Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious.
Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is:
* Having excellent domain knowledge and judgement
* Having the respect of the team, to settle disputes
* Solving problems when needed
* Hiring and retaining an excellent team
* Picking the right things to work on
If a manager is doing these things well I don't need a standing meeting at all. Or we can meet quarterly to check in.
Email is a thing.
But the thing is this makes no sense. Tech issues always turn into people issues - when there is a disagreement, who adjudicates? How can a manager adjudicate something they don't understand. And how will engineers respect / follow the decision?
And people issues invariably become tech issues. How can you hire the right people if you don't understand the tech? How will you know when to fire?
This setup makes no sense to me and i have very rarely seen it work. It seems like it was a product of an earlier time when there was a lot of money floating around and provided a way to (a) shield senior eng from dealing with people problem they just didn't want to, and (b) provide cushy jobs to professional managers that didn't know much about the tech.
But it doesn't work. There's no way to do the shielding well and a person with hiring/firing power needs to know what the fuck is going on.
Really good eng leaders must be both good at tech and good at people. That's the job.
People management is about managing the company's resources to achieve goals. If you are not the one leading the implementation of those goals, you are not going to be able to:
* reason about what the right about of resources should be
* see opportunities for optimization
* forecast future need
I got to know him much better through these productive interactions then awkward smalltalk in a 1:1.
And it kind of make sense to meet privately quarterly since perf reviews are also quarterly and that's the only reason I can really think of for a private scheduled face-to-face.
Of course I could always just ask for a private meeting anytime I wanted, which I guess I did from time to time. But it always for a product reason: a tough tech choice I was wrestling with or similar.
Plus I think the regularity/cadence of it is supposed to provide some psychological safety. Asking for a one-off meeting feels like overkill for a normal 1:1, and yet a little intimidating for the type of 1:1 that you really need to have a 1:1 for (like discussing interpersonal issues).
* I suppose if everyone's fully remote, in theory the water-cooler talk moves to Slack.
It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.
If you can do it w/ the first model why on earth would you not?
Hell, Dunbar's Number is 150 people, and you expect to have 50 directs? That's literally 1/3 of your 150 being occupied by directs. It seems clearly infeasible the more you think about it.
Different roles though.