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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

#421

Post by monkaiju »

untrust wrote: post #403
monkaiju wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar situation here! In fact our team has a no-LLM policy that I'm quite happy with. We did experiment with it, to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go, and we're still paying down some of the slop residue...

> to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go What was the time scale here? Was it actual skill atrophy or were they just shipping slop PRs all the time

About a year. They were making slop, then when asked to work without AI were unable to be effective for months.

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

#422

Post by ryandrake »

AlexeyBelov wrote: post #411
autoexec wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yep, if a toy was that good, then everyone would be begging their managers to use it, not the other way around.

Nobody ever had to force me to use keyword coloring, code formatters, source control, or a bug tracker.

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

#423

Post by gajjanag »

reactordev wrote: post #326
mjr00 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, with the caveat that the 30% work allocation counts toward likability. You can be friendly, charming, well-spoken, fun, etc., but if you fail to deliver and make work for other people, cause your coworkers frustration, and make your manager look bad, you're not going to move up. You will be able to coast for a while though, as managers have a hard time firing people they personally like. It's ultimately a combin…

Your last statement is exactly right. Communication matters most when you're dealing with cross-org concerns and those that master it are usually the more friendly and pleasant ones. This is something I wish more people understood. I even sometimes fall into the latter even though I strive for the former.

> Communication matters most when you're dealing with cross-org concerns and those that master it are usually the more friendly and pleasant ones.

I don't agree with the second one, but agree with the first.

Throughout my corporate career so far, I have found plenty of hot air/pretty picture slide decks that exist solely for ladder climbers to climb. Said ladder climbers are usually all smiles in public and "friendly", but you have to watch out for knives behind your back.

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

#424

Post by eudamoniac »

cleaning wrote: post #399
eudamoniac wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't the company audit the requests to AI and see you're sending a bunch of BS?

Do you have an example of any company ever doing this?

No, but if you run this non judiciously and burn 100x the next guy with no output, maybe they would want to know how

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

#425

Post by pvtmert »

> But a representative for Amazon said that there is no such company-wide metric for AI usage, nor are there internal leaderboards where employees are measured against each other. Rather, employees are able to view their own AI usage on personal dashboards.

Such a bullshit. There is (was) Amazon Q (Now QuickSuite) leaderboard which is a Quick Sight dashboard. Moreover, each PhoneTool

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

#426

Post by zombot »

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…

If you view AI as a religion, it starts to make sense: "There is this new god now, and if we don't worship properly, we will get eaten."

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

#427

Post by pvtmert » 

  > But a representative for Amazon said that there is no such company-wide metric for AI usage, nor are there internal leaderboards where employees are measured against each other. Rather, employees are able to view their own AI usage on personal dashboards.
Such a bullshit statement. There is a _global_ dashboard that ranks Kiro/QuickSuite (formerly Amazon Q) usage per-employee based on tokens. The dashboard itself is in QuickSight (well, that also became part of QuickSuite anyway).

Not only the data is open to anyone, you can clearly sort by rank, daily/weekly/monthly/yearly usages. Current and former employees included. (By internal alias).

Moreover, there is an internal "awards" system that shows up in PhoneTool profile, each employee gets "awarded" of Kiro/AmazonQ/Quicksuite titles like "Blaze", "Thunderstorm", etc. You can see other recipients of the same award just by clicking on it.

  Note: PhoneTool is an internal profile directory where you can look up other employees as oneself...
---

On the side, I know several people who cannot produce proper code themselves, or integrate to anything on their own. Those who need constant hand-holding keep producing immense amount of stuff with Kiro/AmazonQ, over-ranking SDEs nowadays. (these are not SDEs, more of SysDev, Support Engineers and TPMs). This itself is not a specifically good or a bad thing. But once they stack-rank based on the token usage, I am pretty sure "good" engineers who put effort into writing "good" code will rank worse than people who does not put effort into "concise" solutions. Therefore, quality will eventually detoriate. And it will be too late once the leadership realizes what has been going on. (Well, they already seen the Amazon-Q/Kiro related outages and keep denying it...)

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

#428

Post by RunningDroid »

CaptainTaboo wrote: post #86
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.

Things definitely feel 'Soviet' at my company. AI usage has been mandated by upper management (despite the fact that it doesn't really make sense or solve any problems in my particular job). They literally call it an "AI revolution." If you dare question the wisdom of the company's 'AI-First' policy, it's like you risk being singled out as a "counter-revolutionary."

> They literally call it an "AI revolution."

People proclaiming an "AI revolution" seem to have inspired at least one song:

https://genius.com/Worldview-ai-revolution-lyrics

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

#429

Post by s1ngular1ties »

ryandrake wrote: post #419
s1ngular1ties wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might want to read my earlier comment in the overall thread re: delivering business value and moving the needle features while still building with solid architectural principles. As I mentioned above, the AI stuff - with the rails I’ve put in to guide it - has actually lessened tech debt introduced, not made it worse.

I’m well aware of what you’re saying, but we are definitively moving faster in the correct direction. If this hasn’t been the case for where you’ve worked, my sympathies!

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

#430

Post by paulhebert »

onion2k wrote: post #395
paulhebert wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No it isn't. My salary won't increase if the AI budget reduces, or if the AWS bill goes down, or if the board decide not to do a retreat to Davos this year, or anything else. My salary is very strictly limited by the salary budget. The only impact of a reduced AI budget would be an increase in dividends to shareholders, but that would have a second order effect of making the company less valuable because our competit…

Why not?

There’s only so much money to go around. Wouldn’t a big new expense affect how much is available for the salary budget?

I’m sure it differs between companies but there seems to be a big trend of laying off workers while pouring more and more money into AI.

If every company is using AI to compete they’ll still get the same slice of the pie but they’ll spend more money on AI and have less money for salaries

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