6 ms·

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 c

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 traveling. In fact, we are going to make Travel Spending part of your annual performance review: If you don't spend enough on business travel, you'll get a low rating!" We are living in a totally bonkers time.

almost_usual 6mo ago
It’s preposterous, companies are blindly funding slop and the product is fool’s gold.
- brewdad 6mo ago
  It's the state of modern capitalism. Money must flow from one entity to another even if nothing of tangible value is produced. The flows of money prove the growth of both businesses.
  - sznio 6mo ago
    what kind of metric should we use to filter out that bullshit? dollarhours?
  - uuyy 6mo ago
    If I spend money on tokens but my revenue doesn't increase, nor do I get any operating efficiency gains - where is my growth then buddy boyo? The growth in revenue's (since earnings are negative for them) only shows up for the model producer
isk517 6mo ago
I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.
- dominotw 6mo ago
  i call BS on this story
  - elictronic 6mo ago
    They polished the turd more than stating, but the bones are real.
  - re-thc 6mo ago
    I call AI on this comment
    - dominotw 6mo ago
      why?
      - wetpaws 6mo ago
        [dead]
      - pfdietz 6mo ago
        Imitating your own utter lack of explanation or evidence?
  - DANmode 6mo ago
    I don’t. Things that rhyme with this have indeed been happening at the biggest names.
  - mrandish 6mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
    - aspensmonster 6mo ago
      >This article is about statistics and government policy. For Nazi analogies in internet discussions, see Godwin's law.
lbrito 6mo ago
Exactly this. And the fact that it is an industry-wide meme at this point makes bright red flashing lights and klaxons go off on my mind that a catastrophic reckoning can't be too far. There's not enough money in the world to keep this up for too long.
andrethegiant 6mo ago
Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.
- andai 6mo ago
  Obligatory: Negative 2000 Lines of Code https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252
  - syntheticnature 6mo ago
    Versus my sibling comment to yours, I actually sent that to some internal folks after the bit about AI+total lines committed was said.
    - dijksterhuis 6mo ago
      was there any kind of response or reaction to that? it’s something i would have done and probably wouldn’t have gone well. xD
      - syntheticnature 6mo ago
        I didn't send it very high up the chain (and was looking for a job at the time anyhow) but mostly got back snickers from peers and an "I know, but this is a directive from above"
    - s1ngular1ties 6mo ago
      I’m surprised that lines removed isn’t something your bosses at the time weren’t also advocating for, TBH. I don’t blame you for looking around.
  - jimbokun 6mo ago
    Timeless classic.
- syntheticnature 6mo ago
bluGill 6mo ago
My dad worked at a company that had their own travel agency (early 90s when you needed a travel agent for reasons that no longer apply), and he was often booked on the more expensive flight because the travel agency made more money. More than once he could have got first class for less on a different flight but company policy didn't allow him to fly first class. We have always been living in bonkers time.
- glenngillen 6mo ago
  Most big companies still have travel agencies/companies manage their corporate travel. I can’t remember who we used when I was at Amazon, but I made a similar complaint to my manager once given I could fly cheaper in a higher class on a different airline (also one I had heaps of points with so I would have preferred it because I’d be able to upgrade further and/or use the lounge). Turns out the price I saw in the booking portal isn’t actually what Amazon paid. It’s kinda more like a rack rate listing. But then there’s all kinds of discounting/cash back that happens on the backend based on the amount of travel booked each month.
- varispeed 6mo ago
  I used to know someone whose parent worked at travel agency (also 90s) and their whole immediate family could book trips wherever, but only economy class.
- badc0ffee 6mo ago
  I worked at a tech company in the early 2010s that had its own travel agency.
- jimbokun 6mo ago
  We have always been living in the Dilbert and/or Office Space universe.
dehrmann 6mo ago
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."
treis 6mo ago
If we suddenly went from rail travel to jets that's exactly what would happen. We'd go from 0 to all the business flights that happen today. Everyone would be under enormous pressure to not be a laggard.
- cucumber3732842 6mo ago
  I washed a former intelligence agency person get interviewed on a youtube talk show and (tangential to the policy subject being discussed) they they said that's basically how it was after 9/11. We couldn't onboard people fast enough to figure out how to spend the money so while we were doing that we flew first class half way around the world to waterboard people with bottled water. The people authorizing it didn't care. They were spending X to fight terrorism. The public was never gonna see the nitty gritty breakdown. That's basically how it seems to be with AI. Just replace "spent X fighting terrorism" with "spent X implementing AI workflows" or "invested X in AI" or whatever. Nobody actually knows or cares just how far the dollars are going.
