[deleted]
Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
131–140 of 268 posts
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#132It's the same as measuring productivity by lines of code written, same dumb logic by management, not surprising.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
One argument I have heard in favour of this is that management knew this would be a side effect, but that it's more important to have people engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible. You are effectively knowingly wasting money in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.
My questions for that approach are: Why treat AI as a special technology that needs enterprise-scale exploration to come up with a useful application? And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around? The top-down approach to encouraging (mandating?) AI usage strikes me as infantilizing to the workers, who are perfect…
A tool so good, the workers need to be forced to use it.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#134When did FT become Business Insider? I have an FT subscription and they keep moving toward this kind of narrative first reporting to get clicks. It’s no longer a believable paper.
Maybe we just need to subscribe to nikkei proper and ask them to make it pink and stop being peasants.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
One argument I have heard in favour of this is that management knew this would be a side effect, but that it's more important to have people engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible. You are effectively knowingly wasting money in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.
My questions for that approach are: Why treat AI as a special technology that needs enterprise-scale exploration to come up with a useful application? And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around? The top-down approach to encouraging (mandating?) AI usage strikes me as infantilizing to the workers, who are perfect…
Human nature?
In the early nineties, it was common for experienced electrical engineers to keep on using schematic entry digital design and look down on RTL and synthesis tools, despite that fact the latter was already way more productive. At some point, management had to put their foot down and force everyone to switch to using synthesis.
It's not unreasonable to assume that many people are set in their ways and unwilling to change their behavior without a bit of a push.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#136I work at Amazon (standard disclaimer: just sharing my own experience, not an official spokesperson, etc.) I can't say that this isn't happening, but at least the parts of the company I get visibility into, what the article describes isn't my experience. There is a lot of interest in using GenAI, but people are mostly getting kudos around creative uses for GenAI, not just for raw amount of tokens. For most scaled Gen…
I also work at Amazon and my coworkers are playing 20 questions every morning to keep their metrics up. Like anything else there it depends on your org & managers.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#137I swear the industry is being Garry Tanned. Senior management let go our localisation staff. Now they want us to use AI to translate. They still want manual review. We use Github Copilot at work, we get a measly 300 requests with the budget to go over if necessary. Opus 4.7 or GPT 5.5 would eat all of those up in a day. Are we supposed to be using more than the allotted amount, do management see that as a good thing.…
It's just not with AI though. It's who they get their advise from. One of my friend was cribbing to me about his company management - apparently someone in management discovered that PostgresDB is a real good database and free, and so they authorised the IT department to migrate their application from Oracle Cloud to PostgresDB as it will "save a lot of money" (true, but...). However, they aren't willing to shell out…
I had a similar experience but with MSSQL, was invited to join some meetings with MS Sales folks. I quickly learned the project was never meant to succeed, but was simply leverage to negotiate a better contract.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just not with AI though. It's who they get their advise from. One of my friend was cribbing to me about his company management - apparently someone in management discovered that PostgresDB is a real good database and free, and so they authorised the IT department to migrate their application from Oracle Cloud to PostgresDB as it will "save a lot of money" (true, but...). However, they aren't willing to shell out…
Wow... How (in)competent is his management??? "If Oracle can do it"... in 25 years with 1k devs...
47 years if you count from the first release. But now you have this super intelligent thing that enables anyone to create a billion dollar business - you have no excuse!
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#139Our AWS TAM has recently started to respond to us in AI-like responses. It's very obvious. Now it makes sense why.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#140The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.
One argument I have heard in favour of this is that management knew this would be a side effect, but that it's more important to have people engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible. You are effectively knowingly wasting money in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.
> engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible
"Research" isn't part of my job title. If you don't know what's possible then why are you deploying it? You should be telling _me_ what's possible. I mean, you _paid_ for it, how can you possibly not know what you were getting?
> in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.
"I'll take `what even are profits?' for $200, Alex."