At many US tech companies, regular 1:1 meetings with your manager are part of the job. Right now, my manager and I meet for 30 minutes every week. A lot of people do not know what to talk about each week, so they turn the meeting into a status report. That squanders a valuable opportunity to get support and sponsorship from the person who influences your career the most.

Use the 1:1 for the awkward topics

I have read a lot about 1:1s, and the piece I recommend most is “The Art of the Awkward 1:1” by Mark Rabkin, a VP at my company (on Medium). His core argument: do not spend your precious 1:1 time on anything you could discuss in public, or with other coworkers in the room. Save it for the awkward stuff. Talk about your emotions, your feelings, your fears. Ask for honest feedback, and dig into the areas you are actively trying to improve. It is a short read, and I recommend reading the original and sitting with it.

How my 1:1s usually go

My 1:1s usually start with a quick catch-up on the week, at work or outside it. Last Friday, for example, our babysitter was sick and I needed a few hours off; my manager and I ended up talking about work-life balance and what the kids have been doing during COVID. In an earlier 1:1, we discovered we had both served in the military and swapped stories about it. Small talk like this has nothing to do with work on the surface, but it helps you understand each other and reveals my manager’s values in ways a status meeting never would.

Bring the bad experiences too

In past 1:1s, I have also told my manager about times when the unprofessional, rude way someone communicated on a project made me feel genuinely disrespected and angry. In situations like that, a manager’s job is usually not to take sides. It is to help you sort out what you are actually feeling, talk you back from the most extreme interpretation of it, and offer advice or help. At my company, engineering managers can step in and mediate people and project issues. But as I wrote in my post on performance reviews, engineers are also evaluated on the “People” dimension, which includes exactly this kind of project coordination and communication. Learning to handle these situations yourself is part of becoming a senior engineer who can be trusted to run things independently. The incident I described ended that way too: after talking through options with my manager, I went and resolved it myself.

Why senior engineers here can run things on their own

Engineers are reviewed on Impact, Engineering, Direction, and People. That is a lot, and getting promoted means building all of these skills over a long time. But these standards are also why senior engineers at big Silicon Valley companies can operate independently. A senior engineer at the E5 level at Google or Facebook who moves to a smaller company sometimes gets hired one or two levels higher, and senior engineers sometimes become directors, VPs, or CTOs at startups. The reverse is also true: engineers coming into FAANG from elsewhere sometimes get hired at a lower level than the one they held.

The mid-cycle check-in, every three months

On top of the weekly 1:1, because reviews happen every six months, we do a mid-cycle check-in every three months. It is not mandatory; it depends on the manager. If your manager does not schedule one, I recommend asking for a checkpoint halfway through the cycle anyway, just to confirm where you stand.

I just finished mine. I had recently switched teams, so this was my first cycle on the new team, and I used the check-in to get a sense of how I was ramping up and how my manager felt about my work so far. If there are areas I need to strengthen, I still have three months to work on them.

The one rule: your review should contain no surprises

Weekly 1:1s and mid-cycle check-ins are your time. Use them to get your manager’s guidance and advice. The guiding principle is simple: when your semiannual performance result arrives, none of it should surprise you. If you have been communicating with your manager every week, you already know where you stand and you have had the chance to get the help you needed.

How do 1:1s work at your company? What do you talk about in yours? Share in the comments.

Originally published on my former blog on October 4, 2020. That blog is now offline; the text is preserved via the Wayback Machine. Lightly edited for this site.