  - saltcured 6mo ago
    I think this version is getting very close to The Emperor's New Clothes Subscription in terms of how transparently the leadership are displaying their delusions.
jmyeet 6mo ago
You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]? Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used. I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager. [1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-people-using-lines-of-code-as-his-metric-15c17254ed33 https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...
- malfist 6mo ago
  In many many many cases it's not the manager choosing to do that. Its our brilliant job creator class demanding that he does
  - jmyeet 6mo ago
    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.
    - lljk_kennedy 6mo ago
      Bullshit work, in other words.
- xp84 6mo ago
  LoC can occasionally give you signal. For instance, imagine you are joining a new team or company so you don't know how much oversight your predecessor did. If you ask an engineer how they spend most of their time and they say "Mostly just writing code" and you look at GitHub and it says they've made 3 minor commits in the past quarter, that person is lying and your predecessor was incompetent (quite possibly both of them have been MIA from their responsibilities for months). No, I'm not talking about the engineer who can point to significant contributions outside of code: writing technical specs, leading architecture discussions, etc. I'm talking about the ones who just say they're just coding, but are actually not working at all. TL;DR LoC and commit count etc can be used only to flag for review likely cases of quiet quitting.
dkarl 6mo ago
I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make them more productive. Incentivizing people who are already using AI to use as many tokens as possible does seem a little crazy, though.
- com2kid 6mo ago
  There is a limit somewhere, but I keep finding more and more ways to use AI. Not just coding, but things like "here is my teams mandate, go through all my company's slack channels, linear tasks, notion pages, and recent merges in got, summarize any work other teams are doing that intersect with my team's work." That'll burn a lot of tokens. Set that up to run once or twice a week and give a report.
  - thinkharderdev 6mo ago
    Sure, findings ways to burn tokens is not hard. Even finding ways to burn tokens on things (like your example) which are actually useful is not hard. But what is the ROI on that from the company perspective. I mean, you could have also hired an intern to do the job of collating this report every week. But if you went to your boss and asked to hire someone to do something, they would, reasonably, ask what the value of that thing is and whether it justifies more headcount. But we're in this bizarro world where the bosses are basically saying "go hire more people, even if you don't have specific high-value things for them to do. Just create make-work jobs for them!" It's wild.
- swatcoder 6mo ago
  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 there doesn't seem to be a convincing revolution in the quantity or quality of mature software being delivered. Combine that puzzling impressions of outcomes with a sense, for many, that they don't feel like they have a personal problem that warrants a new tool, and you end up with a pretty earnest and defensible indifference. To get hold out engineers using AI, the industry needs to be focused on demonstrating relatable workflow improvements and demonstrating practical improvements to finished work product. Instead, policies like token use incentives just rely on luring them into pulling the slot machine handle with the expectation that once they do, they'll join the cadre of other converts who justify their transition with subjective improvements and intermediate metrics.
akomtu 6mo ago
IMO, the investors behind AI play the Uber game: they subsidise the AI costs and inject it into all facets of society they can get their hands on. They can tell the execs to increase AI usage at any cost. Their bet is that we'll become AI addicts with athrophied brains before they run out of money. Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what we are billed in our homes. So while you're happy generating mountains of AI slop, somewhere there is a datacenter boiling a river. I'd compare this to a new patented formula of water that's nobody asked for, and the patent owners are trying to replace all water supply with their crap before we wake up.
- krupan 6mo ago
  But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
- vharuck 6mo ago
  No need to invoke a hypothetical water example, just look to how Nestlé pushed baby formula in developing countries¹: >For example, IBFAN claims that Nestlé distributes free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
866-RON-0-FEZ 6mo ago
> 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. I had a manager like this once. He didn't last very long, but it was without a doubt the most fun six months of my career.
fooker 6mo ago
