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Ryan Burgess
Welcome to another episode of the front end happy hour podcast. Our jobs as engineers are not always coding, mostly coding, but we also have meetings and one of the common type of meetings is one on ones. In today's episode we are going to talk about one on ones and how they can be effective or maybe not effective. Let's go around the table and give introductions of today's panelists, Augustus you want to start it off. Sure.

Augustus Yuan
I'm Augustus Yun. I'm a software engineer at Twitch.

Mars Jullian
Hi, I'm Mars. I'm a software engineer in the Bay Area and all of my thoughts aremy own.

Stacy London
I'm Stacy London. I'm a senior front end engineer at Atlassian and all my thoughts are Mars's

Ryan Burgess
and I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm a Offer engineering manager at Netflix. And I'm hoping to share all my thoughts today. In each episode of the front end happier podcasts we like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned in all in the episode, we will all take a drink. And what did we decide that beautiful keyword is today?

All
advice

Ryan Burgess
advice. So if we say the word advice from now on, we will all take a drink. All right, before we dive into talking about one on ones, what are one on ones like? How would you all describe what a one on one is? And what are they for? Obviously, it's a meeting but what's the point of them?

Augustus Yuan
What's the meme? I'm kind of curious because I love memes

Mars Jullian
a meeting. Oh, wow.

Augustus Yuan
It's a meme. Oh,

Ryan Burgess
it could be a meme. I don't know maybe. Probably means out there. Alright, so the meeting.

Augustus Yuan
It's a meeting. Yes.

Ryan Burgess
There's usually two people one on one.

Mars Jullian
Mm hmm. Also, not necessary. With your manager,

Ryan Burgess
right? I think that's a typical meeting is the one on one with your manager. But yeah, it could be with another like a colleague, another engineer, maybe a partner that you work closely with.

Stacy London
Yeah, I think they're basically like, yeah, at the most common thing is a meeting with your team lead or your manager, whatever their title is. And it's a it's like a check in how to kind of for both sides, like how are you? How are you doing? Are there questions for me? How can I help you like there's kind of a it's a two way dialogue. And it's just a good check in so that when you eventually have, let's say, a performance review, at the end of the year, you kind of know, where you're at, like, constantly, like you're always checking in on that. So there's no surprises at the end of the year.

Mars Jullian
Yeah, I think one of the main differences like what you're saying between that and like another meeting is it's very unstructured, or at least the ones that I've been in, I don't know that I've ever really been in a one on one with an agenda necessarily. It's sort of just like a good time to put time FaceTime on the calendar with someone that you need to be sort of maintaining some sort of relationship with I sometimes

Ryan Burgess
have had an agenda.

Mars Jullian
Yeah, yeah. It's not

Ryan Burgess
too bad because sometimes you're kind of just like bullets of like, what do I want to talk about? Mainly, it's been for my own remembering what am I supposed to talk to this person about? But not with everyone I find like I actually prefer the casual like meeting words. What's up? Let's talk. Also being the manager with someone who reports to me. I look at it as like, I try really hard and I'm not always good at it, of not being the one talking like I want to look at it as a way for the person coming into the meeting is to be able to share what do they want to talk about? Sometimes I may have to share something, some changes happening or who knows? Or ask a status update, which I hate doing as well.

Augustus Yuan
I really like Stacy, how you said it's a two way dialogue and kind of what you were mentioning Ryan? Yeah, it definitely is that kind of dedicated time where you wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable going to the hallway and be like, Hey, wanna know how I'm performing and stuff I feel it's a really nice like, dedicated time. Your manager can well, assuming we're talking about manager, manager can set aside time for you and really like check in with you. It's actually really interesting because I love how you don't have, you don't necessarily have an agenda, actually, my manager kind of says, you know, this is your time you set the agenda. If I have stuff, I will call out what the agenda is for that, you know, but it's really like this time is your time, but naturally, you kind of have to run the meeting yourself.

Ryan Burgess
So you as an engineer, yeah, yes, yes.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah. Or I guess designer or, yeah, individual contributor. Absolutely. IC role IC.

Stacy London
What do you put on your agenda? Whoo, homie, I mean, not very specific. Right. But like in generalities like

Ryan Burgess
you're having a problem with Stacy.

Mars Jullian
Stacy keeps stealing my thoughts.

