1 on 1 Meetings Q&A and Videos

Hi everyone! I want to understand what are some most effective ways to articulate your person goals and growth areas to your manager. What are some questions to consider? How do I measure success?

I want to maximize 1-1s as much as possible and I think this is a good starting point to laydown the roadmap.

Do you have to have 1:1 with intern manager weekly or is it okay to just send them an email talking about what you accomplished during the week provided you meet with mentor daily.

Context: I work as a Entry Level SWE at Series B Startup with 25 people; the SWE team is 7 people total. I am the only person currently under my manager & my coworkers are fairly clear about what I am building & why. Also, the SWE team morale is strong and productivity seems to be at a sustainable rate.

During our mentor-mentee meeting last week, my manager & I agreed to give each other specific feedback each week (and also agreed for our 1:1 meetings to be used for awkward, personal stuff as Alex & Rahul recommended). In general, I think he is an incredible manager; he’s personable, highly knowledgable, is available to answer my questions, & answers all my noobie questions but I do think there are some shortcomings as he is not used to being a mentor or a manager.

I don’t want to just say “Great job!“ as that is an easy default to fall into week-after-week.

So how do I evaluate my manager? Is there a set of questions somewhere? A framework of some kind?

I've been at this small startup (~100 engineers) for about 8 months.

I've worked on 2 different projects/teams (2 months + 6 months) for various reasons. This constant ramp up process is limiting my ability to make significant impact.

Now my manger is about to move me to another totally different project because my current project scope is transferred to another team.

The startup hasn't done a layoff yet, but the possibility is there this year.

I think I need to stop paying the ramp up cost and stick to my current area (meaning switching to the other team) so I can make bigger scope impact and avoid getting laid off.

How should I navigate this conversation with my manger?

During my first 1 on 1 with a manager, I asked him if he could help me find a mentor and he said he would find one within our overall organization. He also said he could find me a manager within overall Amazon if I want. This would for overall mentorship in Amazon vs being limited to the scope of just my organization.

What are some advantages/disadvantages of having 2+ mentors? Also are there any qualities I should be(or probably more likely asking him to be) on the lookout for those 2 mentors?

Question: "For being promoted from SWE I to SWE II, how do I take the behaviors my company has associated with each role (below) and make that more concrete for a growth plan, taking into account the changing & flexible timelines startups have?"

For context, I already have weekly one-on-ones with my manager (who is new at being a manager & is also my mentor), and a growth plan (that I created with him) that roughly outlines (meets most expectations, meets expectations and exceeds expectations for my role). Additionally, keep in mind I work at a startup w/ <30 people so highly specific concrete goals set on a particular date can change in 2-3 weeks as priorities change. Also, my company has defined a series of behaviors as to what each SWE level should be able to accomplish. Here it is.

Software Engineer I (<1 year - 2 years)

• Technical Skill
  • Broad knowledge of CS concepts
  • Focus on growing as an engineer, learning existing tools, resources, and processes
• Getting Stuff Done
  • Develops their productivity skills by learning source control, editors, the build system and other tools as well as testing best practices.
  • Capable of taking well-defined sub-tasks and completing these tasks
• Impact
  • Developing knowledge of a single component of our architecture
• Communication & Leadership
  • Effective in communicating status to the team
  • Exhibits company’s core values, focuses on understanding and living these values
  • Accepts feedback graciously and learns from everything they do

Software Engineer II (2-6Years+)

• Technical Skill
  • Writes correct and clean code with guidance; consistently fellows stated best practices
  • Participates in technical design of features with guidance
  • Rarely makes the same mistake twice, begins to focus on attaining expertise in one or more areas(eg. embedded , testing, algorithm, support code, commlink).
  • Learns quickly and makes steady progress without the need for constant significant feedback from more senior engineers.
• Getting Stuff Done
  • Makes steady progress on tasks; knows when to ask for help in order to get themselves unblocked.
  • Able to own small-to-medium features from technical design through completion.
  • Capable of prioritizing tasks; avoids getting caught up in unimportant details and endless “bikeshedding”.
• Impact
  • Self-sufficient in at least one large area of the codebase with a high-level understanding of other components
  • Capable of providing on-call support for their area including systems that they are not familiar with.
• Communication & Leadership
  • Gives timely, helpful feedback to peers and managers
  • Communicates assumptions and gets clarification on tasks up front to minimize the need for rework.
  • Solicits feedback from others and is eager to find ways to improve
  • Understands how their work fits into the larger project and identifies problems with requirements.

