[cobolcomesback]

This “mandatory meeting” is just the usual weekly company-wide meeting where recent operational issues are discussed. There was a big operational issue last week, so of course this week will have more attendance and discussion.

This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

[davidclark]

The article claims:

>He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional.

Is that false? It also discusses a new policy:

>Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added.

Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.

[djb_hackernews]

When an SVP asks you to do something in a mass email, it's very much optional. Dave Treadwell is an SVP, his org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people.

My SVP asks me to do things all the time, indirectly. I do probably 5% of them.

[MikeTheGreat]

> org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people.

Ok, this is pretty off-topic, but is this still true? I get that you can't have 10K people all actively participate in the meeting at the same time, but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands?

Doesn't X/Twitter have a feature like this? (Although, to be fair, the last time I heard about that it was part of a headline like "DeSantis announcement of Presidential run on X/Twitter delayed for hours as X/Twitter's tech stack collapses under 200K viewers")

But still - nowadays it seems like it should be possible to have 10K employees all tune in at the same time and then call it a meeting, yes?

[hibikir]

Yes, but at that point it's an all-hands presentation, and you are basically doing a very careful presentation, thinking about every minute, because of how many hours the "meeting" is costing you.

Very different from the typical weekly/montly outage meeting, where discussion is actually expected, instead of being a ritual.

[helsinkiandrew]

> but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands?

They have webinar/event support for 5000+ participants, viewers can raise hands/use chat feedback for questions etc. and the meeting host can invite people to be visible.

[wackycat]

> but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast

they're probably using Chime haha, which as of my last use was lackluster

[benmathes]

that many people likely live in different timezones, or have conflicting meetings, etc. etc.

[sheept]

The meeting isn't the hard part—after all, shareholder meetings have huge audiences too. Enforcing mandatory attendance for myriads of employees is the hard part, so it's more likely mandatory in name only.

[javcasas]

With tens of thousands in a meeting, cracking a 30-second stupid joke is probably costing several thousand dollars.

[hyperpape]

Right, but if you say something essential in a meeting with 10 people and it has to percolate through five levels of management to reach the front-lines and gets watered down, that could be much more lost, even millions.

Scale cuts both ways.

What matters isn't how big the meeting is, it's how important the material is, and how well presented it is.

[wolvoleo]

I don't think I've ever heard a top leader say anything essential in such a meeting. The stuff they work on is not related to my job at all. It's all gartner level strategy stuff. In our company they do take time talking about it in large calls but it's always boring and never relevant. And a lot of political spin you have to poke through to see the real message.

If I ever attend it just put it on mute and look at the slides while I do some real work. That way my attendance gets registered and it doesn't stress me out later with too much stuff left hanging.

That percolation is also translation of what they say to things that are relevant at my level. Like what we will be working on next year, if there's going to be bonus or job losses.

I couldn't give a crap about the company's strategy as a whole and that's not my job anyway. Why should I. I'm not here because I believe in some holy mission. I just wanna do something I like and get paid.

[hyperpape]

Most of those meetings are pretty damn fluffy. No one goes back to their desk and does anything different because they've introduced new company values and the acronym is S.M.I.L.E.

But this meeting is a course correction for how they're using AI, which is a huge initiative. He'll be trying to sell the right balance of "keep using the technology, but don't fuck anything up."

Too cautious, everyone freezes and there's a slowdown[0]. Too soft, everyone thinks it's "another empty warning not to fuck up" and they go right back to fucking everything up because the real message was "don't you dare slow down." After the talk, people will have conversations about "what did they really mean?"

[0] If you hate AI, feel free to flip the direction of the effect.

[swader999]

It's worth 10x that because they are all AI powered super devs now /sarc

[tmoertel]

Unless that 30-second stupid joke is what gets the audience to take your request seriously. Sometimes people will help you when you don't come across like a self-interested corporate tool.

[encom]

I have never in my long life heard a joke from upper management during a meeting/presentation that wasn't awkward and cringe. Just get to the point - tell us how many people are getting fired, so the people who aren't fired can get back to work, and you go back to running this company into the ground.

Sorry, I got flashbacks...

[FuckButtons]

If you assume everyone is making 100k it only takes 20 people in a meeting for it to cost 1k.

[airstrike]

Wasn't it Shopify who had a system for tracking how much each meeting cost based on attendees? I may be misremembering the company though

[LPisGood]

I was thinking about this in recent weeks and I think I’ve actually changed my mind on it.