Augustus Yuan
At least I know, at least for me, I've definitely seen the value of one on ones a lot more. I used to really not know To use them for the way I've used them is really sharing some of the things that I feel I've been doing because I feel sometimes a manager doesn't get the visibility of the work that I get to do all the time. He's always following me that you're really creepy. But he has so many meetings that sometimes it's nice to just share some of the wins that I have. And then also, if I'm ever curious, like how I'm performing or what I could be doing better, I try to ask for that feedback. Like it's like a two way dialogue, you know, always like checking in. That's

Stacy London
great. I think some team leads Yeah, they have maybe a lot or managed have a huge number of people that report to them too. So like, it is, I would imagine it would be hard to keep track of like, Yeah, all the little wins or things that you feel like you did well on during the week, like they may

Ryan Burgess
not know so that's like, that's awesome. It is a good opportunity to just like promote yourself, talk about the things that have gone well, but also maybe things that could have gone better. And also looking for ways that you can get help from someone you know, or advice on sheer energy. How long do you typically meet with someone? One on one? Three to four hours? Wow. Really? That's an intense meeting. No.

Mars Jullian
That's a nightmare.

Augustus Yuan
I was like, Oh my goodness.

Ryan Burgess
And then what's the cadence? Like, once

Stacy London
a day, once a day to four hours? Yeah.

Augustus Yuan
I'm very, very. I was like, wow, I must have a small brain because I can't even go like

Stacy London
half an hour

Ryan Burgess
usually. And like sometimes once a week, I've had some teams at one at once. So like, want to do that once a week. But I almost feel like sometimes that might be too much depending on your team size. Like if your team lead is at your status a do stand ups if they're at your standards, or day and they kind of have an idea like what you're doing maybe once a week is too much because you're like, are they already kind of around everything that's happening. But I think every two weeks seems good for me. Like I like that cadence. That's usually typically what I've scheduled for even my direct reports and especially as my team has gotten larger, It's been like, Okay, well, it's easier to just kind of space them out. But also I want people to not wait for the one on one. Like, if there's something that comes up, throw time on the calendar or just grab me because that's important as well. I meet with engineers on my team, I meet with my manager, I meet with other managers in the company or people that I partner with. And so the cadence can actually differ. And even the time like my manager for the longest time, we were meeting like an hour weekly, it was kind of a status and for my own personal growth, but also like sometimes just talking about team oriented things, especially when it was just him and I managing the team that was very valuable. It was kind of a mix of strategic but yeah, it varies. I think sometimes I meet with someone once a month or maybe once a quarter like so I've even had some that are in cadences like that.

Mars Jullian
Yeah, no, no, I guess well, I mean, it really depends on the person sort of like to Ryan's point. Like with my manager, it's half hour every two weeks and even sometimes like that doesn't feel like quite enough. I mean, a half hour can go by really quickly, especially As in my situation, if you're new to the company that I have a lot to learn about how we operate. And also there's I have a lot of questions about, you know, just general career stuff on. But when it comes to sort of anybody else, I sort of do it in like an ad hoc way, especially with sort of like relationships that I'm building on the team. It's really more informal. It's kind of like just enough time to walk across the street and get a coffee walk around the block come back and that can that can actually be really productive even if it's short.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I think it's a good way to is like even just doing like that as a more casual thing is you're also you're building trust and getting to know someone and that's like, a one on one can be very valuable for that. Interesting Mars to going back to your saying, like be new to a company. And I think that's another time where I've almost like overscheduled like be when someone's new, because there are so many questions and it's like, a lot of times like someone will have a legit bulleted list of agenda. It's like, I have all these questions. Great, let's go through them. So it might even be like once a day, or like, maybe I do schedule an hour or like there's a couple times where I'll do more this especially early on in the first like couple of weeks.

Stacy London
Yeah, definitely.

Augustus Yuan
Have you have any of you like narrowed down? What I guess you talked about how you like, half an hour might be too little. Like when I when I moved from Evernote to twitch. It was interesting because I had one week, half an hour, and it moved to every two weeks one hour. And I personally like the two week cadence more because I feel like there's just a lot more to talk about. Yeah, the half an hour was like, Oh, we just talked last week and it's just, at least for me, it didn't feel like there's enough meat sometimes to talk about stuff. Granted, we don't really go to an hour. That's why when you say three hours I was like, Oh goodness.

Mars Jullian
Yeah, it's kind of nice though. setting that time aside, even if you don't fill it up. I mean, it's it's exactly reasonable. Like, hey, we don't really also talk about like, yeah, we get always over

Ryan Burgess
exactly all the time.

Mars Jullian
Yeah. But sometimes it can be really hard to get time with your manager or really with anyone on the team, depending on like, what's going on or how your team is structured. So that actually sounds pretty nice. Just to have that hold there.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah. And there have been like rare times where we have hidden an hour. And that's because there was a lot to talk about, but most of the time, it's late. Just a little more than half an hour. So perfect, you know, half an hour. Sure.

Mars Jullian
It wasn't really too short when everyone's late to the meeting. Yeah, like you have every company has the traditional, like five minutes, you know, we always

Ryan Burgess
say 25 minute meetings. Yeah. And

Stacy London
that's when

Ryan Burgess
that's when it gets really, really short. So how do you all think about getting the most value out of a one on one, especially with your manager, if we talked about like getting feedback or getting advice? Cheers, cheers.

