[CyberFonic]

I have had many managers and no two conducted 1:1 meetings the same.

In my experience it depends greatly on what sort of rapport you have with this manager. Can you read his personality? If you barely know the person and think he might be a stickler for detail and protocol, then keep your agenda to positive topics. Focus on your accomplishments and anything you plan that has a direct contribution to the company. Avoid anything negative, it might come back to haunt you. This is the safest path.

If you have reasonable rapport then I would suggest to still stick to being positive, but you could very diplomatically raise any issues that might be negatively impacting the company. What I mean is that instead of saying something like "This open plan office is too noisy and I can't concentrate" say: "Sometimes the office gets quite noisy. Perhaps these conditions could be distracting for some of the staff and impact upon productivity." If you get asked how it affects you then you could say: "I use noise cancelling headphones to minimise the impact and maintain my workflow." Of course that presumes you have such headphones. The above is merely an example of how to recast comments so that you don't look like a complainer. If in doubt, don't.

The next 1:1 will be much easier because you have the experiences from the first one to guide you.

[Daviey]

In most teams, the manager's raison d'être is simply to make you more productive. This means unblocking problems when you are stuck, aligning vision (to avoid wasted work), to motivate and prioritise work when overloaded.

The advice of avoiding bringing "negative" things and using the session as almost a celebration of your success is massively missing the potential usefulness of these sessions!

If your boss doesn't know about impedance to your productivity, how can they possibly help you?

[echelon]

The OP has a point, though. Perpetual complainers are such a drain. I hate being around them. They drag everything down.

Everything doesn't suck all the time.

There are pockets of good and bad. Be pragmatic. Don't nucleate a culture of defeatism and make everyone think you only care about your paycheck and not your coworkers and their own struggles.

Not everyone is like this. But I can point to a number of examples of this.