It’s not really possible to measure how much it would cost to not have a meeting, and I think it’s pretty obvious that if there were no meetings ever, it would hurt a company a lot

[tibbar]

i think closer to tens-of-thousands-of-dollars, by my napkin math!

[RealityVoid]

Worth it!

[ljm]

Is that because you delegate or descope?

Why is an SVP doing this if it's just gonna be ignored?

[hnguyen1412]

are you saying SVP’s words are not important and should be ignored? This is not what I remember back in the day when Bezos sent his email with a question mark (or maybe !)

[happymellon]

> are you saying SVP’s words are not important and should be ignored?

Personally I would say that an SVPs words are not important and don't need to be ignored.

It's like a politician talking about abstract policies. Yes they do sort of affect me, but they don't require any affirmative action on my behalf any more than the wind does.

[messh]

so.... is RTO optional

[skeeter2020]

That's not really what the headline attempts to communicate though. It specifically emphasizes "Mandatory" and "AI breaking things". Nobody was going to click on "Regularly scheduled Amazon staff meeting will include discussion on operational improvement"

[ceejayoz]

> He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional.

If I get a note from my boss like that, I consider it mandatory.

[mock-possum]

Yeah I don’t understand why people are pretending not to understand this -

> He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional.

Clearly means that while normally the meeting would be optional, this time it’s not

[idiotsecant]

But it gets less mandatory the more layers up you go. If I get an email from an SVP that is CC: the entire division saying everyone should go to a meeting I will almost certainly be able to ascertain the contents of that meeting in 10 seconds from someone else who did attend

[brewdad]

Surely your boss notices your non-attendance.

[delecti]

If it's actually really mandatory, my manager will probably also relay that directly to me. And that resets the count for "less mandatory the more layers up you go".

[idiotsecant]

The bosses function is to shield you from random time wasting junk. Either you haven't had to survive in a borg corporate environment or you have and you had a bad boss for it.

[the_arun]

Days are not far, where my agents are going to attend meetings & share my opinions, collect summary for me. If everyone do same - agents run meetings & share summary with parent (humans). Each of us have LLMs/Agents with our contextual data. It is another level of multi tasking.

[xp84]

Then I spin up another agent to listen to the agent who went to the meeting and make any necessary adjustments to the output of my coding agents based on the new rules it heard about from the meeting agent.

[Shocka1]

My agent will just be full AGI. It’ll invent time travel and go back to attend all my meetings 100x faster.

Meanwhile the normie “Claw/OpenBot” agents can stay in the present grinding 24/7, while mine recursively spawns across alternate timelines and handles my work at ~1e9x parallelism.

[s3p]

>>He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. >Is that false?

Judging from the comment above, no, the meeting happens every week, and this week they were asked to attend.

[cobolcomesback]

It’s not false. But it’s also weaselly worded.

Note that the article doesn’t say that he told staff they have to attend the meeting. It says he “asked” staff to attend the meeting. Which again, it’s really really normal for there to be an encouragement of “hey, since we just had an operational event, it would be good to prioritize attending this meeting where we discuss how to avoid operational events”.

As for the second quote: senior engineers have always been required to sign off on changes from junior engineers. There’s nothing new there. And there is nothing specific to AI that was announced.

This entire meeting and message is basically just saying “hey we’ve been getting a little sloppy at following our operational best practices, this is a reminder to be less sloppy”. It’s a massive nothingburger.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> It says he “asked” staff to attend the meeting

Being "asked" by your boss to attend an optional meeting is pretty close to being required, it's just got a little anti-friction coating on it.

[cobolcomesback]

That really isn’t the culture at Amazon. There are all-team meetings that happen all the time, and every now and then there is a reminder that “hey we’re gonna be talking about an interesting topic so you might want to join”, but it is certainly not a mandate or expectation that everyone will join.

Different companies have different cultures. Weird that people can’t grok this.

[ryandrake]

"If you could just go ahead and attend that meeting, that would be greaaaaaaat..."

"Did ya get the memo... about that meeting? I'll just have my secretary forward you another copy of that memo, OK? Yeaaaaaaah..."

[ragall]

Exactly. It's just West coast passive aggressive managerial behavior.

[i_cannot_hack]

Your characterization of the event as a simple reminder to follow established best practices is directly contradicted by the briefing note of the meeting, which specifically mentions a lack of best practices related to AI. Which makes me skeptical of your assessment of the situation in general.

> Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.

[8note]

> senior engineers have always been required to sign off on changes from junior engineers.

definitely a team by team question. if it was required it would be a crux rule that the code review isnt approved without an l6 approver.

[BikiniPrince]

It’s part of the change management process that all code is reviewed. This is needed as per several different compliance agreements. What’s probably happened is poor peer reviews from other junior engineers gets missed. That’s a lot of code reviews to send upstream.

[CoolGuySteve]

It didn't seem to make the news but at least in NYC the entire Amazon storefront was broken all afternoon on Friday.

Items weren't displaying prices and it was impossible to add anything to your cart. It lasted from about 2pm to 5pm.

It's especially strange because if a computer glitch brought down a large retail competitor like Walmart I probably would have seen something even though their sales volume is lower.

[kotaKat]

A little birdie told me someone pushed duplicate data into one of Amazon’s core noSQL systems that runs most of e-commerce. The front end of the site broke in weird ways but it certainly wasn’t taking orders.

[m3047]

Sometimes you squeeze clay and it comes out the oddest places. There were other stressors last week.https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-cloud-services-disrupted-i...

[malfist]

Over the weekend I was trying to return a pair of shoes and get a different size and I kept getting 500s trying to go to the store page for the shoes.

[chatmasta]

Funny, I was automatically refunded for a pair of shoes that Amazon thought I never received even though I’m wearing them right now. I couldn’t even find a way to dispute the refund so I just took the win…

[BikiniPrince]

That explains why it kept changing the estimated received date. It was doing weird things.

[belval]

I am not in that specific meeting but it made me chuckle that a weekly ops meeting will somehow get media attention. It's been an Amazon thing forever. Wait until the public learns about CoEs!

[cmiles74]

A weekly ops meeting where they talk about ensuring PRs with AI contributions get extra scrutiny? I think that's significant news.

[osigurdson]

Exactly. This is real world pushback on the "software is solved" narrative from AI labs. Also, most orgs try to copy Amazon for some reason more than big tech firms. "At our org, we disagree and commit" - yeah you made that one up yourself. Anyway, this is going to have a lot of impact in my view.

[cobolcomesback]

There was nothing mentioned in the meeting or messaging about PRs with AI contributions. There are no extra requirements for review or scrutiny of AI-generated-code. The media reports about this have been excessively misleading about this.

[falsemyrmidon]

It's not extra scrutiny. Doing code reviews for every commit is a standard practice at Amazon and has been for a decade plus.

[8note]

id.expect COEs to be coming up with AI code action items though, not to have more thorough human checks

[coredog64]

There's an explicit tension: SWEs would love that as a "get out of jail free" card, but their management chain is being evaluated by ajassy on AI/ML adoption. Admitting AI code as the root cause of a CoE is gonna look really bad unless/until your peers are also copping to it.

[8note]

I think its a question 2 or 3 in a why chain, but 4 and 5 need to be why the agent screwed up, and there needs to be action items that are around giving the ai better guardrails, context, or tooling.

"get a person to look at it" is a cop-out action item, and best intentions only. nothing that you could actually apply to make development better across the whole company

[otterley]

> Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

That's been their job ever since cable news was invented.

[ses1984]

It’s been a bit longer than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

It probably goes back as long as they have been shouting news in the town square in Rome or before that even.

[lukan]

Word around the campfire is, telling stories and exaggerating them to get people attention, is as old as humanity.

But good journalism is still something else.

[otterley]

True enough!

[groundzeros2015]

It’s always sobering to see a news story about something you have insider perspective on.

[embedding-shape]

> This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

Are you completely missing the point of the submission? It's not about "Amazon has a mandatory weekly meeting" but about the contents of that specific meeting, about AI-assisted tooling leading to "trends of incidents", having a "large blast radius" and "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established".

No one cares how often the meeting in general is held, or if it's mandatory or not.

[skeeter2020]

>> Are you completely missing the point of the submission

no, and that's what people are noting: the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal. When did you last see the HN post about Amazon's mandatory meeting to discuss a human-caused outage, or a post mortem? It's not because they don't happen...

[ummonk]

Amazon has had a really bad string of various outages recently. Assuming they're internally treating this as business as usual in post-mortems then perhaps the newsworthy thing is actually that they aren't taking their outages seriously enough.

