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Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

businessinsider.com

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Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#211

Post by delichon »

mejutoco wrote: post #185
delichon wrote: post #157

There is little new under the big fusion reactor in the sky. I just read a chapter in James Glieck's "The Information" about tokenmaxxing in the telegraphy industry. There used to be a big market for code books to reduce the per-character charges for sending telegrams. Compression was cash in the pocket. The telegraph companies discouraged the practice but were forced to accept it. The telegraph code industry started…

That is interesting but tokenmaxxing is not maximizing token usage _efficiency_. It is maximizing its usage.

Thanks, that's so odd that I assumed it was about efficiency, which is how I treat tokens. It's hard to imagine a 19th century business man ordering his staff to send as many long winded telegrams as they can.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#212

Post by ian_j_butler »

nradov wrote: post #134
swed420 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's time we adopt/design an economic system that isn't so easily co-opted by counterproductive prisoner's dilemmas.

What would such an economic system look like?

This is actually pretty well-understood if people wanted to do it.. contrary to popular belief it's more about responsible governance than economics and not really a pro/anti capitalism thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#%22Design_princi...

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#213

Post by nickvec »

victor9000 wrote: post #129

Clearly they need more layoffs, and for that matter why keep anyone around? After all, AI will be writing 100% of code in 2026.

Surprisingly, Uber hasn’t had a mass layoff since 2020. The company currently has ~34,000 FTEs, which I personally think is insanely bloated for what amounts to a taxi + food delivery app.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#214

Post by suprfnk »

mig39 wrote: post #119
LaurensBER wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tokens are the new "lines of code per engineer". Easy to graph, easy to "manage".

The new TPS reports!

Oh, so that was actually a Token Per Second report! Wild!

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#215

Post by JeremyNT »

toasty228 wrote: post #208
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #34

If any company announces that they use token consumption as an employee performance signal, for me that's close to a red flag to stay away from that company. No company with good engineering leadership should act like this is remotely a good idea.

You'd be surprised, I know a few devs in very big tech companies, not faang but you definitely know them, and they all have some kind of token leaderboards, a few told their dev "we don't want you to write a single line of code manually anymore", etc. I assume the execs perspective is something like: if the top 20% of worker produce 80% of the code with LLMs and the company still works then we can get rid of the bott…

I think there's probably something to token use as some kind of metric. If you aren't using these tools much, you're definitely not going to remain a top contributor. The world is evolving quickly here.

But it's just one signal out of many, and more isn't somehow inherently better beyond a certain point.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#217

Post by doublerabbit »

throwaw12 wrote: post #183
duxup wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an amusing post about judging developers based on token usage where some user on HN here was pushing this idea “ICs don’t like it but this is the best way to evaluate” (something like that). They have a whole management team and can’t seem to find a way to judge or god forbid encourage developers…

Problem is in management, management usually comes up non-sense metric when they themselves lack of good metric. For example, everyone talks about strategy, but when you ask them what's our strategy answer is usually something like: * let's figure out together * industry changing is so fast, we should revisit plans every quarter ...

Ha. Exactly at my current contract job.

"Welcome to the new contractor who will be the artitect our new infrastructure. What is your dream IT setup?"

"Yeah, we can't afford that. Lets revisit once you wrangle those 2003 Dell R620's running Windows 2008 with no patching."

And that is why after eight months i'm terminating my contract on Friday and swimming back to shore.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#218

Post by icepush »

izanton wrote: post #29

What if... we stop for a moment, and then, after thinking for a moment, we stop hammering nails with a microscope, and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity? I know it's sounds stupid, but what if

Sounds to me like you are advocating the decimation of the technology sector and a global recession that could last the better part of a decade, buddy!

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#219

Post by KaiserPro »

99954bb63ccc wrote: post #108
izanton wrote: post #29

What if... we stop for a moment, and then, after thinking for a moment, we stop hammering nails with a microscope, and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity? I know it's sounds stupid, but what if

I feel like individually, if you sat down with literally any reasonable person on the planet they would arrive at and/or agree with the tenor here. I'd be curious to hear from people well versed in group psychology/dynamics and/or just a lot of leadership/people experience: what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point. Obviously nobody here is goi…

we are going through our second AI transformation, the first one didn't work that well because the tools were shit.

Whats happening now and whos driving it is interesting. The CEO has a license for this new tool (think one of the top 4, Qwen Claude, Gemini, openAI) and really likes it. So much so that they (non coder) are making lots of little single page web apps.

The COO is bollocks deep in AI, and is saying that we cannot buy any SaaS products anymore. We must make it ourselves.

The engineering manager has seen this as an opportunity to build out a brand for engineering (its a small department in a medium sized company) by delivering quickly what the large year long efforts cant.

This has formed a slopnexus where PoCs are spun up left right and centre, but there isn't much time or thought going in to making them sustainable.

What started out as a (simple ish) asset management tool, neatly scoped into a deliverable PoC has morphed into a 5 product as one monster.

Its a mess that will either lead to burn out or disaster.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#220

Post by afinlayson »

Replace Tokens with Gas, or water or healthcare or anything - and it's foolish. You shouldn't let the seller dictate what amount you need of something.

Smart engineers are figuring out how to best use their tokens - as tokenmaxing is just as silly as gasmaxing your car.

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