This would be hilarious if a bunch of companies did not already do exactly this with exec travel. And academics do this all the time when travel has to be funded from grants. One reason it works out like that for travel funding is that it’s often the ‘use it or lose it’ kind of funding. If you do not use all of the funds allotted, you can’t ask for more and could realistically get less.
AlexandrB 6mo ago
I wonder where in business school they teach you to "measure inputs and try to maximize them", because that's basically what's happening.
xp84 6mo ago
Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI. Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done. Just looking at the work output - how many story points, tickets, how many new bugs are opened, etc. has not become any less relevant a metric for productivity with AI. If you're a skilled and proper user of AI those numbers would be changing in the right direction, compared to before you had it.
- svachalek 6mo ago
  All those numbers are equally gameable and terrible metrics for productivity. With any of those, as with AI spending, you've got to look at actual results qualitatively. There's no shortcut.
  - jimbokun 6mo ago
    The eternal evergreen lesson of managing software developers, and knowledge workers more generally.
- autoexec 6mo ago
  > It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI. If some guy decides to spend a bunch of money bringing AI tools into the company things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. He's sure not going to get recognition and a massive bonus for it. If on the other hand, he can put some numbers in a spreadsheet or powerpoint showing that employees are using AI all the time and profits are up again this quarter, maybe he can take some credit for that or at least keep his boss or the company's shareholders from questioning the wisdom of dumping so much cash into those AI products.
  - andrekandre 6mo ago
kingleopold 6mo ago
because it's come to CFO's as "free debt" aka fiat printing. They need to spend thisfree fiat to keep buble going. I'm sure some inv. banking team internally assured too. $Trillion instuitions have access to free printer now, you and I don't. This is different world since unlimited printer started in 2020. All debt math is fake now because they can create fiat money out of nothing, literally.
autoexec 6mo ago
> It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Some companies might just have been scammed by the marketing that told them that AI would make all their employees 10,000x more productive and save them billions and when that didn't happen the assumption was that it's because employees weren't using the magical AI as often as they should be. Other companies, especially those working on their own AI products, might want employees to use AI as much as possible because they hope it will provide them with the training data they'll need to eventually replace most or all of those employees with the AI. Punishing workers who refuse to train their AI replacement might make sense to them because even though it's costly right now they expect the savings down the road to be much much greater.
malfist 6mo ago
At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking
- Sharlin 6mo ago
  Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.
  - lapetitejort 6mo ago
    Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds
- spaniard89277 6mo ago
  Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man. It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.
  - rightbyte 6mo ago
    It is not their money though. It is the stock owners' so they don't care either.
- mynameisash 6mo ago
  > The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.
01284a7e 6mo ago
I think a lot of these execs have equity in Anthropic... and the dumb ones that don't are just "keeping up with the Joneses" so to speak.
twa927 6mo ago
It's like if class-based society materialized within the IT. And the manager class collectively pushes the narrative of AI replacing ICs. Note that it has beaten capitalism, making rational choices to increase earnings has lost to this AI dream.
- chadgpt3 6mo ago
  Note that propagandizing managers was a rational choice by AI companies to increase the revenue of AI companies.
ljsprague 6mo ago
I've definitely been in situations where managers tell me to "spend X amount before the end of the year." They don't want higher ups to think they can cut our budget.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
crabbone 6mo ago
You'd be surprised... I worked for an international (mothership in the UK, later acquired by the US) company, which had... sort of a similar policy. So, the (mothership) company acquired a lot of satellite companies, all in banking business. All over the world. Then they figured their CEO was corrupt, got in problems with the law, got kicked out. While they were waiting for the new "real" CEO to step in, they let some "interim" CEO to take his place. New new (interim) CEO didn't seem to have a clue about the business she was supposed to run, nor did she care. She knew her time was running out, and she figured she'd spend it traveling the world and partaking in fine dining in every corner of the world the company's tentacle could reach. But, to make it seem more plausible, she, sort of, created a policy of "experience exchange", which sent random troupes of select individuals from different branches of the company to "exchange experience" with another similarly randomly assembled troupe. Of course, the company picked the bill when it comes to lodging and dining. Our inconsequential branch in Israel saw a pilgrimage of high-ranking banking managers from all over the world, but, mostly the wealthier parts of it. Some didn't even bother to show up in the office though, and proceeded straight to the banquet hall of the most expensive hotel on the Tel Aviv beach. To be fair though, the interim CEO got the boot even before her time was supposed to end, but it was serendipitously close to the acquisition by the US company, and so she was let go as part of a "restructuring" and "optimization"... but it was a crazy year!
