Not really a "very very good chance", but the few instances of this happening have accomplished the intended effect of making everyone terrified of the possibility and thus never doing it.
> the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_.
How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.
> How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.
Easy, send a message prior to the meeting "Hey, I have no topics to cover this week, so let's skip it and save the time".
Thats fine, though if you do that forever you'll probably harm your promotion chances. Which, if your goal is just to get by, sounds fine?
But generally speaking, it's a chance for you to speak about your work to the person writing your performance review, and get feedback, which may be in short supply otherwise for various reasons.
I don't know why I'd ever want a promotion, and I haven't ever got one. I did turn one down once. A promotion is like 5% more pay for way more work and a bunch of corporate bullshit along the way. If I want to move up I just change jobs.
Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.
In startups with less than 50 people (and I am being generous on the number), everyone talks to everyone all the time, so there is no need for these moments to extract key info to fix/improve situations, identify topics to push, ...
But once the company is just large enough, there is no way you're going to interact with everyone in a meaningful manner (n^2 relationships and all that), and the simplest solution is intermediaries and 1-1s.
But 1 on 1 meetings are not crossing team boundaries, they are always within the team which is pretty much always smaller than 50. There's no reason the team cannot "talk to everyone all the time" just because other teams exist. But instead this communication is replaced by meetings even though the ability to talk hasn't changed.
Managers DO cross team boundaries though, their peers are other managers. I can't talk to the 100 people in my department every week, but my manager can talk to their 9 peers, who each talk to their 10 reports.
Precisely! And this is true not just for managers but also higher-level ICs. Its ok for Senior and below to be team focused, but moving to the next level means broadening scope and that means talking with people, regularly!, outside your immediate team.
But the initial claim was that 1:1 meetings "add value to the team". I can believe that they add value to the manager's manager, but they are not adding value to the team of the person being met with.
I'm a staff eng and have 1:1s with other managers I don't report to and my peer staff/principle engs in other reporting chains and they are some of the most valuable meetings I have to keep connected with what other teams and the rest of the organization is doing, what's going well, what they might need from me, pain points, initiatives, etc. And of course just to build and maintain rapport across the org, which absolutely pays dividends.
I do these less frequently than with my direct manager, but still on a regular cadence, typically once a month or every other month.
Startups don't have as rigidly defined team boundaries. It wouldn't be uncommon for people to take up tasks and responsibilities that would fall under some other team with a different manager.
In larger corporations, teams are insular - members aren't rewarded for doing work outside of their domain, and would be punished for letting another team do their job. Some members are so indoctrinated that they won't respond to any communication outside of their team, unless it's through their own manager.
Beautiful thought but really hard in real life. Do you talk to all members of the family, deeply, every day?
Most would say no, so you need to open the spaces to do so.
This is only "Funny" in the sense that it's "funny" that a high-performing startup can run the entire thing on a single huge Postgres instance and that mysteriously stops working after you hit a certain level of scale. Relationship count scales quadratically as you scale headcount. A single poor relationship can sour an entire team or worse. When your team is 5 people, it's trivial for e.g. the CEO to have the state of all relationships in the company in his head. As a company grows larger it gets harder. Once you surpass Dunbar's number it's virtually impossible. The function of 1:1s is to scale this.
And changes happen at pretty much all levels of scale. Even once you get well past startup size the times of structure and processes required for a 10,000 or 20,000 person company is much different from a 1,000 or 2,000 person company.
Please define what "predicting the next token" means. The next token according to what probability distribution? Couldn't every process that produces text (including humans writing) be modeled as predicting the next token according to some distribution?
(1) The test has to be signed by an online doctor. The firm arranges this implicitly, but it's not free. I can't go directly to Quest for any random test I want. The tests offered directly by Quest without an intermediary are too expensive and too few.
(2) States like New York throw a wrench in it by disallowing anyone with an in-state billing address from ordering such tests.
Ideally I should be able to pay the same low rate that the insurance firm would minimally pay, but in practice I can't. I have to pay a lot more if I can get it at all. The cartel is strong.
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