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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

You should do it.

An hour is too long, just cut it short if you’ve got nothing to chat about.

The other comments about never talking to your boss and being productive are stupid wishful thinking and you should ignore them.

Your job as a senior is not to sit and hack away at code; that is a job for juniors.

You have to do “team” things too, and part of that is knowing what your team mates and boss are doing and expecting.

How are you planning on doing that without talking to them?

Most likely at least one member of your team is not communicating and it’s easier to apply a blanket policy than single one person out for it.

So, don’t take it personally, you’re not being micromanaged.

If the cadence feels too short, suggest you do it less often, but saying you see “no value” in them and want to opt out is the wrong approach, gonna make your boss unhappy and not solve anything.

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> You have to do “team” things too, and part of that is knowing what your team mates and boss are doing and expecting. How are you planning on doing that without talking to them?

You can talk without having weekly scheduled 1:1s. If there's a topic that needs to be addressed and you are the one thinking about it first, then you gather the necessary people, you write the necessary text for them to know the context before the meeting happens, and you scheduled a meeting inviting the people you think should know about the topic. Having scheduled 1:1s is orthogonal. I like to treat my managers using the hollywood principle: "don't call me, I'll call you"

Everyone works different, but that decision (to have scheduled 1:1 or not) should probably be discussed between the two in a frank tone. Trying to rationalize for/against miss the difference of needs.

Someone I manage explicitly came and asked for a weekly 1:1 meeting, because it was hard for him to stay focused or productive without it and indeed his productivity went up after introducing it.

Me and my manager have no scheduled 1:1 but it works well. I think I'm also the type of person that scheduled 1:1 would work well, because we tend to have 2-3 1:1 per week anyway when things are remote and we need to be in sync or brainstorm ideas and meta-issues.

But with my previous manager, scheduled 1:1 didn't lead to anything except "you're doing fine".

If someone is not sure if would be useful, one can always try for a short time and then talk if it's helpful or not and change it accordingly.

> You can talk without having weekly scheduled 1:1s.

And you can have unlimited PTO, too, but does it really happen if you don't have some minimum set amount of time you have to use?

|| An hour is too long, just cut it short if you’ve got nothing to chat about.

A easy tip for this is to set every meeting to 30 mins but keep the next 30 mins free. Sometimes people worry that they did something wrong when a long meeting is cut short. Works for most meetings not just 1-1s.

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