xnx 6mo ago
Good time to be a sane company then. "Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake." and all.
- uuyy 6mo ago
  awesome phrase
MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
People think we’re living in oh so capitalist times, why then does everything smell soviet.
- sph 6mo ago
  Horseshoe theory
osigurdson 6mo ago
It seems like a natural result. People have been trying to use dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time. Therefore, "part 1" was already in place. Now, something even easier to track is available (token usage). So, just throw token usage on the dashboard and tell people that higher is better - what other outcome would you possibly expect?
- 12_throw_away 6mo ago
  > dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time I'm actually a little curious about how long it has been. Bad managers have always prioritized irrelevant metrics, of course, but I have a feeling (backed by no data, just vibes) that management in general crossed a point of no return as soon as "data-driven" became a cross-industry buzzword. Like, I vaguely remember a time when consumer interactions didn't always come with a request to fill out a survey (with the results getting turned into a number and fed into a dashboard somewhere). And then that changed, and now everything must turned into a number and that number must go up.
  - osigurdson 6mo ago
    "Data driven" essentially means "scalar driven". There is nothing wrong with it if your chosen scalar is a proxy for anything that matters. Of course, usually no one can explain this mapping.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
recursivecaveat 6mo ago
Management has confided in me that token usage is a secret performance metric. At the same time I'm getting emails from infrastructure people about prompting techniques to get LLMs to speak more concisely to save the company money lmao. I'd prefer a video essay mode that bulks everything up. Two years ago everyone would have told you that 'impact' was the way to measure people, and been aghast at tracking inputs like hours. Say what you will, but at least showing up at 8 didn't cost the company money. Today I see people spending time and money vibe coding tools in search of a problem, just to spend tokens and demonstrate that they're on board with the singularity.
dtnewman 6mo ago
This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main). (If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.) Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287
- stephenhuey 6mo ago
  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.
  - dtnewman 6mo ago
    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.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ted_bunny 6mo ago
      How about a built-in AI assistant to answer my burning questions?
  - sznio 6mo ago
    I want a in-browser Gemini version. For some reason my company doesn't count Gemini CLI use. I guess I'm supposed to copy code between my browser and my editor.
- LikeBeans 6mo ago
  Brilliant
dyauspitr 6mo ago
Nonsense. It’s a little bit of a loss leader so devs are hooked on it and it’s considered incredibly unproductive to work without one. Then they will just have 10 peoples jobs replaced with one guy.
overgard 6mo ago
Look it might seem silly, but the point is to get all our employees to be travel-pilled. They just don't know how great travel is yet.
eudamoniac 6mo ago
I'm making sure to use the most expensive model possible for the stupidest shit constantly. They asked for it!
OtomotO 6mo ago
The most important part being: "Because we FEEL this will make you more productive and we will make more money!" No evidence but more Lines of Code...
proteal 6mo ago
What if instead the manager was saying: “hey team I need you to all buy as many lotto tickets as possible!” I feel like that’s a better analogy. Some charlatans are buying fake tickets, but as a manager who wants to win big, I’m ok with some chicanery so long as the average person is trying to honestly meet my directive.
Skidaddle 6mo ago
It might be an ROI calculation, e.g. some people will waste tokens, but if it means someone else feels empowered to make something awesome or impactful, it will have been worth it.
2muchcoffeeman 6mo ago
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.
- DanielHB 6mo ago
  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.
naveen99 6mo ago
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.
zombot 6mo ago
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."

