[Wilem82]

First of all, if you want to talk about something, you don't need to wait for the next scheduled meeting, you can just talk. Therefore the system of scheduled one on one meetings is nothing but bureaucracy. Therefore the question is "is there anything you discuss with the manager, ever?" And the answer to that depends on the manager's competence. If you can delegate your task to the manager and they are actually able to solve it, then you can use it to keep the progress rolling. If they aren't able to do anything meaningful, there's nothing to talk about, really. Which is usually the latter case and it comes down to "want something done, do it yourself".

[gwbas1c]

> If you can delegate your task to the manager and they are actually able to solve it, then you can use it to keep the progress rolling

Managers are supposed to delegate tasks to you, not the other way around.

If you are delegating tasks to your manager, (as opposed to your manager saying something like, "I'm going to assign this task to XXX," or "I'm going to go try and get team YYY to do ZZZ,") then your manager isn't really managing.

[Wilem82]

> Managers are supposed to delegate tasks to you, not the other way around.

In software engineering? Not really. They aren't engineers, they can't delegate anything because they have no idea what to do or how to do it.

In SE, the best managers can do is be helpers in non-technical tasks, like manage the attendance system for you or talk to other departments when your issue tracker goes down or if there's an internet connection problem in the office, and so on. Make sure nothing distrupts your work, in other words.

> If you are delegating tasks to your manager, (as opposed to your manager saying something like, "I'm going to assign this task to XXX,"

Managers cannot, without any input from the engineers, assign tasks, because they have no idea what the task affects, the impacts, the risks, difficulties etc. Their so-called decisions that touch on the technical side are 99% based on the engineers' input. The engineers say this is critical and explain why and the manager says "oh well, then you and you should fix it asap!".

Sometimes a manager is useful for aggregating the data flowing in and out of the team, as the team's single point of entry for various people, kind of like a reception or secretary in a sense. Again, to let the engineers work on their stuff.

Or, the manager could present some business requirements, although for that you should have a PO, but suppose it's the manager. Even then, they're not delegating as in commanding the people to do something, they're just asking the engineers to work on a solution, something which the manager has no idea how to do. It's like, if I call a plumber to fix something, I'm not delegating the work to the plumber because I have no idea how to do it myself, I'm simply asking the plumber to provide a service. I'm not the plumber's "boss", the plumber is the expert, I'm simply asking their expert opinion on how to proceed.

> then your manager isn't really managing

They are never managing anything, at least from my oh I don't know, about 16 years of experience working at companies big and small.

[amznthrowaway5]

> Managers cannot, without any input from the engineers, assign tasks, because they have no idea what the task affects, the impacts, the risks, difficulties etc. Their so-called decisions that touch on the technical side are 99% based on the engineers' input.

Which makes it very easy for the engineers to BS the managers. If the manager doesn't understand technical details and gets all the information from the engineers, how does the manager tell who is actually getting the difficult work done so he can promote the right people? I guess that explains another reason why promo/review systems and the "career ladder" are almost always dominated by corruption.

[garyrichardson]

This is not a model of working I’m familiar with. I work as collaboratively as possibly with my reports and my manager. 1:1 meetings are my most important. If I’m not discussing the non-obvious challenges we face, we are sharing our goals or tuning our shared vision.

[Wilem82]

Little bit of a contradiction there. You say collaboratively, yet you share your ideas one on one, instead of with the entire team. It's either one or the other.

Next, assuming the challenges you speak of are technical, the manager is no use talking to because they're not an engineer. The manager of course should know of technical difficulties to understand risks of delays, but that works through inviting them to engineer meetings where the team presents its consensus on the matter.