Stacy London
I think what's not valuable is status reports. That's the stuff I don't like I don't want the one on one to be like, tell me the status the current product You're working on your like, that's not what this is should be for and up is for that. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
totally good email, or there's many ways that you can get it in the one on one shouldn't. Yeah,

Stacy London
I think it's easy to go there. I think that's like such a default, because it's so easy to talk about, because like that is the easier stuff. The one on one could be more about, you know, like, there's more emotional impact there. And there's more emotional topics. So it is harder to talk about those things. So sometimes you just default to project status. But try not to let it go there. It's like more much more valuable when it's like, How are you feeling? Are you feeling positive? Or, you know, like, that kind of stuff, I think is really huge.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I think sometimes I've even had the where we talk a little bit of the status things, but it's even trying to get how's the project going? Not so much of Oh, we're here. It's like, maybe a date slipped? It's like, Well, why did it like what could we you know, it's like trying to like, pull something more out of it and just a status update. But yeah, oftentimes, that's where things are going. So I'm working on this and it's like, Okay, cool. Like what's, what else like so we can kind of go a little bit deeper.

Mars Jullian
I think that's interesting. To that, you mentioned that because I find that sometimes it really depends on like, the space that the other person makes for you, if that makes sense, like the emotional space, sort of like what is your the other person on the other side of the one on one expecting out of it, but I actually really appreciate one on ones when it's sort of just like, it starts out with like, Hey, how are you doing? And then the deeper stuff comes out of some sort of random conversation that you kind of didn't expect to be having. And I think actually, that's the power of a good one on one and a good manager who kind of just is there for you. And then all of a sudden, you realize that you've uncovered something that you didn't know it was just like blurt

Augustus Yuan
it out, you're like, I

Mars Jullian
know, I don't I don't know if you ever knew this, Ryan, but you were really, really good at doing that.

Ryan Burgess
I was like, firstly, my use of my first question.

Mars Jullian
I would often go and I would often come in and just rant and then from there, there would there would eventually be something productive in that but it was really, really useful on like an emotional level to be able to let it go. But also like, actually just have someone listen and be like, Hey, I'm hearing this, like, this is how we move forward. So

Augustus Yuan
I'm kind of so This is where like, starts to look like it's my turn. But I don't really know what to say. So I was kind of curious for Ryan, since you're a manager, is there anything you wish people told you?

Stacy London
More? or something?

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, that's that's a good question I think about it is trying to think a little bit broader about what someone wants for their career growth. I think that's always one that often ask, and it's not something that you want to talk about, like, you're not going to talk about that every single one on one. But having people think about like, what, what do they want to be doing? What are things that we can work together on in order to make those things happen? Because maybe it's like you want to do more leadership or you want to do more technical depth or just certain types of projects. And I think those types of conversations are really good to have with your manager. So there's the future thinking of growth, for your own personal growth, but even What about your team and the things that maybe we could be investing time in from a technical standpoint, like, engineers are closest to these problems. And so raising some of the concerns are like, Hey, I think we need to change something in order to be more productive or have better quality, or we should be investing here is like having those types of conversations I really enjoy. It's like, also trying to encourage people to think future and not just think about the very tactical in the moment projects that we're doing, making sure that they're we're thinking a little bit broader on investment.

Augustus Yuan
I love that you bring that up, because, you know, we have a meeting called retrospectives, where we kind of, you know, form we think about the past sprint, how did it go, what processes failed, but sometimes it's really hard to really act on those. It's really just nice to like, talk it out with your manager, like so. I sometimes have used that space to do that. So yeah, cuz

Stacy London
maybe your manager could like the maybe the retro item is something that you need more than you couldn't you couldn't just affect that change on your own. You need help or you need maybe Time, project time, roadmap time or whatever, then you can like,

Augustus Yuan
you know, talk about that. And that's and then your manager does have some of that power. So they might be able to help with that, if it makes sense. Or even just like the visibility, like, Are there is is one time, I was kind of annoyed at another team. I can't remember when or where. And then my manager was like, Oh, yeah, actually, that's because they're working on this huge project. And, you know, they're like, I did not know that.