almost_usual 6mo ago

It’s preposterous, companies are blindly funding slop and the product is fool’s gold.

brewdad 6mo ago
It's the state of modern capitalism. Money must flow from one entity to another even if nothing of tangible value is produced. The flows of money prove the growth of both businesses.
- sznio 6mo ago
  what kind of metric should we use to filter out that bullshit? dollarhours?
- uuyy 6mo ago
  If I spend money on tokens but my revenue doesn't increase, nor do I get any operating efficiency gains - where is my growth then buddy boyo? The growth in revenue's (since earnings are negative for them) only shows up for the model producer

isk517 6mo ago

I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.

dominotw 6mo ago
i call BS on this story
- elictronic 6mo ago
  They polished the turd more than stating, but the bones are real.
- re-thc 6mo ago
  I call AI on this comment
  - dominotw 6mo ago
    why?
    - wetpaws 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - pfdietz 6mo ago
      Imitating your own utter lack of explanation or evidence?
- DANmode 6mo ago
  I don’t. Things that rhyme with this have indeed been happening at the biggest names.
- mrandish 6mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  - aspensmonster 6mo ago
    >This article is about statistics and government policy. For Nazi analogies in internet discussions, see Godwin's law.

lbrito 6mo ago

Exactly this. And the fact that it is an industry-wide meme at this point makes bright red flashing lights and klaxons go off on my mind that a catastrophic reckoning can't be too far. There's not enough money in the world to keep this up for too long.

andrethegiant 6mo ago

Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.

andai 6mo ago
Obligatory: Negative 2000 Lines of Code https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252
- syntheticnature 6mo ago
  Versus my sibling comment to yours, I actually sent that to some internal folks after the bit about AI+total lines committed was said.
  - dijksterhuis 6mo ago
    was there any kind of response or reaction to that? it’s something i would have done and probably wouldn’t have gone well. xD
    - syntheticnature 6mo ago
      I didn't send it very high up the chain (and was looking for a job at the time anyhow) but mostly got back snickers from peers and an "I know, but this is a directive from above"
  - s1ngular1ties 6mo ago
    I’m surprised that lines removed isn’t something your bosses at the time weren’t also advocating for, TBH. I don’t blame you for looking around.
- jimbokun 6mo ago
  Timeless classic.
syntheticnature 6mo ago

bluGill 6mo ago

My dad worked at a company that had their own travel agency (early 90s when you needed a travel agent for reasons that no longer apply), and he was often booked on the more expensive flight because the travel agency made more money. More than once he could have got first class for less on a different flight but company policy didn't allow him to fly first class. We have always been living in bonkers time.

glenngillen 6mo ago
Most big companies still have travel agencies/companies manage their corporate travel. I can’t remember who we used when I was at Amazon, but I made a similar complaint to my manager once given I could fly cheaper in a higher class on a different airline (also one I had heaps of points with so I would have preferred it because I’d be able to upgrade further and/or use the lounge). Turns out the price I saw in the booking portal isn’t actually what Amazon paid. It’s kinda more like a rack rate listing. But then there’s all kinds of discounting/cash back that happens on the backend based on the amount of travel booked each month.
varispeed 6mo ago
I used to know someone whose parent worked at travel agency (also 90s) and their whole immediate family could book trips wherever, but only economy class.
badc0ffee 6mo ago
I worked at a tech company in the early 2010s that had its own travel agency.
jimbokun 6mo ago
We have always been living in the Dilbert and/or Office Space universe.

dehrmann 6mo ago

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."

treis 6mo ago

If we suddenly went from rail travel to jets that's exactly what would happen. We'd go from 0 to all the business flights that happen today. Everyone would be under enormous pressure to not be a laggard.