[thepasch]

> the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal

I do not understand how “company that runs half the internet has had major recent outages and now explicitly names lax/non-existent LLM usage guidelines as a major reason” can possibly not be a big deal in the midst of an industry-wide hype wave over how the world’s biggest companies now run agent teams shipping 150 pull requests an hour.

The chain of events is “AWS has been having a pretty awful time as far as outages go”, and now “result of an operational meeting is that the company will cut down on the use of autonomous AI.” You don’t need CoT-level reasoning to come to the natural conclusion here.

If we could, as a species, collectively, stop measuring the relevance of a piece of news proportionally by how much we like hearing it, please?

[mattgreenrocks]

The defensiveness is almost as interesting as the meeting itself.

[emp17344]

Way too many people have tied their egos to the success of AI.

[cobolcomesback]

And too many people have their egos tied to its failure, too.

Im a massive AI skeptic. If anyone were to be jumping up and down on the corpse of AI and this incessant drive to use it everywhere, it’d be me. But I also work at Amazon. I got the email. I attended the meeting. I can personally attest that there are no new requirements for AI-generated code. The articles about this in the meeting at extremely misleading, if not outright wrong. But instead of believing the person that was actually there in the room, this thread is full of people dismissing my first-hand account of the situation because it doesn’t align with the “haha AI failed” viewpoint.

[autoexec]

Not just their egos, but their paychecks. This place is either going to get very quiet or really weird when the hype train derails and the AI bubble bursts.

[shermantanktop]

The subject of the media coverage is not AWS, it is a peer organization to AWS that runs using significant amounts of non-AWS infrastructure. They are both part of an umbrella called Amazon but are not at all the same thing.

Maybe your CoT-level reasoning isn’t so robust.

[saghm]

It's hard to that this objection seriously. The publication is literally called the Financial Times. It's not exactly crazy for them to think that their readers might care about the entity that shows up the stock ticker rather than how the company happens to divide up things internally.

Even if it weren't a finance publication, I have trouble imagining you making this argument if a headline said something like "Google deals with outages in the cloud" because of the idea that it's misleading to refer to it as anything other than GCP. I think you're fundamentally not understanding how people communicate about this sort of thing if you actually think that someone saying "Amazon" is misleading in any meaningful way.

[shermantanktop]

You’re describing reasonable misunderstandings, but they are still misunderstandings.

The cause and effect statements just don’t correspond to reality.

I guess I’m stuck on the idea that the actual facts are relevant. If the question instead is how the dance of optics and PR is going in the minds of people who don’t know enough to doubt what they read, I don’t know what to say about that.

[cobolcomesback]

The message and meeting being discussed here have nothing to do with AWS or any outages AWS has faced recently. I think you’re missing the point of the discussion.

I don’t blame you, because this is just bad reporting (and potentially intentionally malicious to make you think it’s about AWS). But the meeting and discussion was with the Amazon retail teams, talking about Amazon retail processes, and Amazon retail services. The teams and processes that handle this are entirely separate from any AWS outages you are thinking of.

The outages that Amazon retail has faced also have nothing to do with AI, and there was no “explicit call out” about AI causing anything.

[furyofantares]

This reply chain is confusing but I'm guessing got merged from another thread that had a different title?

Must have as the comments are hours older than OP.

[cmiles8]

The core message of the article is that Amazon has been having issues with AI slop causing operational reliability concerns, and that seems to be 100% accurate.

[coredog64]

/with AI slop//

[rahbert]

This is correct. We ran them on Wednesday’s in Alexa. Jessy actually used to come and sit in ours once a quarter or so when he was running AWS.

[age1mlclg6]

What has really happened is that those employees were made into "reverse centaurs":

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...

[Clent]

Who is the media you're accusing here? This is a twitter post. As far as I can tell they do not work a media company.

What is worth being pointed out is how quickly people blame "The Media" for how people use, consume and spread information on social networks.

[otterley]

The source is not a Twitter post, it's a Financial Times article (that the poster failed to cite).

[niwtsol]

I believe it is by group - AWS started the weekly operations meeting, effectively every service's oncall from the last week had to attend. Then it grew massive, so they made it optional. Alexa had a similar meeting that tried to replicate what AWS did. A lot of time spent reviewing load tests getting ready for holiday season, prime day, and the superbowl (super bowl ads used to cause crazy TPS spikes for Alexa). And a lot of finger pointing if there was an outage from one team. While it probably did help raise the operational bar, so much time wasted by engineers on busywork/paperwork documenting an error or fix vs improving the actual service.