Ryan Burgess
So I think that's important too. Like, I often think of my role is to also provide insights into future things or why we're doing certain things like that type. I want to answer those types of questions. Going back to Gus question to have, like, what I would want. One thing I don't get a lot of is feedback for myself. And that's when I'm, like, always want to hear is how could I be doing better? And maybe it's like, even just I did something wrong, especially directed at like one of my direct reports. It's like, could they give me that feedback? So that i know i think that's always helpful too. And people But people shy away from that. Usually, I

Mars Jullian
was actually gonna ask how everyone else deals with that in terms of giving advice to their managers, especially when there's, um, there's obviously like a power dynamic involved in that sort of like space. I mean,

Stacy London
it can be, it can be scary. I think you have to, before you can do that you have to build up the trust in that relationship. And the way to do that is for you know, like, what you said, What Mars you're saying earlier, like, when Ryan, you'd say, How are you feeling? or How are you doing? If you have a manager that never asks you that and is like, what's the status of this project? Like, you're not building that trust to say like, that you feel comfortable with them being taking that feedback that you're giving them and not being, you know, not doing something terrible with it, like not holding it against you, but being open and honest and like that trust building that trust to have that conversation. That takes a little bit of time. It's earned,

Ryan Burgess
like earned right i think that's Important even I'm asking for the feedback. It's on me to also build that trust, too. I think that's really important. You're right. There's always this. Unfortunately, there is a level of power dynamic, which I don't. I don't think there should be. But it's like, it's hard when there's a title thing, manager, I don't know about that one as much. But when you get into like, Director VP, I really feel like there's this like automatic Oh, that person's a VP, it'd be really nice to just remove that feeling altogether, so that you can feel comfortable giving someone that feedback. But yeah, you're not going to just go up some random person and be like, I've got feedback for you. Because you have no idea how that's gonna react. Yeah, you have to build the trust.

Stacy London
Yeah. And like, you will see it over time, you'll see that manager, how they behave, how they give and receive feedback. So that comfort level will increase be like, Oh, I can be constructive and like, you know, say like, Hey, I wish you would have done this. In this meeting. That would have been helpful and you know that that's gonna be like positive.

Mars Jullian
I really like that you brought that up because I'm being on the other side of that in terms of like wanting to give advice to people. Especially in a power dynamic and not being able to use saying that makes it feel like less of a failure on the other person. I think that's really, really interesting that you pointed that out because it really is a two way street, especially in that particular relationship. So it's good to bring that up two years old. I say the word Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
Speaking of the manager one on one, because we've talked a lot about that I saw a post on Twitter, someone had tweeted this not that long ago, like a couple weeks ago, that someone was like, does anyone else dread their one on one every single week? Or bi weekly, or whatever it is, as you're nodding your head? Do you honestly sometimes dread that and why

Stacy London
I don't currently, but kind of like what Mars mentioned before, like, if you have if you feel comfortable, there's trust with your with your managers, psychological safety, these kinds of things. You You won't dread them because it won't. It's not a stressful scenario. But it can be if you if you have a manager who Is hezlet you can see you've seen them take like, retribution on someone or you've seen them, you know, do things that break that trust, then you're like, well, I don't know, I don't really want to talk to this person like, and it is very hard. You dread them. You don't you don't feel comfortable. You don't feel like there is trust. And yeah, so it's possible.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, I think there was a time when I dreaded one on ones because it was kind of an awkward shift of teams and temporary manager and stuff. And I think the thing that made me I don't know if dread is the right word, but I just wasn't comfortable going to them because I felt that the one on ones was hurting the relationship between me and my manager more than it was like, helping it like it was really hard to like, you know, find ways to connect and not talk about work. You know, it sounds like especially like in the temporary manager case, it's like, Hey, you know, I want to talk about career growth. They might not, they are not going to be your manager forever. So they it's hard for them. It's like you know that going into Yeah. So I feel that that was a time when it was really hard to look forward. I don't know if I want to use the word dread, but

Ryan Burgess
that was I stole that more from the tweet because that was exactly what it was said he was like, interesting. And I was trying to think about it. I'm sure I have at some point, sometimes, even I think maybe there's been times where I've thought I didn't do well on something. And then so you're feeling like, maybe not good and that like, Oh, am I gonna get a bunch of feedback on this? And I already know that I didn't do that. Well. I think sometimes I've maybe felt like that, but I've never like dread like that one. I'm like, Yeah, I don't know if I've been that extreme.

Stacy London
Yeah, it's probably more of like, the it's pretty tough, probably a toxic environment. And it's not you know, most people on the team are probably dreading it. That's like, a bad situation for everyone. But yeah,

Ryan Burgess
it's possible, which to me is probably like a bigger question of like, especially if it's like it's on demand. It's like probably talk to HR or talk to like their manager. Like if it's that bad. I'm like, that's a clear sign that something's wrong.

