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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

#161

Post by com2kid »

dkarl wrote: post #121
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…

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make…

There is a limit somewhere, but I keep finding more and more ways to use AI.

Not just coding, but things like "here is my teams mandate, go through all my company's slack channels, linear tasks, notion pages, and recent merges in got, summarize any work other teams are doing that intersect with my team's work."

That'll burn a lot of tokens.

Set that up to run once or twice a week and give a report.

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

#162

Post by bravetraveler »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #154
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.

You're right; the justification is made by dancing. Meme moment... weird flex, but okay.

I'm also hesitant to 'go for the gold' because it only means more B2B monopoly money, juiced stats, or expectation. Or, God forbid, become the resident Token Expert. That praise you mention is exactly what I don't want!

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

#164

Post by autoexec »

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…

> It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane.

Some companies might just have been scammed by the marketing that told them that AI would make all their employees 10,000x more productive and save them billions and when that didn't happen the assumption was that it's because employees weren't using the magical AI as often as they should be.

Other companies, especially those working on their own AI products, might want employees to use AI as much as possible because they hope it will provide them with the training data they'll need to eventually replace most or all of those employees with the AI. Punishing workers who refuse to train their AI replacement might make sense to them because even though it's costly right now they expect the savings down the road to be much much greater.

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

#165

Post by swatcoder »

dkarl wrote: post #121
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…

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make…

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 there doesn't seem to be a convincing revolution in the quantity or quality of mature software being delivered.

Combine that puzzling impressions of outcomes with a sense, for many, that they don't feel like they have a personal problem that warrants a new tool, and you end up with a pretty earnest and defensible indifference.

To get hold out engineers using AI, the industry needs to be focused on demonstrating relatable workflow improvements and demonstrating practical improvements to finished work product. Instead, policies like token use incentives just rely on luring them into pulling the slot machine handle with the expectation that once they do, they'll join the cadre of other converts who justify their transition with subjective improvements and intermediate metrics.

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

#166

Post by malfist »

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…

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

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

#167

Post by elictronic »

dominotw wrote: post #54
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.

i call BS on this story

They polished the turd more than stating, but the bones are real.

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

#168

Post by malfist »

jmyeet wrote: post #112
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…

You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]? Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used. I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager. [1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.c…

In many many many cases it's not the manager choosing to do that. Its our brilliant job creator class demanding that he does

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

#169

Post by 01284a7e »

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…

I think a lot of these execs have equity in Anthropic... and the dumb ones that don't are just "keeping up with the Joneses" so to speak.

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

#170

Post by xp84 »

jmyeet wrote: post #112
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…

You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]? Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used. I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager. [1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.c…

LoC can occasionally give you signal. For instance, imagine you are joining a new team or company so you don't know how much oversight your predecessor did. If you ask an engineer how they spend most of their time and they say "Mostly just writing code" and you look at GitHub and it says they've made 3 minor commits in the past quarter, that person is lying and your predecessor was incompetent (quite possibly both of them have been MIA from their responsibilities for months).

No, I'm not talking about the engineer who can point to significant contributions outside of code: writing technical specs, leading architecture discussions, etc. I'm talking about the ones who just say they're just coding, but are actually not working at all.

TL;DR LoC and commit count etc can be used only to flag for review likely cases of quiet quitting.

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