alt Hacker News> They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards.
This measuring of tokenmaxxing as a proxy for something beneficial to the company has got to be the single dumbest thing I have ever heard of in my entire software career.
It would be like some company in the dot com era measuring employee's internet download traffic as a proxy for productivity or internet-pilledness.
Why not just reward employees based on who's submit the largest expenses claims? That might have some correlation to work too, right ?!
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They used to measure loc, but this is even dumber than that. The charitable explanation is they just want to make sure nobody is completely avoiding AI use.
It's truly bonkers: the reverse of a budget. It is like rewarding the people who spend the most money.
In the corporate world it's impossible for any one person to tell what's going on across multiple domains due to the complexity. If I tell you the Zorbulon API is creating 30% more flargs (which is critical for Twiddle operation), I often just have to take your word for it.
Hell, I'm in the bowels of Google as an IC and it's hard to understand what adjacent teams are doing. Even harder for management that never gets their hands on anything.
So while you know engineers are probably bullshitting you with fake work, you can at least turn around and tell your supervisor the numbers. It's all a game of plausible deniability.