Stacy London
There are some and then there's like, personality types like some, some people you feel incredibly comfortable talking to, like, they don't know what I have a hard time articulating what what the characteristics are. But some people make you feel very comfortable talking to them. They look you directly in the eye, they have this ease about them, you can just casually chat, they're good at making conversation. So it's easy to have that one on one. But you can also have like, someone who doesn't have that personality and they're kind of awkward and they stumble around words and it sounds kind of fake when they say like things and so then then it just becomes awkward and so it's not like you dread them but they're more like

Mars Jullian
another another awkward situation. Yeah, well there they can be a lot of work you know, like you even regardless of personality to whether it's gonna be like the good one or was it can be the bad one. one on ones. And then there can be the ones that are just kind of like, What do I do? a half hour, you know, a half hour could be a loo talk about how it's a short amount of time can be a really long

Ryan Burgess
time. If you're sitting there in silence. Yeah,

Mars Jullian
precisely. It's sort of it's hard. Especially with someone if you're trying to build a relationship and sort of you're like, the other person's not reciprocating with that work that you were that you're trying to do. It's, it can be really tough to go if there's a half hour out of my day, we're just gonna

Ryan Burgess
so we talked about this idea of dreading and kind of alluded to some of the things that could be bad but I'm curious like, have you what is like really made bad one on ones obviously, like we just talked about? Someone not really being that easy to talk to. CCU even kind of said, like, they almost people need to be genuine. Like, that's kind of what I heard. What you're saying I think that's really true is in order to build a relationship and trust, you actually have to care about person, someone who doesn't listen to you and just talks over you. That's about one on one and I've definitely had that many

Mars Jullian
Yeah, basically a lecture. Yeah, like you go into wanting a lot of information and you only get through one or two questions, because each one was its own lecture. That can be really, really tough.

Augustus Yuan
I want to echo a lot of the things that he Mars touched on this before too, but, you know, sometimes you just watch her rant. And then I feel this isn't even just in one on ones, but in everyday life with friends. Sometimes when you tell problems here, friends may say, huh, you know, it sounds like this person is telling me this problem because they want advice from me. And then they go into a lecture and start telling you, you know, how you should approach this? You just start thinking these like, Oh, God, I've made a mistake.

Ryan Burgess
I know exactly. Sometimes you just you're not looking for a solution. And sometimes that's like, hard for the other person to because they're like, I want to help you, but that person really is just kind of Looking to vent and share this and kind of get it off? And, and maybe like, a good way to approach that if you're that person hearing the person vent, is ask them as like, hey, are there things I could help with? Yes. Are you know, are you looking for a solution actually truly understand instead of just like, Alright, I got this perfect solution for you. This is how you're gonna fix all your problems. No, I wasn't looking for that. So that could make a bad one on one. I think

Stacy London
that's a really mature manager thing to characteristic would be to say, Are you looking for me to help you with a solution? Or you just want to like,

Ryan Burgess
it's a simple question. Yeah. So the thing was kind of could get out a example of bad one on ones. I've had this happen, not at Netflix. So it's not at my manager now. But I've had managers in the past that would constantly cancel or move them my one on one. Yes. And that was actually really frustrating because it was like, Oh, I just felt like not important. And not that's something I've strived for my entire time is like I have moved one on ones. They are Easier to reschedule than a large meeting. But if they don't get like completely canceled or just like, moved out for a month or something like that, that to me is just really bad and or like,

Stacy London
forget, you know, forgetting to schedule an important one on one at all, like that kind of stuff is bad, right? Like, not just not me not even moving on, but not even having on scheduling like that kind of stuff. Right? Like, it makes you feel like you're not important.

Ryan Burgess
And would you feel comfortable like calling you're reporting to me, and I was like moving it? Would you say anything?

Stacy London
I mean, if it was like a repeated thing? Yeah, I think once in a while. Yeah, no big deal. But like, yeah, if it was like, constantly happening, or like,

Mars Jullian
I think that really speaks of the dynamic too, especially if like, that's the only FaceTime you have with your manager or like you at all, even outside of your one on one and then it keeps getting rescheduled. I just can't I can't even imagine being able to give someone that feedback right in the first place

Ryan Burgess
because you almost already feel like the power dynamic has really kicked in. At that point, so I'm not even important, right? You don't have a relation

Mars Jullian
and you don't have a relationship with them at all, because that's your relationship building time and it keeps getting moved around. Right.

Augustus Yuan
I'm pretty fortunate because I haven't experienced this I twitch so far. But yeah, I also hate it when the managers or someone, you know, this could be on on the on either side of the party, but when they're late, and which is, you know, acceptable, but then they don't really make the extra time to kind of, it's basically just a last dedicated time, especially if the one on one is characterized as this is your time and then all of a sudden, they're they're late and

Ryan Burgess
then they don't make more time for it. It's, I'm guilty for being late Augustus always

Augustus Yuan
a couple. I've seen managers handle this, or Well, people who do one on ones well, where they say, Hey, you know, I'm running a little late, we can reschedule to your time or you know, they'll come to the one on ones like if you want more time, Let's reschedule it, Let's reschedule or you know, if you feel

Ryan Burgess
communicate Absolutely, I think it's being really open and like making the time.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah. Because at least then you feel they cherish your time they value your time. You know, they're thinking of you. Where are they like, sorry, I'm Wait, I actually have another meeting after this. But anything you want to talk about is like, clearly gonna go somewhere.

