alt Hacker News> FWIW in the face of these kind of mandates I have been using tokens but ignoring the output. So it's costing my employer money and they have a warped metric of whether the tool is actually useful.
What you're actually doing here, from my POV, is incentivizing your employer to use more invasive metrics when they tried to stay hands-off and mandate the absolute bare minimum of "uh, give it a shot and see if you think it's useful right now."
The analytics that Claude Enterprise exposes are far more intrusive than I would want to be subjected to as an engineer, so I rolled out a compromise. I don't even track who the active users are, currently.
But maybe you're right, and there are enough people sabotaging the metrics out of spite, that there's a reason they provide the other data.
I hope that the engineers in my org are more mature than that, and would be willing to just say "I'm not currently using it", but thanks for giving me something to think about.
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When the CEO, CTO and Director are all saying "everyone has to use AI" I think it's pretty naive to think people will speak out openly. The bare minimum would be making the tools available and letting people do their jobs.
Go ahead and spend more time collecting more granular metrics spying on your employees. Apparently there aren't more valuable things for you to do than micromanaging individual developers.
I think one side of the issues folks are having is that combined with the mandate to use these tools, there is also an expectation or assumption that the developers will instantly get X% more productive. Like, "you must use this tool and you will be twice as productive".
Where I work there as certainly been that kind of discussions, "we need to use AI for this, because no offense but you are simply not fast enough". And this from people who do not understand software development and has never worked with it. They have only read the online stuff about 20X speeds and FOMO. (And my workplace is generally quite laid back and reasonable. I am sure many other places are much more aggressively steered.)
>more invasive metrics
If you have accurate metrics to gauge developer productivity then use them.
But you don’t because if you did you’d be a billionaire.
What you have is metrics that can measure developer busyness. If you use those metrics all you’ll do is run your good devs off and keep the ones who can’t find new jobs.
So you’ll have to do what anyone who manages software teams has always done and trust your line managers to manage your devs.
When it comes to people wasting tokens, most people aren’t gonna to do it with the intent to fuck your metrics. But if you tell people you are measuring something they will find a way in increase that metric whether it results in anything productive or not.
> mandate the absolute bare minimum of "uh, give it a shot and see if you think it's useful right now."
That’s not the bare minimum, though. The bare minimum is: “if you are meeting or exceeding your job expectations, great work, keep using the tools that are working for you.”
To a productive employee, merely saying “just try out AI, it might help” feels like the boss saying “just try out astrology or visit a psychic for a reading. You might find it interesting.”