[robosox]

Great article, and as indicated in his blog's comments, very similar to Rands in Repose (http://www.randsinrepose.com) whose writings in this space are similar.

I can't stress enough how useful 1:1s are for my own team (I believe Google follows the Andy Grove model mentioned in "High Output Management", another great book). It's easy for engineers to under-communicate those somewhat-important-but-not-really issues with their tech lead / manager, and getting it out on the table during 1:1s is crucial to keeping said issues from getting out of hand.