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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 e

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.

skeeter2020 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - idiotsecant 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      Surely your boss notices your non-attendance.
      - delecti 7mo ago
        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 7mo ago
        Starting to wonder if some people who complain about all day meetings just don’t realize they are optional.
      - idiotsecant 7mo ago
        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.
  - mock-possum 7mo ago
    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
cobolcomesback 7mo ago
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.
- 8note 7mo ago
  > 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 7mo ago
    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.
- BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - ragall 7mo ago
    Exactly. It's just West coast passive aggressive managerial behavior.
  - 7mo ago
s3p 7mo ago
>>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.
djb_hackernews 7mo ago
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.
- javcasas 7mo ago
  With tens of thousands in a meeting, cracking a 30-second stupid joke is probably costing several thousand dollars.
  - tibbar 7mo ago
    i think closer to tens-of-thousands-of-dollars, by my napkin math!
  - RealityVoid 7mo ago
    Worth it!
  - swader999 7mo ago
    It's worth 10x that because they are all AI powered super devs now /sarc
  - hyperpape 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      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.
the_arun 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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.

skeeter2020 7mo ago

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 7mo ago
> 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.
- idiotsecant 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    Surely your boss notices your non-attendance.
    - delecti 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
        Starting to wonder if some people who complain about all day meetings just don’t realize they are optional.
    - idiotsecant 7mo ago
      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.
- mock-possum 7mo ago
  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

cobolcomesback 7mo ago

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.

8note 7mo ago
> 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 7mo ago
  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.
BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
> 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.
- ragall 7mo ago
  Exactly. It's just West coast passive aggressive managerial behavior.
- 7mo ago

s3p 7mo ago

>>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.

djb_hackernews 7mo ago

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.

javcasas 7mo ago
With tens of thousands in a meeting, cracking a 30-second stupid joke is probably costing several thousand dollars.
- tibbar 7mo ago
  i think closer to tens-of-thousands-of-dollars, by my napkin math!
- RealityVoid 7mo ago
  Worth it!
- swader999 7mo ago
  It's worth 10x that because they are all AI powered super devs now /sarc
- hyperpape 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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.

the_arun 7mo ago

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 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  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.