cucumber3732842 6mo ago
I washed a former intelligence agency person get interviewed on a youtube talk show and (tangential to the policy subject being discussed) they they said that's basically how it was after 9/11. We couldn't onboard people fast enough to figure out how to spend the money so while we were doing that we flew first class half way around the world to waterboard people with bottled water. The people authorizing it didn't care. They were spending X to fight terrorism. The public was never gonna see the nitty gritty breakdown. That's basically how it seems to be with AI. Just replace "spent X fighting terrorism" with "spent X implementing AI workflows" or "invested X in AI" or whatever. Nobody actually knows or cares just how far the dollars are going.
- saltcured 6mo ago
  I think this version is getting very close to The Emperor's New Clothes Subscription in terms of how transparently the leadership are displaying their delusions.

jmyeet 6mo ago

You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]? Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used. I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager. [1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-people-using-lines-of-code-as-his-metric-15c17254ed33 https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...

malfist 6mo ago
In many many many cases it's not the manager choosing to do that. Its our brilliant job creator class demanding that he does
- jmyeet 6mo ago
  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.
  - lljk_kennedy 6mo ago
    Bullshit work, in other words.
xp84 6mo ago
LoC can occasionally give you signal. For instance, imagine you are joining a new team or company so you don't know how much oversight your predecessor did. If you ask an engineer how they spend most of their time and they say "Mostly just writing code" and you look at GitHub and it says they've made 3 minor commits in the past quarter, that person is lying and your predecessor was incompetent (quite possibly both of them have been MIA from their responsibilities for months). No, I'm not talking about the engineer who can point to significant contributions outside of code: writing technical specs, leading architecture discussions, etc. I'm talking about the ones who just say they're just coding, but are actually not working at all. TL;DR LoC and commit count etc can be used only to flag for review likely cases of quiet quitting.

dkarl 6mo ago

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make them more productive. Incentivizing people who are already using AI to use as many tokens as possible does seem a little crazy, though.

com2kid 6mo ago
There is a limit somewhere, but I keep finding more and more ways to use AI. Not just coding, but things like "here is my teams mandate, go through all my company's slack channels, linear tasks, notion pages, and recent merges in got, summarize any work other teams are doing that intersect with my team's work." That'll burn a lot of tokens. Set that up to run once or twice a week and give a report.
- thinkharderdev 6mo ago
  Sure, findings ways to burn tokens is not hard. Even finding ways to burn tokens on things (like your example) which are actually useful is not hard. But what is the ROI on that from the company perspective. I mean, you could have also hired an intern to do the job of collating this report every week. But if you went to your boss and asked to hire someone to do something, they would, reasonably, ask what the value of that thing is and whether it justifies more headcount. But we're in this bizarro world where the bosses are basically saying "go hire more people, even if you don't have specific high-value things for them to do. Just create make-work jobs for them!" It's wild.
swatcoder 6mo ago
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 there doesn't seem to be a convincing revolution in the quantity or quality of mature software being delivered. Combine that puzzling impressions of outcomes with a sense, for many, that they don't feel like they have a personal problem that warrants a new tool, and you end up with a pretty earnest and defensible indifference. To get hold out engineers using AI, the industry needs to be focused on demonstrating relatable workflow improvements and demonstrating practical improvements to finished work product. Instead, policies like token use incentives just rely on luring them into pulling the slot machine handle with the expectation that once they do, they'll join the cadre of other converts who justify their transition with subjective improvements and intermediate metrics.

akomtu 6mo ago

IMO, the investors behind AI play the Uber game: they subsidise the AI costs and inject it into all facets of society they can get their hands on. They can tell the execs to increase AI usage at any cost. Their bet is that we'll become AI addicts with athrophied brains before they run out of money. Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what we are billed in our homes. So while you're happy generating mountains of AI slop, somewhere there is a datacenter boiling a river. I'd compare this to a new patented formula of water that's nobody asked for, and the patent owners are trying to replace all water supply with their crap before we wake up.

krupan 6mo ago
But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
vharuck 6mo ago
No need to invoke a hypothetical water example, just look to how Nestlé pushed baby formula in developing countries¹: >For example, IBFAN claims that Nestlé distributes free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

866-RON-0-FEZ 6mo ago

> 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. I had a manager like this once. He didn't last very long, but it was without a doubt the most fun six months of my career.

fooker 6mo ago

This would be hilarious if a bunch of companies did not already do exactly this with exec travel. And academics do this all the time when travel has to be funded from grants. One reason it works out like that for travel funding is that it’s often the ‘use it or lose it’ kind of funding. If you do not use all of the funds allotted, you can’t ask for more and could realistically get less.

