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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

#151

Post by kingleopold »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly trav…

because it's come to CFO's as "free debt" aka fiat printing. They need to spend thisfree fiat to keep buble going. I'm sure some inv. banking team internally assured too. $Trillion instuitions have access to free printer now, you and I don't. This is different world since unlimited printer started in 2020. All debt math is fake now because they can create fiat money out of nothing, literally.

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

#152

Post by [deleted] »

noworriesnate wrote: post #125
d_philla wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this one is legit the right call, though

But how would you compete when people inevitably started mandating superior editors such as emacs[1] or even notepad[2]? [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Notepad

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by binary0010 »

mrbungie wrote: post #47
MrCharismatist wrote: post #9

Like six months ago we got a presentation from an AWS guy on the AI tooling available and how it fit with our particular use cases. At one point seemingly out of nowhere he pointed out on his screen share "Look at how many tokens I've used this month. I run so much Opus." It was a number that was offensively large. I remember thinking "That's a really odd flex, this crap is so expensive the fact that you use so much…

I still don't know how to reconcile these reports with what other people say about GenAI-agentic assisted engineering being the only way of working nowadays, especially in startups. Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.

It's not required for startups. But if you are building trashy, brittle products and your main metric is speed to market, and have the expectation of high failure chances (e.g. most yc startup batches) - then yes you have to do agentic eng.

If you are making extremely specific, high quality products over a long time window and your founders are deeply experienced in that field of engineering, then no, you don't need agentic engineering and probably want very little llm code in general (outside of some boilerplate, internal toolings, etc).

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

#154

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

bravetraveler wrote: post #140

I'd do this if the other punch to follow didn't appear to be 'justify the expenditure' . Choosing to wait for the PIP instead, if $EMPLOYER goes this way. Tell me the work I'm not doing and how pieces of ~~flair~~, sorry, tokens might help. Or don't, I don't care.

Anecdotal, but appears to be common among other comments in the thread.

For companies doing this there is no 'justify the expenditure'. Employees are being praised for high expenditure, regardless of actual outcome.

Leadership see the problem as 'people resisting AI'. Embracing AI is seen as the solution, and token usage is seen as the measure of success.

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

#155

Post by monkaiju »

swader999 wrote: post #46

People need to start yelling, throwing things and publicly mocking execs that do this. What is wrong with you all? I do this (except the throwing) and I get nothing but respect. If you've been a good little soldier for years, done nothing but deliver and then you raise your ire people will listen. If you can't change your company, change your company!

Similar situation here! In fact our team has a no-LLM policy that I'm quite happy with. We did experiment with it, to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go, and we're still paying down some of the slop residue...

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

#156

Post by rdedev »

philipallstar wrote: post #70
Qem wrote: post #68

It's a shame AI now has a universal basic jobs[1] program, but humans still not. Companies are paying AI to dig holes, so other AI can fill them. [1] https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

We didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it. This isn't like that, as it isn't funded through taxes. This is private companies experimenting with their money, and risking downstream cost increases that may cause people to go elsewhere, as they do when they try anything new. This is much better than just funding people regardless of productivity through forced taxes. [0]…

Right now there are state govts bending over backwards to provide cheap energy for data centers. The difference is being paid by people who live nearby through increased electricity costs. This is a tax with just extra steps

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

#157

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

mjr00 wrote: post #24

I've heard similar stories from AWS and other non-AWS FAANG employees. All of the token leaderboards have a "this doesn't count toward your performance review" disclaimer, but there's an implied nudge nudge, wink wink after that statement. One person I've talked to has someone in their org who is running GasTown and chews through tokens 24/7. They don't contribute very much, but they're comfortably in the #1 spot.

I have heard from multiple people at smaller to medium sized orgs where token usage and AI adoption are a central part of performance reviews.

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

#159

Post by svachalek »

xp84 wrote: post #145
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly trav…

Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI. Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done. Just looking at the work output - ho…

All those numbers are equally gameable and terrible metrics for productivity. With any of those, as with AI spending, you've got to look at actual results qualitatively. There's no shortcut.

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

#160

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

avelis wrote: post #124

Goodharts Law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/goodharts-law/

But does Goodhearts law apply to things that were never a good measure to start with :)
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