[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.

[wolvoleo]

Well this is the main problem with AI right now isn't it? How to use it successfully without having it fuck up.

How are they expecting some juniors to do this when the industry as a whole doesn't know where to begin yet?

Like that Meta AI expert who wiped her whole mailbox with openclaw. These are the people who should come up with the answers.

Ps I mostly hate AI but I do see some potential. Right now it feels like we're entering a fireworks bunker looking for a pot of gold and having only a box of matches for illumination.

What we need to know from management is exactly what you mention. Do we go all out and accept that shit will hit the fan once in a while (the old move fast and break things) or do we micromanage and basically work manually like old. And that they accept the risk either way. That kind of strategy is really business leader kind of work. Blaming it on your techs when it inevitably goes wrong is not.

Because the tech as it is right now is very non-deterministic. One day it works magic and the next day it blows up.

And yes that SMILE thing was a good example. Been in too many of those time wasters.

[Throwaay19832]

Lol this reads like some transcript from the court of an ancient Roman Emperor.

[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

[airstrike]

Yeah, I agree it's a silly metric. But it's kinda also a good reminder that meetings do have a cost associated with them, so they should stay short, focused, and held only when necessary.

"This could have been an e-mail" should never need to be said.

[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".

[dpark]

Starting to wonder if some people who complain about all day meetings just don’t realize they are optional.

[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.