AlexandrB 6mo ago

I wonder where in business school they teach you to "measure inputs and try to maximize them", because that's basically what's happening.

xp84 6mo ago

Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI. Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done. Just looking at the work output - how many story points, tickets, how many new bugs are opened, etc. has not become any less relevant a metric for productivity with AI. If you're a skilled and proper user of AI those numbers would be changing in the right direction, compared to before you had it.

svachalek 6mo ago
All those numbers are equally gameable and terrible metrics for productivity. With any of those, as with AI spending, you've got to look at actual results qualitatively. There's no shortcut.
- jimbokun 6mo ago
  The eternal evergreen lesson of managing software developers, and knowledge workers more generally.
autoexec 6mo ago
> It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI. If some guy decides to spend a bunch of money bringing AI tools into the company things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. He's sure not going to get recognition and a massive bonus for it. If on the other hand, he can put some numbers in a spreadsheet or powerpoint showing that employees are using AI all the time and profits are up again this quarter, maybe he can take some credit for that or at least keep his boss or the company's shareholders from questioning the wisdom of dumping so much cash into those AI products.
- andrekandre 6mo ago

kingleopold 6mo ago

because it's come to CFO's as "free debt" aka fiat printing. They need to spend thisfree fiat to keep buble going. I'm sure some inv. banking team internally assured too. $Trillion instuitions have access to free printer now, you and I don't. This is different world since unlimited printer started in 2020. All debt math is fake now because they can create fiat money out of nothing, literally.

autoexec 6mo ago

> It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Some companies might just have been scammed by the marketing that told them that AI would make all their employees 10,000x more productive and save them billions and when that didn't happen the assumption was that it's because employees weren't using the magical AI as often as they should be. Other companies, especially those working on their own AI products, might want employees to use AI as much as possible because they hope it will provide them with the training data they'll need to eventually replace most or all of those employees with the AI. Punishing workers who refuse to train their AI replacement might make sense to them because even though it's costly right now they expect the savings down the road to be much much greater.

malfist 6mo ago

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

Sharlin 6mo ago
Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.
- lapetitejort 6mo ago
  Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds
spaniard89277 6mo ago
Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man. It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.
- rightbyte 6mo ago
  It is not their money though. It is the stock owners' so they don't care either.
mynameisash 6mo ago
> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.

01284a7e 6mo ago

I think a lot of these execs have equity in Anthropic... and the dumb ones that don't are just "keeping up with the Joneses" so to speak.

twa927 6mo ago

It's like if class-based society materialized within the IT. And the manager class collectively pushes the narrative of AI replacing ICs. Note that it has beaten capitalism, making rational choices to increase earnings has lost to this AI dream.

chadgpt3 6mo ago
Note that propagandizing managers was a rational choice by AI companies to increase the revenue of AI companies.

ljsprague 6mo ago

I've definitely been in situations where managers tell me to "spend X amount before the end of the year." They don't want higher ups to think they can cut our budget.