Hi! I'm an L5 in a big tech company, tasked with leading a big org-level project that span multiple engineering teams, with lots of cross functional collaboration w/ UX and PM as well.

I'm new to my own team and I'm not the subject matter expert in the area of our work, which is around 8-ish people with about 2 other L5s. In order for me to successfully manage this project for our team, I am already involved in a lot of meetings and I have yet to set up recurring 1:1s. I believe I should set up some more of these 1:1s, but I can't imagine I would be setting one up w/ everyone I come across.

Which 1-on-1s / relationship should I prioritize, how frequently should they happen, and how do I ensure these meetings are good use of both my time and the other person's time?

While exploring the benefits of taro premium I was most interested in the 1 on 1 meetings. I've subscribed to premium but do not see any option to register for the 1-1 meetings. Could someone please let me know how to register.

Thanks

I have been working in this company for 1 year 3 months now, and I'm feeling burnt out. I'm looking to take a break for around a month and a half, which I know is on the lengthier side. Does anyone here have experience requesting this long a leave?

I'm a new grad. I watched the and i understand the theory -- be vulnerable, use it as a time to grow and get feedback on improvement, keep docs and an agenda

But I've only ever had 1-on-1s in my 1 internship where every 2 weeks I'd meet with the manager and it would be 5-10 mins. When I ask how can I improve, they would say yep everything is good, your perf is good, keep doing what you're doing and I'd say ok.

If I told my manager that hey I'm not happy with the current scope and I'm not learning enough they said rn keep doing what you're doing and later in the internship I'll give you other stuff and then I never got different work

In my new different company where I'm working in an early stage startup I want to set up a strong 1-on-1 culture with the founders who I am always working/talking consistently with but I have no idea what actually to talk about?

Can someone share case studies on what your recent 1-on-1s are like? what did you talk about -- breaking down in time components (e.g. first 5 mins small talk, then next 10 mins talking about X, then 10 mins on Y). If someone could share like a blue-print/actionable framework or guide that would be really helpful

I'm feeling very undervalued at my current position. I've been working on my service the longest and therefore was the one that onboarded most of my team. In 2023 my manager and tech lead have largely been too busy to help. For instance, I only have 1-1s one every 2-3 weeks.

The new members we got on our team were new to the company and one in particular has relatively poor communication skills, so I have had to spend a lot of time onboarding them.

Unfortunately, in my performance reviews the main emphasis is on the work that I am delivering and there is not much emphasis on the impact I've had through the rest of the team. But the couple of months I tried focusing more on my work, I noticed the culture on the team degrading.

The hardest part for me has been that I have found my manager very unhelpful in helping me with my career and other frustrations. There have been multiple times where instead of helping I've felt as if he's blamed me. I have expressed this to them, but they have not changed.

Now I'm in late stages of interviews with 3 companies. I estimate the pay increase would be between 10-25% if I receive an offer.

Our team also just changed significantly, we swapped a mid-level engineer with a senior-engineer and got a new manager. They will be reporting to my previous manager so that manager will still be around.

I'm optimistic that the new manager and teammate will upgrade my situation but given the more than a year of frustration without improvement I'm still leaning towards leaving. Though I am having second thoughts as well.

I'd love to get any advice on how to handle my situation. Thanks so much!

