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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

#201

Post by runako »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #117
dominotw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i call BS on this story

If you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/

I can't find the reference right now, but I remember reading literature about studies done at large programming organizations (like IBM, government) who used LOCs as a performance metric. Programmers could earn more money by including more lines of code in their work. This went exactly the way you'd expect.

Edit: I think it may have been from Capers Jones's _Programming Productivity_[1]. Published in 1986, based on research covering the prior 30 years(!) or so. We have known that bad incentives specifically distort the performance of programming teams for a long time.

1 - https://archive.org/details/programmingprodu0000jone/page/n1...

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

#202

Post by xnx »

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…

Good time to be a sane company then. "Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake." and all.

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

#203

Post by Sharlin »

malfist wrote: post #166
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

Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.

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

#204

Post by cindyllm »

Henchman21 wrote: post #171
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…

> "You've used AI to do something that was a single command." As time passes and the layers of abstraction pile up, later generations won't understand the underlying layers of the abstraction. This is a huge weakness in our systems development -- and a huge potential attack surface for adversaries.

[dead]

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

#205

Post by thelopa »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #63

I work at a FAANG (not Amazon), and have heard this a lot, both internally and publicly. Except, never officially from anyone that mattered (leadership). It always starts with a rumor and/or someone (internal) creating a dashboard/metric, and blows up from there. I've even heard leaders proclaim that it's NOT what they're looking at, and that you better NOT be wasting those expensive tokens. Now, they might be; they'…

I recently left a FAANG. Shortly before I left (for unrelated reasons) the director of my org got scolded by the VP he reported to because token usage in his org was low. After that the ICs in my org were told to use ai for everything or there could be consequences for their careers.

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

#206

Post by mrbungie »

mikojan wrote: post #173
mrbungie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I learn a command that is both repeatable and useful, I prefer to either keep it in my mind or in my aliases. Thank you.

That's what Skills are for :^)

0 tokens per command >>> Hundreds of tokens per command

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

#207

Post by wayeq »

breppp wrote: post #132
mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/

The worse example I know is the time the Belgians forced the Congolese to harvest more rubber by cutting their hands if they haven't reached the correct quota, ensuing a cross-tribe hands trading economy

> cross-tribe hands trading

sounds like they had some cross cutting concerns

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

#208

Post by mrbungie »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #191
mrbungie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I learn a command that is both repeatable and useful, I prefer to either keep it in my mind or in my aliases. Thank you.

You can still do this! And AI will teach you that command far far faster than synthesizing it yourself.

Yeah, I know AI is useful for that, that's why I said after I learn. Hopefully once.

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

#209

Post by ijidak »

swatcoder wrote: post #165
dkarl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

> It's worth reflecting on why it's so hard to convince hold outs to discover how AI might help them

I have. My conclusion is... humans are deeply irrational when it comes to rapid change.

Egg or olive oil prices spike, humans out an entire government.

The rate of immigration spikes, humans throw them into camps and break useful treaties.

Most of the resistance I've observed amongst engineers is resistance to change generally.

And then digging in when challenged.

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

#210

Post by j-bos »

darth_avocado wrote: post #135
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.

In my first job ever, I used to get my work done on time and leave. There were a few people who’d stay in the office until late and show up on weekends. Same output, but they got the promotions and my bonus got prorated. This is the same thing.

At least this one doesn't require spending the manhours moving dung from pocket to pocket, now we finally get credit for automating it!
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