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Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

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Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#441

Post by hirvi74 »

patrick451 wrote: post #440
hirvi74 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not want FAANG and FAANG does not want me. So, as a goblin, I must ask: how is your and your team's morale doing? People in FAANG likely worked hard to get in there or lucked out or some combination of both. I feel like my soul would be crushed if I hacked away at Leetcode for months on end just to babysit and gaslight some algorithm into asymptotically following my instructions.

I work in a FAANG. My sense is that most of my teammates are loving the AI. Personally, I hate the AI tools and the hype around them and what it has turned this job into. My own morale has never been lower in the 7 years I've been there and I'll probably try to switch careers or semi retire sooner or later.

I have also considered switching careers, but my employer is not really enthusiastic about AI, so I am trying to hold out for as long as I can. As in, my employer does not pay for nor use any AI at all.

I feel like the economic value of talent is about to be in an interesting position sometime in the not so distant future. Perhaps talented engineers use AI is a more talented manner, but I am not sure that is entirely true nor will it remain that way forever.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#442

Post by happymellon »

jimbokun wrote: post #346
isk517 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.

We need an Office Space 2 just about AI shenanigans.

The AI problems are still the same problems.

> We need to talk about your flair

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#443

Post by promano »

recursive wrote: post #296
promano wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a way of measuring velocity, but who cares about estimating stories when we could be spinning up more agents? Burn a bunch of tokens and those stories will be DONE before you could even find your planning poker cards!

I've lived through a bunch of initiatives about improving planning and estimation. None of them turned into a stable process that worked for anyone. I don't know if I can extrapolate from that, but it gives me an inclination that no one really trusts anything that comes out of task estimation. Which would be why we're looking for more objective metrics like token burn rate. No room for argument - tokens are tokens!

A token is approximately word generated by a LLM; a few dozen tokens gets you a line of code... so measuring token burn rate is the same as counting lines of code. All it took was a change of name, and we're back to the most primitive metric we ever got for measuring programmer productivity.

I don't think I can take anything from management in tech seriously again after tokenmaxxing.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#444

Post by pvtmert »

pvtmert wrote: post #425

> But a representative for Amazon said that there is no such company-wide metric for AI usage, nor are there internal leaderboards where employees are measured against each other. Rather, employees are able to view their own AI usage on personal dashboards. Such a bullshit. There is (was) Amazon Q (Now QuickSuite) leaderboard which is a Quick Sight dashboard. Moreover, each PhoneTool

...each PhoneTool profile contains relevant "awards" (titles) on people's profile. Things like "Blaze", "Thunderstorm", etc are awarded publicly. Any employee can also click to these awards, and see who else also been awarded the same thing. (Plus total number of people)

*) PhoneTool = Internal People Directory. Shows user-profiles of employees...

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#446

Post by jordanb »

parineum wrote: post #385
danaw wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

soviet-coded minus the cheap/free housing and public transit

And famine

Buckle up buttercup, a massive fertilizer shortage (from the Iran war) is currently combining with a super el nino (from climate change) to crush global crop yields this year.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#447

Post by dyauspitr »

recursive wrote: post #336
dyauspitr wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? You get story points for free with jira. That’s like the one metric every place uses.

Story points are unicorn dust that crumbles under any attempt of serious optimization. The fundamental problem is that SP is not an objectively defined metric. If we come under serious pressure to improve velocity measured by SP, there's nothing to stop that initiative from trickling down into the SP estimation/measurement. SP works fine as long as you don't look too closely at it.

Yeah everything is subjective unicorn dust but there are ways of making sure story points have some semblance of accuracy. Either ways it’s probably the best metric we have atleast for an established team.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#448

Post by NicoJuicy »

breppp wrote: post #338
NicoJuicy wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Belgians had nothing to do with that, nor the then governement The king had a side biz

Similar to the British in India, it was first controlled by some kind of company that benefitted the host country by extracting resources, and later on the host country took control. Belgium took control of Congo in 1908

It was literally the king that wanted it as personal venture. Belgium took over because he was very/too bad ( you're right that the governement was involved, I stand corrected).

Healthcare and infrastructure was then build too, but the relation was already scarred and well, it's not easy to reset everything.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#449

Post by ExoticPearTree »

crabbone wrote: post #211
swatcoder wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth reflecting on why it's so hard to convince hold outs to discover how AI might help them. The fundamental issue is that there really aren't many convincing demonstrations that hold outs can relate to and there remains basically no evidence of real value gained. Users attest to higher productivity and point to material but intermediate factors like token use, generated lines of code, pr counts, etc, but ther…

Here's one selling factor from the experience I'm experiencing right now: Others will use AI, and it will make your life miserable. You need to know enough about AI to be able to fight back. The experience: one employee, self-selected, assigned themselves to a task of configuring integration with MySQL HA deployment. They produced a mountain of code in a short month (we are talking about close to a hundred thousands…

It's the same old adage of "garbage in, garbage out". If the employee in question is clueless, good luck producing something useful or at least tailored for the job.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#450

Post by rtkwe »

andrekandre wrote: post #373
rtkwe wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two major types of documentation "why is this like this" documentation and then there's "here's the features of this library/tool" documentation. LLM stuff is fine for the latter as long as you screen it for hallucinations. Your right the former they can't really do because they don't have access to the reasoning but I've often found even the latter to be lacking in many teams.

> LLM stuff is fine for the latter as long as you screen it for hallucinations that is such a productivity black-hole tho; at that point i might as well have written it myself

IMO that's down to how you personally feel about the two sides of the process. For me the initial writing is super tedious and I've never gotten great at the voice of technical documentation but checking it for errors and correcting that is easy.
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