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.

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BigTTYGothGF 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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cobolcomesback 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"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..."

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ragall 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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i_cannot_hack 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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”.

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8note 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.