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

fastcompany.com

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

#241

Post by cmiles8 »

It’s not surprising given Amazon’s pretty lackluster position in AI beyond providing raw compute, which itself is basically a commodity at this point.

Have heard very similar stories to what the article describes. There were also outright revolts from tech folks being forced to use Amazon’s own shit self-built AI vs Claude Code and other top-tier products.

Given Amazon’s early start with Echo and Alexa they should have absolutely dominated this AI revolution but have been scrambling in a panic ever since ChatGPT showed up on scene and always seem two steps behind the market.

It all paints a picture inside Amazon of clueless leaders at the top and mobs of others below them just gaming the system so a silly dashboard looks green. “Day 2” has arrived.

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

#242

Post by Insanity »

Devil's advocate - this is a forcing function to get people to try out AI whom might be reluctant to try it. I'm speaking from personal experience, I was 'forced' to use the tools as it is being tracked, and found genuine use-cases.

Of course at some point the 'benefit' is outweighted by the 'negatives', e.g people making up work. Tokens used is about as useful a measure of productivity as 'hours in office'.

EDIT: My use-case still have relatively low token usage though lol

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

#243

Post by Insanity »

tyleo wrote: post #59

This is foolish. High token use is associated with worse output. If you fill your models context you are going to be using a lot more context but the labs literally put out charts of how the models degrade at high context use. This is analogous to measuring productivity by LoC output.

High token usage does not mean high token usage in the same session / context window. But yeah, context rot hits hard, I find that with Codex/GPT5.4 after about 50% context window usage it's hard to get anything useful out of it on a moderately sized codebase.

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

#244

Post by nomorewords »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #89
jordanb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been noticing how our economy keeps getting more Soviet as it becomes more top-down. We basically have central planning now with all the pathologies inherent in that system, but unlike the soviets we just have a bunch of guys who happened to get rich or bribe the right people running our GOSPLAN.

Yeah, the stories I've heard from Meta are very Soviet-coded. Like, trying to exceed the plan but not too much, because then the new plan would be hopelessly unachievable and you'd be punished for not meeting the insane expectations.

So like Publix company earnings? You have to beat by a little so you're not just flat but beat by too much and you look incompetent/suspicious

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

#245

Post by dingaling »

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…

> resistance to change generally

Nah, software engineers were always butterflies fluttering from one language or framework to the Next Hot Thing. Change was part of the job, if you didn't keep up you fell behind and atrophied.

Resistance to AI is, I think, more because it is seen as an existential threat, or because it's something whose ultimate long-term outcome is still undefined. It's going to be either a benefit or a hazard, and we don't yet know whether we'll need Bladerunners to rein it in.

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

#246

Post by eunoia »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #179
eunoia wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams. We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings.…

Interesting. When you say leadership along with manager meetings, are you referring to managers, who might just be exacerbating the rumors I mentioned, or actual company leadership, like Directors, Vps, etc? And are they saying “AI usage”, or explicitly “Token count”?

Executive leadership talking to the managers in their orgs.

I wish I was kidding, but they really are pushing increased token usage. Like I said, we push back. When we push back they acknowledge it's a bad metric and lately have started to add qualifiers about how we don't want to burn tokens unnecessarily and in fact we should be looking to use tokens more efficiently.

And then in the next meeting we are once again talking about how to encourage our teams to use more tokens.

The goal is to increase AI usage of course, but the only metric they track to measure progress on that goal is token usage. Also endless presentations of vibed tools that we never hear about again after a week. Get a lot of those too.

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

#247

Post by perrygeo »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #35
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 Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!

I watched people ask LLMs for linting/refactoring help, burning easily 5 minutes for something that could be completed deterministically, locally, in ms using any modern editor.

Quite frankly it was embrassing. We've had tools for static analysis for ages. Use them.

Someone with better knowledge could work 100x faster using 100x fewer resources. They did it the slow, expensive way but at least didn't have to think? Odd flex.

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

#248

Post by eunoia »

hirvi74 wrote: post #220
eunoia wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams. We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings.…

I do not want FAANG and FAANG does not want me. So, as a goblin, I must ask: how is your and your team's morale doing? People in FAANG likely worked hard to get in there or lucked out or some combination of both. I feel like my soul would be crushed if I hacked away at Leetcode for months on end just to babysit and gaslight some algorithm into asymptotically following my instructions.

Mixed bag. Some engineers are excited about the company giving them a blank check to explore a new tool. Some engineers are upset because they feel their skills are being devalued by leadership.

Overall I would say most are exploring the new tools while waiting for the madness to subside. Work in $BIGCORP for long enough and you get used to leadership being out of touch with the work on the ground.

Engineers in $BIGCORP jobs are by and large not the hacker types anymore btw.

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

#249

Post by lljk_kennedy »

jmyeet wrote: post #200
malfist wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bad manager: "I have to give you a bad rating because of the company-wide LoC metric." Good manager (to good engineer): "can you please churn some code to update your LoC metric so I don't have to give you a worse rating?" I'm sorry but any manager who just claims they're a passive victim of company-wide mandates is a lazy and bad manager.

Bullshit work, in other words.
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