My SVP asks me to do things all the time, indirectly. I do probably 5% of them.
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?
Very different from the typical weekly/montly outage meeting, where discussion is actually expected, instead of being a ritual.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, I got flashbacks...
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
"This could have been an e-mail" should never need to be said.
Why is an SVP doing this if it's just gonna be ignored?
If I get a note from my boss like that, I consider it mandatory.
Judging from the comment above, no, the meeting happens every week, and this week they were asked to attend.
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.
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.
Different companies have different cultures. Weird that people can’t grok this.
"Did ya get the memo... about that meeting? I'll just have my secretary forward you another copy of that memo, OK? Yeaaaaaaah..."
> Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.
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.