are social and outspoken, your higher ups can mayyybe rely on you to communicate your wishes clearly, but think about it, would you really regularly signal even small but pestering problem to them? Lots of people are shy to speak, especially when not in private. Relevancy can be increased by making them weekly, in 15m.

Re: How to get the most out of your 1:1s

#183

Post by markbeare »

songzme wrote: post #114

I really struggle with 1:1s primarily because: 1. Do you want career growth? No, and its hard to tell that to my manager. More growth leads to more responsibility, which is more stress. I'm happy where I am and I don't want promotions. I'm afraid to tell my manager that, because which manager wants an unambitious engineer? There was someone like that on our team and he was laid off in the last layoff round, so I have…

Agreed with the other comments here. I would love to hear this as an engineering manager. I fear the work becoming stale for my team and push growth opportunities to keep things interesting.

Re: How to get the most out of your 1:1s

#184

Post by KMag »

hashtag-til wrote: post #166
terryf wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager - I would love it if someone tells me that! This makes my life so much easier! It means, that I will not have to worry about figuring out a good place for you to grow into. It also means that I will not have to worry about finding a replacement for you after you get promoted. Hell, if you tell me that I'll do everything I can to give you a raise asap. Tip: Your manager really, really wants to hear what y…

> Hell, if you tell me that I'll do everything I can to give you a raise asap. This is not how salary raises work IMHO. In my experience as a new (~2 years) manager, you get many questions when proposing salary raises to people perceived as happy, satisfied and agreeable. I always feel like I need to put more effort on behalf of my reports and kind of repeat many times the obvious fact that it is better if we don't w…

The problem I've always had in asking for a raise is that it seems to me in a downturn situation, dissatisfied over-performers are probably second in line for layoffs after under-performers. If you can't give them a raise, and they're likely to jump ship soon, and will likely land another job shortly. (I'm not sure how unemployment time of recent layoffs feed back into employer's unemployment insurance rates.)

So, my career has been a big raise my first year out of college, followed shortly by a 2x lateral move to another company, followed by a bunch of single-digit percentage annual increases, followed by another doubling of my salary. A couple of times managers have also pro-actively scheduled meetings with senior management when they feel they've screwed me over on bonus/salary adjustment, and I got assurances they knew they owed me once there was more budget available.

I know I'm too agreeable, but I don't ask for a raise unless I have a written offer in-hand. I've seen varying advice on how to handle counter-offers, but it's also risky to accept a counter-offer if there's a company down-turn, as you're now more expensive and recently have shown a willingness to leave the company.

I guess the solution is just to be confident in your ability to quickly find a new job if you're laid off. I've given plenty of interviews (somewhere between 200 and 500 in my career) and am very confident in my ability to both leet-code and pass technical interview questions. Yet, I'm very hesitant to risk being in the position of interviewing when I don't currently have a job.

Re: How to get the most out of your 1:1s

#185

Post by pc86 »

yunohn wrote: post #34
vasco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to defend the constant ratings, but imagine managers are not in fact all stupid for a second, and that they realize the power dynamic is there. You still need to do the same job and fulfill the expectations of your own manager, as a manager. It's easy to assume stupidity, and I'm sure there's plenty dumb moves made, but what you find cringy another report finds cool and easy. I bet there are people who would love…

> imagine managers are not in fact all stupid for a second I don’t really see where the commenter implied this. To support their stance, I have also had lots of managers at various-sized companies (FAANG incl), who didn’t understand the inherent 1:1 power dynamic. They would expect full honesty, while covering up anything above my pay-grade.

"Stupid" is a pretty accurate description for someone who thinks something lazy and misguided is accurate and clever.

Re: How to get the most out of your 1:1s

#186

Post by terryf »

thrwy_918 wrote: post #176
terryf wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager - I would love it if someone tells me that! This makes my life so much easier! It means, that I will not have to worry about figuring out a good place for you to grow into. It also means that I will not have to worry about finding a replacement for you after you get promoted. Hell, if you tell me that I'll do everything I can to give you a raise asap. Tip: Your manager really, really wants to hear what y…

> Your manager really, really wants to hear what you really honestly think I mean, yes, this is almost always true, but that does not mean that it's always in your best interests to tell your manager what you honestly think.

Absolutely. But it's also a question of what you want to optimize. Is it more about making sure you keep your current job, is it about maximizing income or is it about having peace of mind?

First, figure out what is the probability of you being able to find a new job. For most developers that are reasonably good, in the current market, finding a new job of at least the same compensation (probably more!) is possible, if not easy.

Assuming the calculation from the previous item goes well and if you want to optimize for peace of mind, say what you feel. If it turns out you have a bad manager, start looking for a new job. Getting fired immediately in the situation described in the original comment is extremely unlikely. If you get the impression that things are not going as expected, start looking for a new job.

If you want to optimize for keeping the current job and not for peace of mind, yes, technically the safest way for now is keep doing what the original poster said. However, how long can you keep that up? How bad will it make you feel to keep faking?

