[harrall]

I have standup every day so my manager knows what I am doing so my 1:1s are:

- General sentiment about problems with the team and company that bother me but that I don’t have a solution to yet or decided how to bring it up with the team.

- Fun / interesting projects I unilaterally decided to dedicate my working hours towards that I never asked permission to work on. Sometimes it ends up being something cool that my manager wants to join in on or promote to a bigger effort.

- About our lives and what's going on.

[cebert]

So basically useless unless you need to schedule a meeting with them

[tclancy]

That's assuming an awful lot, mainly about how we no longer need human connection or context with other people to be able to succeed as a team. When I took over as an engineering manager, it took a couple of 1:1s per person but actually being interested in them as fellow humans made a huge difference. One of my reports, a former teammate who I really liked and got along well with, was carrying serious depression around every day. Learning that gave me a chance to help him out, discuss my experience so he knew he wasn't alone and let me make space for him to breathe.

Which made him a more productive cog in the machine fellow human-bot!

[watwut]

Nothing says human connection as much as scheduled meeting and necessity to have scheduled meeting to get or provide context.

If the general mussings about a company, causual fun project and a little small talk about life require scheduled meething, you dont have those human connections with the team.

Did you considered that people understand difference between human connection, relationship and being one of mandatory duties/meeting with someone who is actually apart and disconnected?

[stirfish]

>Nothing says human connection as much as scheduled meeting and necessity to have scheduled meeting to get or provide context.

I understand your point, but that also describes a date.

[watwut]

I dated only people I already had human connection with. I did not went to dates because company process said I should or I thought it will make my partner more performing, but because I wanted to be with that person.

We also did quite a lot of spontaneous unplanned stuff.

[danudey]

It's beneficial to have someone to bounce things off of, to provide feedback, or to share a degree of personal information; it can be helpful for my manager to know that I have a lot of family stuff going on this week so I may be intermittently available, less productive, or working different hours.

It's also an opportunity to get on the same page about stuff or clarify things that might be a bit too long-form for a daily standup.

My 1:1s with my team lead vary between three minutes and 45 minutes; if there's a lot to cover, we cover it, if there's only one thing we discuss it and hop off. If there's nothing or if one of us is busy we just skip it.

I think the real benefit is that that time in my team lead's calendar is always blocked off for me if I need to use it for something so I don't have to wriggle around other meetings, appointments, etc. to get a slice of face-to-face time about something that doesn't feel 'important enough' to schedule a meeting for but which wouldn't get discussed otherwise.

[harrall]

No there are topics that are not important enough to bring up (yet) so they don’t warrant their own meeting, so you need a soft place to bring them up with low expectations.

A 1:1 is like asking to get lunch with someone — you don’t have anything specific to talk about but it puts you two together to talk about random things.

Unless you meet new people by exchanging printed lists of your interests and activities and marking which ones you are interested in, but the rest of us don’t tick like that.

[jjav]

> So basically useless unless you need to schedule a meeting with them

Back in the day of 5 days in the office, this kind of connection happened through osmosis, not really necessary to schedule.

In this day of everyone remote, if you don't intentionally schedule time to just connect, it'll never happen.

[win311fwg]

Depends on the size of the company and/or where you fit in the organization. If your manager is also the owner then there is something to be said about keeping a friendly relationship. If it is some middle manager several layers deep who doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, then yeah, it's a waste. That time would be far better spent speaking to the CEO or board of directors.