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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

#71

Post by throwmeaway876 »

What's the root cause of these ridiculous decisions being taken at tech corporations? Constantly, they fall into fads like these that everyone with a brain knows make no sense but still many companies decide to follow them. For example: RTO -> what's the point of this shit? we never knew for sure but higher ups at most tech companies suddenly decided that RTO was the way to go forward despite all the downsides. Another example: DEI policies, some of them were very non-sensical.

I believe there has to be some downward pressure on these executives to take these decisions but I would like to know where it's coming from exactly and what's the logic behind them. Is it some big institution like Blackrock which has leverage on many of these companies? That's always been my bet but I never knew for sure.

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

#72

Post by sheept »

rtkwe wrote: post #8
AMerrit wrote: post #2

I've done similar at my job where management wants us to use all of our tokens before they expire. I usually set it to documentation tasks and other minor tasks just to eat up tokens.

At least that nominally creates some value at the end of the day. Documentation is the thing everyone wants but no one has time/desire to create. My most recent token heavy task was having an agent write unit tests for coverage on a little graphAPI tool I'd written a bit ago to satisfy SonarQube.

People don't want to read LLM-generated docs though. It'll lack the context to justify why things were designed the way they were, and there's always a risk of hallucination so you still have to verify the documentation's claims, since the person who published it likely did not scrutinize it.

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

#73

Post by wolvoleo »

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'…

In our place it is really a thing and comes from leadership. They feel like they spent a lot on copilot and they want to see people using it.

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

#74

Post by tyleo »

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 feel like it depends on the leader. I've definitely seen leaders value LoC beyond reason and cause worse, bloated codebases by rewarding cowboys with 10k line PRs.

Big companies have thousands of leaders. Many good, many bad.

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

#76

Post by drivingmenuts »

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.

> This is analogous to measuring productivity by LoC output

True, but it looks like productivity to people whose own productivity is measured by how busy their subordinates appear to be.

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

#77

Post by drivingmenuts »

blindriver wrote: post #19

This is what I do. I tell AI to go through every file in my project, identify up to 10 bugs per file, and then write the markdown with the name of the file plus "bugfix". This takes about 2 hours. Then I delete all the files with the suffix "bugfix" and then do it again.

You should probably create an agent to make agents whose jobs are to figure out how to maximize the token usage (and one whose job is to calculate the minimum token usage, so it doesn't look like a boondoggle).

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

#79

Post by pyrolistical »

throwmeaway876 wrote: post #71

What's the root cause of these ridiculous decisions being taken at tech corporations? Constantly, they fall into fads like these that everyone with a brain knows make no sense but still many companies decide to follow them. For example: RTO -> what's the point of this shit? we never knew for sure but higher ups at most tech companies suddenly decided that RTO was the way to go forward despite all the downsides. Anoth…

Crappy managers don’t know (or actively avoid) how to measure business value from individuals. So they need you to be in the office so they can physically see if you are putting in the effort.

Tokens is just yet another proxy for business value.

The problem they face is if everybody is judge by business value in dollars, crappy managers are the first to go

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

#80

Post by dehrmann »

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…

It's more like "We really value face-to-face interaction, so we're going to track that with your total travel spend. We don't want to get in the way, so there's no budget."
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