Mars Jullian
Yeah, they're really like communicating that they, I mean, like, we've all said it that they value you and they respect to you, as opposed to have just another thing on the checklist. And we're with you in two weeks, right, which comes through in the meeting, too, even if they don't have the time. But when sort of like all those things are coming together, and you're like, Okay, well, I'm just another cog in the machine to

Ryan Burgess
harder to build the relationship and trust at that point. Yeah.

Mars Jullian
I think that's hard too, because I can't imagine that if you have you're carrying around those feelings and you're carrying around that dynamic that you're going to really listen to anything that the person you're having a one on one with has to say. I can't imagine that makes for an effective team all around. If it's your manager, primarily that you're doing that that you're sort of listening to them and aligning with them. And carrying through team goals that aren't just your own. Mm hmm.

Ryan Burgess
And that could really have a rippling effect if that manager does it with there's maybe 10 people on the team and they're doing that with that 10 people so now everyone on the team feels like that could be very unhealthy. And like one thing

Stacy London
I think is not necessarily like, indicative of, like, a bad one on one, but it if, let's say a manager has like, way too many people reporting to them, and they, like get into the one on one with you and they like bring up something on their computer like okay, so last time we talked about Click, click, click, click, like not remembering the last conversation they had with you. I can't fault them because that's you have so many people reporting to you and like that's good that they have notes and they're referring to them, but it feels very, like, Oh, you don't remember what we talked about at all. Like, it feels strange. It's kind of like I guess like when you're the same thing about like, being The Interview with someone and you're just typing away and not looking them in the eye and like it's something about that interaction that the one on one is one of those situations similar to the interview where it's there shouldn't be a computer.

Mars Jullian
Yeah, it sounds hard. I want to empathize with managers, yes or no one on ones because there's like a sound like from what we're saying that there's a lot that you need to be thoughtful of in terms of like how you treat that relationship. And that can be a lot of work. For some people. I think it can be emotionally overwhelming. Like I think like a therapy session, like you're constantly

Stacy London
taking on the emotions of like every person on your team in some way.

Mars Jullian
We were talking earlier about like dreading some of the one on ones and I think one that is kind of scary and can also depending on the skip level person be really bad as a skip level one on one, which is when you are not meeting with your manager, but potentially your managers manager or someone sort of even further higher up the chain depending on your hierarchy. And that can be really scary because it's unclear what the expectations are. how that's going to affect your career, how that's going to affect your work. What are they expecting from you? And obviously, there's always kind of like, I'm sure we all have the, the need, or the want to impress someone who's like higher up as well, I mean, including our manager, but, you know, sort of proportional to the number of levels away from you. And that can be really scary. It's just sort of like, what is this time used for? And there's anxiety around it too, because you feel like,

Stacy London
oh, like, my manager has meetings all day, they're really busy. Oh, they must, you know, my managers manager must be very busy and like, their time is really important. And so you get this anxiety about like, I don't want to waste their time, I want to have this be a good productive conversation, and it's a little bit more. I don't know why it feels like more fresh. Makes sense.

Ryan Burgess
And honestly, if we go back to the trust aspect, you're not meeting with this person, probably as much, right? Like, I think that's already that could absolutely play into it. I get naturally feeling like, Oh, this person's busy and I don't want to waste their time but like they need time, right. Like that's time set aside for a reason. I don't think if they didn't have time for it, they didn't thing is important, they probably just wouldn't have it at all. But I think of ways that could be better is if you're meeting with them is coming prepared, what can you get from them? I think if you're talking to someone who's higher up in the company, what are some of the visions? Like, what are some of the things that I should be thinking about? And so I think there are ways that you can, like, get some value out of it. And probably tomorrow's point, you can impress them pretty well, too, is like if you're thinking strategic, or like trying to, like ask the right questions and get something really valuable out of that, then it's like they walk away. Well, that was that was a useful meaning to that's so interesting,

Augustus Yuan
because I don't have

Mars Jullian
Yeah, I think that I haven't had one where I am now but previously, that's like skip levels were actually pretty common.

Ryan Burgess
I think they are important too, is like, like I said, if there was like unhealthy meeting with your manager, like, I've encouraged my team is like, if you have a problem with me, I mean, please tell me fix it and work on it. But if I'm not hearing it, if I'm not hearing the feedback and doing something about it, yeah, go to my manager. Or go to HR because like that sucks to have a manager that you're like, I don't want to be around this person. So I think skip levels should happen is like they should be also checking on their direct reports being like the managers too, they should get feedback and hear that from the team. One thing

Stacy London
that skip levels are good for, I found is that they're enough they're abstracted enough away from maybe the work that you're doing that they're a good person to check in with to be like, what are you hearing about the work that we're doing? Or what do you like, what's your perception of how this project is going? Because they're, they're not super far away, but they're enough where they might give you more insight if like, maybe the product is going great, but they're they don't think so. And like figure out why, like, that's really helpful.

