alt Hacker NewsThe fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.
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One argument I have heard in favour of this is that management knew this would be a side effect, but that it's more important to have people engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible. You are effectively knowingly wasting money in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.
Depends on what they're trying to incentivise.
It's quite possible they aren't trying to measure performance but are literally just trying to increase token consumption to feed the bubble and hype.
Plus pressure employees may find new unique use cases for AI.
It's like if your goal is inflation, you give out tons of money and as long as its spent, you achieve your goal.
If it's stupid and it works then it's not stupid. Sometimes executives have to use blunt instruments to turn around the culture of a hidebound large organization. When Jeff Bezos sent his 2002 API mandate it might have seemed stupid at the time and yet it worked.
https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes...
Management loves numbers because they’re the only things you can objectively compare as X > Y.
It makes for pretty charts, extrapolations, and projections.
It doesn’t matter if the numbers are not particularly correct. As long as the data gathering step can be justified it’ll do. Though bonus points if making the number bigger is a good thing (v.s. tracking something like number of sev 1 issues).
I have recently played around with lots of data from measurements and one can totally dump everything into context and let Claude try to analyze data that way. It burns through a lot of tokens. It is smarter to save data to disk and let Claude write scripts that handles/analyzes the data. It’s much faster and the results are much better and you save a lot of tokens. But I guess Amazon prefers the first approach.
> You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.
I worked for a healthcare tech startup that made everyone wear fitbits and you got cheaper health insurance premiums if you averaged a higher # of steps every day. People were putting their fitbits on drillbits and whirring them around to log like 20,000 steps a day.
My current job is doing the exact same thing. My manager even showed me a tool with graphs showing token use and related metrics.
This is Matt Garman, the ultimate MBA. Bonus for sure tied to tokens-per-quarter, which is the 2026 equivalent of measuring engineers by lines of code...
This why AWS is bleeding good engineers for years. What is left is starting to look like Boeing post McDonnell merger...
They took out a quarter of their documentation page limited real estate, with AI doc shorts nobody asked for, nobody needs, and cant disable.
Goodhart's law in action.
Most productivity metrics are stupid, vain attempts at avoiding doing real management work. If you are actually interfacing with your subordinates regularly, as managers should, it will be obvious who is pulling their weight and who isn't, no need for arbitrary statistics that are easily gamed.
Or maybe they plan to review how effective high usage engineers have been next cycle and the tokenmaxxers will get bit in the ass when they have little to show for all their wasted tokens? Performance metrics can, and do, change on a dime and tokenmaxxing seems short sighted when management can look at old logs.
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So my assessment of the current mania is that it’s basically a management variant of Pascal’s wager.
If you as a “leader” refuse to go along with the crowd and you’re right, then after the dust settles you look like someone who guessed right. Oh and now we’re in a recession so you are probably having a bad time regardless. You maybe get one promotion, congratulations.
If you refuse to go along with the crowd and you’re wrong, you look like a Luddite, you probably got fired at some point along the way and your judgement reputation is hurt.
If you do go along with the crowd and the crowd is wrong, you are just in the same boat as everyone else. You are probably about the same as if you went against the crowd and you were right, possibly even better because it can take awhile to be proven right and you could be hurt in the middle.
So, I think, once something like this picks up enough steam, it’s just logical on a per individual basis for everyone to go along with it, regardless of how they feel about it internally.