Amazon has shut down an internal company leaderboard which ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 230 points 2 months ago (11 children)

Whole concept of "how much AI you used", is so flipping stupid of a metric I can't even wrap my head around. I mean even if we assume it's their own AI they are using... that's their power etc... That's like a leaderboard for most gas used up, or miles driven by your truck drivers.

  • source
  • hideshow 16 child comments
  • [–] 116 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    It's the old lines of code metric style of thinking.

    The people in charge only know line go up means better and bigger number is better.

    Its only when things go wrong and someone ELI5 for them that they listen. And even then it'll wear off in a week and they'll be on to their next make the number bigger obsession.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 27 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    I've had to explain this to more executives than I wish to remember. Computer code is a recipe, not a cake. When you see a recipe that's super long, and requires two kitchens worth of bakeware and tools, you probably think it's a bad recipe. Short, elegant, easy to follow recipes with a little note in the margin from your grandmother about what to do when the dough is too sticky are the best recipes.

    Unfortunately, one learned the exact wrong lesson from this, and started measuring lower lines of code produced as better... Which worked for a while, but lead to a lot of weirdness around new features for no particular reason.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Right? How do you even cheat on a ruleset this dumb? You don‘t. It was a stupid contest from the start.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    It only makes sense if

    • you want to drive up adoption because
      • you're confident in usefulness already
      • want to find out about usefulness and need the userbase and usage for it
    • you have ulterior motives to push for AI adoption

    I can imagine leadership - disconnected from real work and any practical AI use experience - being misinformed and misguided into believing marketing and hype-cycle about gains. It also doesn't seem implausible that leadership wants to drive up adoption to quickly gain feedback and results about usefulness and gains/loss.

    In good faith, it requires a certain mindset (no care about the waste or potential loss or risk) and distance from practice. Not implausible, though, in my eyes.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
  • load more comments (6 replies)
    [–] 126 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    If a metric becomes a target...

    How many times do we have to teach you the same lesson, old man?

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 86 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Back in the day I worked at a place that gave everyone pedometers and encouraged everyone to get in at least 10,000 steps a day. Yes, employees were ranked.

    Guys in the machine shop figured out you could attach it to a power drill and register 10,000 steps in a couple of minutes.

    Why yes, yes the idea was discontinued after that...

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 26 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Our company did something similar, but you could bring your own (like a Fitbit) and it would sync its data from Fitbit. The thing it didn’t check was the type of data it was getting. The Fitbit app allowed you to manually enter data, not just data it captured from the device. So this got sync’d to the company app as if it was actual data since it didn’t mark it any differently.

    I would sit in bed at night and enter a random feasible number every time to hit my goals and get a cut of those sweet rewards.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • load more comments (4 replies)
  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago

    That's a good idea. An alternative is to put it on your masturbating wrist, and rub one out. That's got to go a long ways to the daily count. Probably works better for men than women.

    I knew someone who put it on their happy dog's tail, and he wagged his way to 10K steps.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 75 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Oh no, did using stupid metrics backfire because people are smart enough to game the stupid metric?

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 66 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself.

    -- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 59 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    I worked once in a company where they noted down how many times each employee went to the toilet in a day. if you had the runs they would write you up. needless to say, I lasted just about 3 weeks before I quit.

    This here sounds very similarly stupid.

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 52 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    A friend of my worked at a company where they had metrics on Claude code usage and some employees just started multiple agents on the same project where one was tasked to implement a feature and the other was tasked to remove that same feature...

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Reminds me of an old story where a pizza place held a competition among the employees, to see which cashier could convince the most people to upgrade their medium pizzas to a large. The POS system was set to track whenever a medium was upgraded, and would award the cashier one point. The employee with the most points each week won something like free movie tickets.

    Employees would put on their best salesmen pitches, trying to get customers to upgrade their medium orders to larges. But one cashier always won, pretty much without exception. He was going to see a new movie every week for free. And he didn’t even seem to be trying.

    His trick was that whenever a customer ordered a large, he would just put it in as a medium and then immediately upgrade it. It gave him the point for the upgrade, with zero actual sales effort on his part. So every time he had a customer order a large, he got a point by default. Customer ordered three large pizzas? Three points. He didn’t even bother trying to convince people to upgrade their pizza sizes, because the free points from every large order were already enough to let him win every week.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 45 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    My company is doing this too. Measuring this and PR counts.

    What’s it about technical leadership and having no fucking clue how anything works?

  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I don’t get it. Are they rewarding people for using it more? It’s not really a tool to reward over using more or less. Just seems strange.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    The further you get from the front lines the less you have a grasp on day to day operations, especially when the job changes. Double that for leaders that never held technical positions, and come from other areas that guide their view on things.

    Then you have the power imbalance with a hierarchy, if someone is responsible for your job you are more likely to just say "yes" to bad ideas than push back on them. Even when a manager is receptive to feedback that doesn't mean the ICs are going to give the feedback, or they get demoralized when their ideas aren't taken for valid reasons.

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 32 points 2 months ago

    the use of AI was always for cheating , what did they expect.

  • source
  • [–] 29 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Ironic that cheating the system is exactly what Amazon execs are doing all day every day.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 27 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    "Claude, write me a recursive AI prompt, then execute it."

    "I'll be leaving for the day. Notify me if anything changes."

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 26 points 2 months ago

    But using AI is all about cheating!

  • source
  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago

    Why don't they start a new leaderboard for amount of tax paid in each country?

  • source
  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago

    I used AI to do all the AI for me and I won AI and now reward is fired...

  • source
  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago
    [–] 14 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    How come people with MBA studies are too dumb to see that easily cheated metrics, are easily cheated? What do they actually teach in those studies? Have 5 mission statements that are the exact opposite of how we actually act, and fire people do line go brrr? That's it?

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 14 points 2 months ago

    Paywall.

    But yeah, I would have done exactly what I imagine they did - just waste as many tokens as possible in a loop, and continue actually working.

    Just kidding, I'd be updating my resume and interviewing elsewhere instead of working.

  • source
  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Exactly what I said would happen.

    Me smrt billionaire, me track token quantity. Dat look good. Use most tokens iz gud. Wat does kwalitee mean?

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    load more comments
    view more: next ›