deleted 6mo ago

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crabbone 6mo ago

You'd be surprised... I worked for an international (mothership in the UK, later acquired by the US) company, which had... sort of a similar policy. So, the (mothership) company acquired a lot of satellite companies, all in banking business. All over the world. Then they figured their CEO was corrupt, got in problems with the law, got kicked out. While they were waiting for the new "real" CEO to step in, they let some "interim" CEO to take his place. New new (interim) CEO didn't seem to have a clue about the business she was supposed to run, nor did she care. She knew her time was running out, and she figured she'd spend it traveling the world and partaking in fine dining in every corner of the world the company's tentacle could reach. But, to make it seem more plausible, she, sort of, created a policy of "experience exchange", which sent random troupes of select individuals from different branches of the company to "exchange experience" with another similarly randomly assembled troupe. Of course, the company picked the bill when it comes to lodging and dining. Our inconsequential branch in Israel saw a pilgrimage of high-ranking banking managers from all over the world, but, mostly the wealthier parts of it. Some didn't even bother to show up in the office though, and proceeded straight to the banquet hall of the most expensive hotel on the Tel Aviv beach. To be fair though, the interim CEO got the boot even before her time was supposed to end, but it was serendipitously close to the acquisition by the US company, and so she was let go as part of a "restructuring" and "optimization"... but it was a crazy year!

xnx 6mo ago

Good time to be a sane company then. "Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake." and all.

uuyy 6mo ago
awesome phrase

MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago

People think we’re living in oh so capitalist times, why then does everything smell soviet.

sph 6mo ago
Horseshoe theory

osigurdson 6mo ago

It seems like a natural result. People have been trying to use dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time. Therefore, "part 1" was already in place. Now, something even easier to track is available (token usage). So, just throw token usage on the dashboard and tell people that higher is better - what other outcome would you possibly expect?

12_throw_away 6mo ago
> dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time I'm actually a little curious about how long it has been. Bad managers have always prioritized irrelevant metrics, of course, but I have a feeling (backed by no data, just vibes) that management in general crossed a point of no return as soon as "data-driven" became a cross-industry buzzword. Like, I vaguely remember a time when consumer interactions didn't always come with a request to fill out a survey (with the results getting turned into a number and fed into a dashboard somewhere). And then that changed, and now everything must turned into a number and that number must go up.
- osigurdson 6mo ago
  "Data driven" essentially means "scalar driven". There is nothing wrong with it if your chosen scalar is a proxy for anything that matters. Of course, usually no one can explain this mapping.

deleted 6mo ago

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recursivecaveat 6mo ago

Management has confided in me that token usage is a secret performance metric. At the same time I'm getting emails from infrastructure people about prompting techniques to get LLMs to speak more concisely to save the company money lmao. I'd prefer a video essay mode that bulks everything up. Two years ago everyone would have told you that 'impact' was the way to measure people, and been aghast at tracking inputs like hours. Say what you will, but at least showing up at 8 didn't cost the company money. Today I see people spending time and money vibe coding tools in search of a problem, just to spend tokens and demonstrate that they're on board with the singularity.

dtnewman 6mo ago

This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main). (If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.) Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

stephenhuey 6mo ago
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.
- dtnewman 6mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ted_bunny 6mo ago
    How about a built-in AI assistant to answer my burning questions?
- sznio 6mo ago
  I want a in-browser Gemini version. For some reason my company doesn't count Gemini CLI use. I guess I'm supposed to copy code between my browser and my editor.
LikeBeans 6mo ago
Brilliant

dyauspitr 6mo ago

Nonsense. It’s a little bit of a loss leader so devs are hooked on it and it’s considered incredibly unproductive to work without one. Then they will just have 10 peoples jobs replaced with one guy.

overgard 6mo ago

Look it might seem silly, but the point is to get all our employees to be travel-pilled. They just don't know how great travel is yet.

eudamoniac 6mo ago

I'm making sure to use the most expensive model possible for the stupidest shit constantly. They asked for it!

OtomotO 6mo ago

The most important part being: "Because we FEEL this will make you more productive and we will make more money!" No evidence but more Lines of Code...

proteal 6mo ago

What if instead the manager was saying: “hey team I need you to all buy as many lotto tickets as possible!” I feel like that’s a better analogy. Some charlatans are buying fake tickets, but as a manager who wants to win big, I’m ok with some chicanery so long as the average person is trying to honestly meet my directive.

Skidaddle 6mo ago

It might be an ROI calculation, e.g. some people will waste tokens, but if it means someone else feels empowered to make something awesome or impactful, it will have been worth it.

2muchcoffeeman 6mo ago

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.

DanielHB 6mo ago
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.

naveen99 6mo ago

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.

zombot 6mo ago

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."