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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

#221

Post by hirvi74 »

thelopa wrote: post #205
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.

I wonder if we will ever reach a point on society where tokens just become the universal currency. We will all work for tokens, pay our bills in tokens, make purchases in tokens, strippers will dance for tokens, etc..

I'm kidding, of course... but human stupidity is infinite, so...

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

#222

Post by paulhebert »

thereisnospork wrote: post #143
MrCharismatist wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I feel for junior admins, I was one 35 years ago and the only reason I'm where I am today was because I had to learn the hard way, repeatedly and often. I use the shit out of opencode to do things as a force multiplier, not as a way to keep me from knowing what its doing. The point at which we're optimizing for "we don't need to know that anymore" is the point at which everything blows up, because agentic work…

Replace agent with 'direct report' and you've just described middle management. For better or worse, companies have always run on non deterministic tasks doled out by persons who barely understand the work.

Honestly human employees feel closer to deterministic than LLMs.

I have a pretty good sense of the quality of work my coworkers output, where they tend to struggle, where they're talented, what level of review is required, what I should double check, etc.

By contrast LLMs are more like picking a contractor out of a hat. Even with good guardrails the quality and types of issues vary wildly prompt to prompt.

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

#223

Post by sojournerc »

xp84 wrote: post #177
nathan_compton wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the founding fathers believed in constraining the state because it could be abusive, but they should have understood that all power ought to be subject to the people, not just state power.

I wonder what the largest and most powerful private enterprise the FFs knew about was. I suppose they'd probably heard of the Hudson's Bay Company, but I have no idea how they really felt about the potential that many normal people would feel equal amounts of domination from companies with revenue much larger than most countries' GDP.

The Dutch East India Company would've definitely been known, and was huge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

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

#224

Post by bonesss »

isk517 wrote: post #44
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 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.

That’s the part I don’t get: Engineers are smart enough to ask an LLM to ask other LLMs to ask other LLMs to load the policy manual then count the R’s in “LLM fork bomb”.

Additional story points completed per week, versus token-dollar spent, or some such combo would seem more sane.

But maybe they aren’t really tracking productivity, so tracking tokens is all they have? … I dunno which part of that is dumber.

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

#225

Post by paulhebert »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #215
pjmlp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worries, we keep drinking from paper straws, because that is what really matters. The problem with not burning tokens is when you not meet the performance KPIs, get labelled as luddite and off you go, even before the job gets taken over by AI. I do agree with the sentiment, that and war mongers destroying the planet.

What's the logic of dissing paper straws in a comment raging against war and AI as threats to the environment? I see it a lot and assumed it was concern trolling from plastic manufacturers or libertarians funded by them but you seem genuine. Have you just fallen for that concern trolling? Grown so cynical that nothing matters anymore? I don't understand the intention if you have a genuine desire to improve society. W…

I think it's a reference to the frustrating pressure to make small personal sacrifices while those in charge burn down the world.

I don't mind paper straws (though I don't really use straws in general) but it is frustrating trying really hard to be sustainable and then hearing that Amazon is encouraging people to use as much computing power as possible.

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

#226

Post by paulhebert »

krupan wrote: post #136
onion2k wrote: post #6

I'd bet that the goal is for people to 'game' it though. By pushing people to use AI more they'll try it, experiment with it, 'waste' time on it ... and from that they'll learn about it. That's the end goal. They're using tokens for pointless stuff right now in order to figure out use cases where it helps. You can't do that without also learning where it doesn't help. My company is doing the same thing.

I'm sorry, but that's insane. I mean, I guess if you have cash to burn I could think of even worse ways to spend it, but seriously, this is dumb. What other tool have businesses spent millions of dollars and person hours on to try and find something useful the tool can do?? Talk about a solution looking for a problem! If it's not clear in the early stages that this tool solves a problem then ditch it and move on! Giv…

Every dollar your company gives to AI providers is a dollar they're not paying you.

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

#227

Post by dkarl »

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…

Unfortunately, a convincing demonstration to convince a skeptical colleague would require measuring developer productivity.

Among skeptics, I've only seen people won over by using it themselves, because when they use AI for their own work, they invest the time to review the code, understand it, and assess its quality by their own standards. That's how people learn to trust AI coding assistance.

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

#229

Post by autoexec »

ijidak wrote: post #209
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…

> 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…

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

Most engineers I've known are enthusiastic when given the opportunity to play around with a new toy. What they don't like is anything being forced on them. There's nothing irrational about that. They've often invested a lot of time into optimizing their workflows.

I've also found that if something actually makes their work easier, you will never have to twist their arm to make them use it. They'll apply it everywhere it helps. They'll even try using it in places and in ways it was never intended for. If they're digging in, you likely haven't made a very compelling case for your changes.

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