Hi everyone,

I work for a company that offers online web and mobile apps for US-based customers. As part of a recent re-organization, all mobile, web, and backend engineers have been combined into a single on-call rotation. Even though most of these 20+ engineers (mobile + Web engineers) have not much context about the backend system, my director wants to alleviate the frequent on-call rotation, and he proposes having a healthy size of on-call rotation that uses the "follow the sun" model approach, which involves training engineers in different time zones to have knowledge transfer about the backend system and potential issues. I'm curious to know how I can effectively onboard and train over 20 web and mobile engineers for the on-call rotation while following this model.

The Backend team has compiled a comprehensive support run-book log for each corresponding issue/alert, which shows the severity, priority, and range of the issue. The on-call rotation involves acknowledging alerts and following the steps outlined in the run-book.

Please note that the support run-book is not a 100% comprehensive source of truth since the production system is integrated with multiple 3rd party APIs and systems, and the backend platform serves as middleware for both mobile and web applications. There may be instances where issues are caused by third-party vendors and cannot be solved by the on-call person.

I would love to hear your thoughts and perspectives on this matter. I'm also meeting with my boss for our one-on-one to talk about his idea. This is still an experiment, but would like to get people's perspective. Thank you!

My team is a fairly distributed team, so I've setup monthly 1-on-1s with everyone to help build up relationships.

For 1-on-1s like this, what strategies do you use to build strong relationships quickly?

Most resources on 1-on-1s focus on ones with your manager. But I feel like there's a difference here.

I am not sure if we have a option of 1:1 mentoring.

Hi Taro Community,

During my recent 1:1 with my manager, we discussed the idea of me sending weekly updates about my work, and he was in favor of it. I want to ensure that these updates are concise, informative, and structured in a way that facilitates clear communication and showcases my progress effectively.

Could anyone share formats or templates they’ve successfully used for similar weekly updates to their managers? Any tips on what to include and what to avoid would also be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your insights!

How to navigate working with new engineering manager who is away for 1st month?

From my first one-on-one with my new direct manager (M3), my new manager tell me that he will be away 1st month to travel to Asia for family visit. My new manager told me that he would only be avaliable during India timezone so he will not have any one-on-one with me due to time zone difference. So he asks me to work directly with the Director (M4) for this month. I have worked with this director for 8-12 months last year, who are my current Director (M4). Wanted to see if anyone has any thought on how to navigate through the next month while my direct manager is gone and won't be avaliable for me.

My direct manager reassures me that I will still have one-on-one with my skip on a weekly basis, and nothing should have changed since I worked with my Director (M4) before as I was his direct report as Senior Software Engineer.

Wanted to ask if there's anything that I should consider for this 1 month of transition with my new engineering manager?

I have a weekly 1:1 with my manager. I want to share the 1:1 doc I've been keeping, but I'm embarrassed that I feel like my onboarding (I'm in my 6th week on the job) has been slow and I haven't hit the 1 month target we set in our first meeting.

Should I share my 1:1 document with my manager given that I haven't hit this target? My guess is I should bite the bullet and do it, because the logic is he already knows.

The argument not to share would be "no need to remind him of my failures".

I know that 1:1s should be awkward, so I guess I should share this info.

Thanks!

My manager initially told me we'd probably meet once a month. They manage several teams so we have only interacted once. I'm also on a contract and have a goal to get converted full-time. My "onboarding buddy" who I have weekly 1 on 1s with is not a developer - they're a PM. There's 1 other engineer on the team who is in a completely different time zone - our time overlap is minimal. The rest of the team are data scientists.

Who should I focus on getting feedback from if my direct manager is not involved in assigning tasks? the PM? the engineer in a different time zone who does not control my tasks but knows the most about the codebase? Both?

I’ve recently been applying to various jobs, just in case of an unexpected layoff (golden parachute). Lately, I’ve been motivated to upskill as a developer. I’ve now reached the two-year mark at my company. After the reorg, I have a new manager, team, and director, and I really like this team. My performance over the past six months has been better than it was with my old team. Recently, Google reached out to me for an interview, but I haven’t really studied data structures and algorithms (DSA) due to work. My performance hasn’t been great, and now I also have a phone interview with Meta.