Ryan Burgess
I like that. Like, what's the perception of this and like, what have you heard even that? Yeah.

Mars Jullian
I like that a lot.

Ryan Burgess
Try that in my next one. Yeah. That's a good segue into like, even before into picks, is what's one piece of advice that you could all give someone? Maybe it is a skip level or maybe it is just going into the next one on one with a peer or manager like what's something, a piece single piece of advice that someone could take away?

Mars Jullian
Cheers. Yes, I think

Stacy London
Mars maybe we're the first one to mention it at the beginning of the episode was that one on ones aren't necessarily just with managers. And so my piece of advice would be if you're a more senior person on the team, maybe set up little one on ones with people that are either more junior or, or if you see someone that like maybe you see them struggling or you know that you might have good advice for them. Or maybe they have advice for you. Also.

Ryan Burgess
Cheers all around

Stacy London
setup a like a one on one with that with that person, appear one on one, those can be super, super helpful and help build trust in the team through we actually,

Mars Jullian
to that point, have a cool system on our team. hauled. It's like our team coffee club. And it's like literally a random slack bot that pairs you with someone once a week to get to know people to just like go to go have like a one on one coffee with someone I kind of like that. It's sort of like outward and it's sort of like not someone you would think to associate with otherwise, but yeah, we have that actually for lunches.

Ryan Burgess
That's that is I haven't done it. But yeah, you can just be like, I have time and then it will like finds it will match you up with someone.

Mars Jullian
Yeah, I think I like I like that. That's that's always hard to remember coming into a company sort of like making the one on ones in the time with people who are not your manager.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, and those I even like the one that you said, you might get paired up with someone you've never worked with, but you'll learn something more in the business and like, you know, some other aspect that you just don't necessarily need to know but you might connect the dots and like learn something that's really valuable.

Augustus Yuan
Like, yeah, for me, something that's really helped me especially when I was new to like working. I literally didn't know and feel too early to like always talk about career because honestly, I didn't even know what I wanted to do. To move forward is really just being upfront and saying, you know, hey, I would like to make this one on one useful. I like I found that certain manage, every everyone is different. And so how they want to use the time and what is best for their time is is different. And so sometimes it just helps to be like, what would be the best way to use these one on ones with you? Because sometimes you get different answers and you know, you can focus on different things. Yeah, that's great.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I think even in that vein, it's also like important for you to talk through what year like what are your goals out of it, too. I think my one piece of advice is ask your especially if it's with your manager, constantly ask them for feedback. How could I be doing better, just like making sure to check in on that I think is a good valuable way. You may not always get constructive feedback, maybe it even just, they'll give you positive feedback. I like continue doing these things. But it's really good to know that and you can get ahead of things If you are worried about like a bad performance review or something like that, you're kind of going to know where you always stand with your manager. So I think asking that on a regular cadence can be very valuable. All right, so let's get into this episode's pics. In each episode, we love to share pics of things that we found interesting. Let's go around the table and share pics. Augustus. What do you got? Sure.

Augustus Yuan
I have two picks. One is this GitHub repository called play right? It's made by Microsoft. So a little context on this is Have any of you heard of puppeteer? Yes, yeah. So puppeteer is this for people who haven't heard of it is this automation framework where you can run automation integration tests on chromium. This is actually made by the people who used to be at Google and were on the puppeteer team. I guess they're part of Microsoft, and they made a play right, which is kind of the same thing, but it supports every browser So they've made an API where you can do Firefox, you can do Safari. And it's a pretty intuitive API. And I just thought it was like really cool. So probably something worth check out. Oh, really? Yeah, I was just like, Ooh, this looked interesting. So I haven't tried it yet. So pretty excited. And then my second pick is this article called eight AWS in plain English, so twitches now and Amazon company. So these a lot of AWS and we hear people say, easy to, you know, terraform and all this stuff, and I like made like index cards to like, freaking memorize all these acronyms. And then I found this website called AWS in plain English and they literally have what what it is what it should have been called. And you use it for x thing, and then they give you some thing to compare it to. So for example, there was one Yes, so RDS should have been called Amazon SQL and use this data and use this to be my sequel to RDS is a stands for relational database service. My flashcards are working very well and they say it's like her Heroku Postgres or something. So I thought it was a really good article. If you use AWS I

Ryan Burgess
also think that's great advice that you like, just made flashcards, because