Also, it's very common to over-estimate the likelyhood of extreme edge cases happening. They are possible, but need to be weighted with the likelyhood and the risk. Again, if you are fairly certain that you can get a new job if needed, then the risk is small and the likelyhood (as you mentioned) is low. However, the peace of mind change can be substantial. To me it seems worth it. Maybe to you it wouldn't be. Then yes, don't do it. But it's important to think of all the factors and not just focus on not rocking the boat. Sometimes risks are worth taking. Sometimes not. Life's complicated and you only get one go at it :)

Re: How to get the most out of your 1:1s

#187

Post by novok »

karaterobot wrote: post #178
terryf wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager - I would love it if someone tells me that! This makes my life so much easier! It means, that I will not have to worry about figuring out a good place for you to grow into. It also means that I will not have to worry about finding a replacement for you after you get promoted. Hell, if you tell me that I'll do everything I can to give you a raise asap. Tip: Your manager really, really wants to hear what y…

> Tip: Your manager really, really wants to hear what you really honestly think. As the original commenter noted, the person who was honest about what they really thought was the one laid off when the time came. I won't say it's true for you, but at many organizations "I really want to hear what you honestly think..." has a second clause: "... so that I know who my most valuable 'resources' are." I'm unconvinced that…

I think it depends on what kind of unambitious it is. I have one guy who I don't connect with much who I estimate is pretty much like the OP. Has a kid, doesn't want a lot of stress, doesn't really want to proceed further, but is happy to do his current job and has a lot of experience as a senior.

But at the same time, this guy just jumps in whatever you ask him to do, and figures it out pretty quickly, doesn't need hand holding and is fairly independent and gets stuff done. He does his job and is a very low maintenance employee overall. He also updates his tickets / status as you ask him. He's an adult.

Since I know I don't have to be responsible for coaching him or moving his career forward or fixing issues or reminding him to do his job or figure out what to do, he's pretty good! He gets the job done and I don't have to do a lot of work for and is a reliable guy. If layoffs come, he would not be on the bottom of the list.

Other employees that don't want to be ambitious, or are picky about their workloads, that I have to remind constantly to do stuff, create conflicts I have to resolve and so on are significantly more work for the manager. If they are also not performing then yes, they would be the people on the bottom of the list.

So overall, if you want to be unambitious to advance after the terminal level of 'sr engineer', be a low stress easy employee to manage who is overall productive and have a good or neutral personal relationship with and it's really doubtful you'll be on the layoff list anytime soon. It lets managers be more effective and bigger with their team, because one high maintenance employee has the workload of 5 low maintenance ones.

Also only %10 of engineers ever advance into management or staff engineering leadership positions, so it's somewhat expected there will be a lot of people who are not going to go further anyway.

You could couch you being unambitious in asking your manager, how can I become a low maintenance employee for you? What would make your job easier in respect to managing me? How could I reduce your stress load? Tell him you don't want to be a manager (super common in engineering) but you do want to make life good for you, him and the team.

> I'm unconvinced that (from the employee's perspective) the best way to engage with management or HR is radical transparency.

I totally get that, and I was like that before being a manager. But once you become a manager, you realize there are a bunch of things that are actually very helpful to be transparent about, and other things that are not and it can be hard to communicate what those are unless you have a buddy who's a manager elsewhere and likes talking about the good and bad of their job outside of work. I really recommend that people do the "tour of duty" for 2 years into management to understand what it is. It will make your future career way less stressful and everything makes way more sense. https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy/status/1345574901818609664

Re: How to get the most out of your 1:1s

#188

Post by mebassett »

songzme wrote: post #114

I really struggle with 1:1s primarily because: 1. Do you want career growth? No, and its hard to tell that to my manager. More growth leads to more responsibility, which is more stress. I'm happy where I am and I don't want promotions. I'm afraid to tell my manager that, because which manager wants an unambitious engineer? There was someone like that on our team and he was laid off in the last layoff round, so I have…

> I'm afraid to tell my manager that, because which manager wants an unambitious engineer?

the laying someone off for that is silly. But when I was managing a team for the first time I would have found it really helpful if one of them told me that! It was so far from my imagination that there would be an _unambitious engineer_ the thought never occurred to me. I wasn't a lot of my time and theirs working on this erroneous world-view.

Re: How to get the most out of your 1:1s

#189

Post by pc86 »

thenerdhead wrote: post #105

Here's some tips to better 1:1s on-top of what the article mentions: - If you're a direct manager in the 1:1, it is your job to take notes. Period. - 1:1s are business meetings about results, and sometimes personal matters are discussed. - If you have role power, you need to be cautious with what you say during a 1:1. People will take things literally. - Agendas should be simple. 10 minutes you, 10 minutes me, 10 min…

It's interesting to me how many people have diametrically opposed views of what a 1:1 should be. Business meetings / status updates vs. personal discussion. Structured agenda vs. no agenda. Weekly vs. biweekly vs. monthly. Etc.
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