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.
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.
With tens of thousands in a meeting, cracking a 30-second stupid joke is probably costing several thousand dollars.
Worth it!
i think closer to tens-of-thousands-of-dollars, by my napkin math!
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"
> 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.
>>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Exactly. It's just West coast passive aggressive managerial behavior.
> 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.
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”.