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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

#411

Post by AlexeyBelov »

autoexec wrote: post #229
ijidak wrote: post #209

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 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 eas…

Yeah. Nobody mandated Jetbrains products, almost every developer I know decided for themselves. Actually, it was the opposite: I remember asking a company I once worked for to buy me a license. Took 6 months for them to finally agree. Now my monthly allotment of tokens is way bigger than the price of that license, and it was given freely.

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

#412

Post by DanielHB »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #383
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…

Spending is just a proxy for AI use here. This is nothing new. I remember past CEOs saying “Ajax! Ajax! Ajax!”, “Big data! Big data! Why aren’t we using Big data!” AI is just the next tool to over spend on in poor ways, realise it’s shit and spend a ton more money trying to roll it back. The situations where is shines will continue to use it when the hype dies down.

Oh wow, I totally forgot that "Ajax! Ajax! Ajax!" was a thing back then, that was at the beginning of my career and it was just as baffling hearing executives calling for a such a under the hood tech choice without understanding how it actually works.

The "Big data!" calls though did make more sense coming from executives, obviously it was also often dumb, but it was a lot easier for them to understand the results. However most companies would have been better off waiting 5-10 years before jumping into it as a lot of money was wasted on processes and tools that are completely outdated today.

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

#413

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

paulhebert wrote: post #225
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Paper straws really, really suck for little kids though.

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

#415

Post by r_lee »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #286
mjr00 wrote: post #24

I've heard similar stories from AWS and other non-AWS FAANG employees. All of the token leaderboards have a "this doesn't count toward your performance review" disclaimer, but there's an implied nudge nudge, wink wink after that statement. One person I've talked to has someone in their org who is running GasTown and chews through tokens 24/7. They don't contribute very much, but they're comfortably in the #1 spot.

Yeah my manager at my 400 people company is one of those. He runs gas town and his agents bump things here and there throughout the codebase and he has like 50 commits a day. Compat versions, formatting, stuff like that. But the thing is, the problem is the person, not the technology. He was already like this before LLMs. He would "refactor" repos into smaller repos, and all of a sudden all of the code has his name.…

Sounds like the perfect employee honestly. I bet he's beloved by the upper management

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

#416

Post by ted_bunny »

dtnewman wrote: post #272
stephenhuey wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just sent it to some developers who could really benefit from this! Please let us know when you have Codex and Gemini versions ready to rumble.

Sorry, it will be a while. We're currently building out enterprise features like SSO/SAML support, role based burn access, and a carbon offset marketplace. As you can imagine, we're burning a lot of tokens to get these out, but actual productivity isn't up as much as you'd think.

How about a built-in AI assistant to answer my burning questions?

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

#417

Post by naveen99 »

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…

its more like you have purchased unlimited monthly travel for a fixed cost for your employees for $20. And you want your employees to maximize travel, since you already paid the $20.

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

#418

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

mial wrote: post #323
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah my manager at my 400 people company is one of those. He runs gas town and his agents bump things here and there throughout the codebase and he has like 50 commits a day. Compat versions, formatting, stuff like that. But the thing is, the problem is the person, not the technology. He was already like this before LLMs. He would "refactor" repos into smaller repos, and all of a sudden all of the code has his name.…

Sounds like an actual psychopath.

Yes, I think so. And another aspect is that he's not the aggressive bully that perhaps you would stereotypically expect from my description. Instead he's super calm, super polite, the perfect picture of professionalism. But all of that is superficial, you might be a dishonest person in various styles. It took me a long time to notice the underlying substance of the behavior.

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

#419

Post by ryandrake »

s1ngular1ties wrote: post #389
0xy wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you're working but LLM enhanced development has skyrocketed our rate of feature development. As an example, a project roadmapped to take 7 months was delivered in only 4.5 because of CC/Codex. I'm confused how anyone could believe it isn't an enhancer, unless they have refused to use any of the technologies.

Yeah I’ve experienced much the same as you. Like it’s overwhelmingly clear from everything it’s enabled for us that we’re going far, far faster than we ever have, and the guardrails we have in play have helped guard the architecture and make it even harder to commit a bad PR. Sometimes in reading these comments I’m left wondering what sorts of experiences people are having elsewhere that’s left them this soured on it…

Everyone is replying but nobody is reading.

Moving faster doesn’t necessarily mean delivering business value faster. You may be moving faster in the wrong direction.

More code doesn’t necessarily mean delivering more business value. You’re piling on debt and if that debt is growing faster than the value of the code, you’re actually losing.

And even if you somehow are delivering more, better code, faster, and without building technical debt: writing code is somewhere around 1-5% of the actual work and time that it takes to deliver a software product. At least in all the places I’ve ever worked. You are optimizing the wrong thing.

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

#420

Post by ryandrake »

parineum wrote: post #379
dkarl wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's only really one measure, ultimately, and that's profits. Are these heavy AI companies raking in 10x profits with their 10x'd developers?

THIS is exactly what I want to see. Show me 10 randomly selected “All in on AI” companies that are running circles around a control group of 10 randomly selected similar but traditional software development companies. Show the AI-using companies being measurably more profitable.
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