On the plus side, my company's stock has surged, and we’ve received bonuses, raises, and promotions. In my last 1-on-1 meeting with my manager, he told me I should be more independent and that my performance is great (hinting at a promotion)—fingers crossed. My family and friends are encouraging me to interview with both Meta and Google, but I don’t really want to leave my current company.

I've noticed that my manager often doesn't acknowledge my suggestions or thoughts during team meetings, even though our one-on-one interactions are fine. I feel that high-impact opportunities are given to other team members, despite my requests for them. I am moved to support work recently (manager claims that this is also high impact and there is scope to reduce operational work). Additionally, I received the no salary increment in my team in last review.

I also feel that my manager supports a teammate at the same level as me more than they support me, even though we are both working towards promotion.

I'm not sure what to do—whether to stay and hope things improve or transfer to another team and start fresh. If I change teams, I will need to start working from scratch for my promotion.

I often see advice online / receive feedback from so many different sources. That could be during manager 1:1, peer feedback, reading content on LinkedIn, etc. While I resonate with it, I often find it hard to track all the feedback / advice I receive and holding myself accountable to act on it or change my behavior. This is especially hard when the advice is not immediately actionable (i.e. situation based).

So my question is, how can I consolidate the learnings from all of these sources and make sure I act on it (or at the very least, remember it when a situation arises)?

Every year, there's a mandatory compensation one on one with my manager. I find the session mostly informational and it's not really a bargaining / negotiation process. Usually when the compensation conversation happens, the performance review was set in stone a few months ago. There's limited things a manager can do.

What do you ask during the compensation discussion? The nitty-gritty of compensation of my current company is thoroughly discussed over different forums and there's more information over the Internet than what my manager could officially tell me. Should I just quickly close the comp one on one to save time for both of us?

In my 1:1 my manager praised me for not getting upset or defensive when a senior engineer managed to convince me and my manager to change which interfaces we are to read from for the project I am working on. To be clear this is a 2 month project on a microservice with a lot of data translation requirements.

He liked that I just kept a unfazed appearance and refactored the code in 2 hours. I even shared that as a win to him :). But I’m confused why I’m getting praised. It feels like I’m getting praised for breathing. I’m a mid level engineer by self assessment so lmk if I’m not realizing some nuance here. To be clear the technical proficiency is not what I’m concerned about. I’m just more confused about what’s so important about that behavior I got praised for.

I recently had issues with management at my company and, out of frustration, changed my LinkedIn status to "Open to Work." I saw this as a chance to practice behavioral interviews, as Alex suggested in his course.

After completing some behavioral interviews with recruiters, I’m now scheduled to speak with hiring managers next week. Two companies have moved directly to the technical round based on my recruiter conversations. Most of these interviews are expected to happen over the next two weeks. I did not expect to get any technical interviews because I thought I wasn't good enough. But somehow it worked out better than I expected.

Here’s what I found out about the technical interviews from a follow-up email that I asked :

Both are live sessions.

The first company, which builds secure financial systems, provided this detail:

- "This is a filesystem design question combining design and live coding. The expectation is to present a complete solution, moving beyond pseudocode. Develop an approach/logic that can be fully implemented within the allotted time." - TypeScript & Node.js

The second company, which works in the distributed systems space requires a live coding assignment in Golang but gave no specific details.

I'm unsure how to best prepare. These aren’t straightforward like LeetCode problems, and there's no information on which libraries or resources to use. I haven’t done system design interviews before, and these companies expect a working coded solution. I've been attending system design sessions and group discussions with Taro, but live coding a feature is new to me.

I've done take-home assignments before, where there’s ample time to prepare, but this will be my first time coding a working component from scratch in a live interview. The pressure is higher since someone is constantly observing. I could treat these interviews as practice, but I don’t want to waste these opportunities. There's no guarantee of another chance, and I want to do well. This experience will be invaluable, and I don’t want to regret not giving it my best.

I was also wondering if I should ask more follow-up questions on the specifics of the technical interview like libraries to use, existing examples, resources to practice, etc. Is this too much to ask or is it fine?

Any guidance on preparing for these interviews would be greatly appreciated.