Augustus Yuan
I think that's I mean, especially with technical terms or acronyms, oh my god, the acronyms for the longest time SLA stand. So there's apparently there's two meanings for this. There's an SLA service level agreement, which is something where, which is where you know, tickets, certain priority after a certain amount of days, you need to like address it. So you define some like maybe 30 days you'll address this ticket. Apparently, there's also another one service latency acceptance, which is how we describe the latency for certain microservices. So you might say Hey, what's the SLA for this service? And they'll tell you Oh, like the P 99 is x, x, whatever. So people would always just like toss around this. Oh, you know, what's the SLA for this service and be like, Yeah, probably like 30 days. You know? Yeah, you know, we'll we'll get to it. You know, we'll

Ryan Burgess
come up with a new

Stacy London
burn doing storytime about acronyms. My favorite one was POS. When I worked at Kohl's that's point of sale. Yeah, but like, that's not what it maps to in my head.

Ryan Burgess
Alright, Mars, what do you have?

Mars Jullian
One of them is more along the front end spectrum. There's someone at work. Send me this talk from react con about style x, which is Facebook's new CSS and JS framework, which is not open source yet but seems super, super interesting in terms of like having statically analyzable like CSS in JavaScript and all of that stuff, and actually, they make a really interesting point in there about accessibility about why you should program your styles using REM versus pixels, and how it dynamically like, does all the math for zoom levels and browsers and stuff anyways, it was fascinating. It's really, really short. It's only about like 14 minutes. So if you've got some time, I would recommend it. And then the second one's more fun. And it's called Spotify his pet playlist, because he didn't know you could have a playlist based on music you love that's also not gonna drive your pet crazy when you work from home. So try a little skeptical of the concept, but I was reading in their FAQ just now because I was more curious about how they put it together. And actually, it was made with like a musicologist who has composed two albums of music for cats.

Ryan Burgess
So they're, they're an expert in this field

Mars Jullian
experts in this field. He's like a master cellist. But yeah, so it's supposed to it's supposed to have music that you love also catered to your various animals personalities, that does ask you about you. animals and their various energy levels. So

Ryan Burgess
I may have to

Mars Jullian
try this. It's pretty I thought it was entertaining and the animations and illustrations are quite cute. So

Ryan Burgess
love it very cool Stacy. She kind of stole your music pic.

Mars Jullian
I know I can't

Stacy London
see I have two picks. The first one is, I rarely have pics. I usually do music ones, but I was like, Oh, this is a good one for one on ones. It's a an article by Laura Hogan, called manager handoffs. And it's a, it's about it's called one on one on one. And so you're transitioning managers. And you basically set up a time with your new manager and your old manager and you and it's to go over like all the things like maybe your last performance review, how are things going but you do it to build that sort of bridge and transition so stuff isn't get lost, like it is hard to switch managers and especially if it's like maybe in the middle of performance here. Like what if the new manager loses all the context to the stuff that you worked on and if you don't tell them that Like maybe they don't have it. It's just like this nice thing to do to kind of make sure there's consistency.

Ryan Burgess
I believe I've read that article.

Stacy London
Yeah, it's I mean, she's great too. Yeah, it's from 2017. It's not like super new but

Ryan Burgess
the concept I mean, that happens regularly. And then

Stacy London
the second pick is a music. It's the song is called Illusion of Time by Daniel Avery and Alessandro cortini. Kind of minimalist. You might recognize Alessandro from his work with Nine Inch Nails, but the song sounds nothing like an original song. It's it's very chill.

Ryan Burgess
Alright, I have two picks, which actually have not not related to the topic at all. One is a I don't know if it's on Android, but I have it on my iOS device. It's for photographers. It's called sky candy. And it's an app rates the sunrise and sunset like it tries to predict them, which is awesome. There's an actual I found the the API that's out there as well. So there is an API that pulls in the different weather and conditions to try and predict how good of a sunrise or sunset it's going to be. I find it really useful because there's been many times I've woken up super early to take some photos, and the sunrise is terrible. So this is really, really helpful. My second pick is every year, I don't know I've done this for a few years now. I always find it very hard to keep track of all the great conferences out there. I have a list for 2020 on my get hub. So it's 2020 conference. Definitely, there's already a lot of conferences on the list. And I'm sure I'm missing a ton, but yeah, people have even been adding to it, which is great. It helps me keep track of them all. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. For in episode let's all go around. And where can people get in touch with you?

Augustus Yuan
Yes, you can get in touch with me at Twitter @augburto.

Mars Jullian
I actually am not really on Twitter so you can find me on Instagram @marsjosephine.

Stacy London
I'm @StacyLondoner on Twitter,

Ryan Burgess
and I'm at @Burgessdryan on Twitter. Thank you all for listening today's episode you can follow front end happy hour on Twitter, front end HGH and you can find a set front end happier calm. I think we actually have an Instagram too at front end hh as well. Any last words the quiet one on one