Amazon has shut down an internal company leaderboard which ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work.
But using AI is all about cheating!
Why don’t they start a new leaderboard for amount of tax paid in each country?
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?
Ironic that cheating the system is exactly what Amazon execs are doing all day every day.
Execs and management lie at every town hall but then act appaled if someone lies on their resume.
Because they can, of course. They get to hold those with the weaker position, to a higher standard. Partly why they are terrified of us being in the stronger position, they project their fear that we would treat them as they treat us.
“Claude, write me a recursive AI prompt, then execute it.”
“I’ll be leaving for the day. Notify me if anything changes.”
Wouldn’t even need that. Just give it a mid-way complicated pile of nonsense with reasoning on, and it’ll be crunching on that for the whole day, burning money to do so.
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?
Goodhart’s law in action.
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…
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.
The neat thing is you don’t even need AI for that!
Look mom, I found the infinite productivity glitch. Production hit infinity% thanks to copy pasta!
AI once again taking jobs from human workers smh
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
Or, to put it succinctly, that which gets measured gets done, and the people in charge of measuring don’t know what’s important.
And then, eventually realizing this, they hire consultants for $$$, who offer two things, further tips for goosing numbers in silly ways, and also just direct advice for how to treat employees like utter shit, with a sharp, stainless veneer of “smart (because $$$ spent) business strategy”.
This hits so hard
If a metric becomes a target…
How many times do we have to teach you the same lesson, old man?
If a metric becomes a target, It ceases to be a good measure. If it ceases to be a good measure, It will want a glass of milk. If it wants a glass of milk, It will want a cookie. If it wants a cookie, It will need to become a target. If it needs to become a target, It will want to be a measure.
Hey I know that book!
I should probably spell it out, yeah.
It’s my favourite counterbalance to certain managers at my company regurgitating a half-understood “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (which is also almost entirely bullshit, but MBAs need a one-size-fits-all solution in order for the whole premise of their degree to work, so they attempt to make businesses conform to their methods instead of adapting their methods to the business). You can’t use a single measure (or only directly dependent measures), then tell people to improve that measure without figuring out just why it’s lagging and working on that instead.
ctrl + f + goodhartThere it is 👍
At least once more.
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.
I used 5 AI.
I used 2 AI before i used 2 AI, then i used 2 AI some more…
Like judging how good a driver is by the person with the longest distance a to b.
I mean I can say it’s not quite as guaranteed to be bad. IE distance from A to B is inherently bad, Most distance driven COULD mean you made more stops and did more good… or it could mean you took a horrible route, got lost and wound up crossing through the wrong state.
And here we have our employee of the year! He accidentally turned left instead of right, and ended up circumnavigating the entire globe. While most of you only use 2 miles to go from A to B, he used 24899. Isn’t that incredible?
or it could mean you took a horrible route, got lost and wound up crossing through the wrong state.
We don’t need a map to guide us.
Should it be snowing?
Hey, I’ve never seen the sun come up in the West?!
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.
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.
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.
Hey boss, I just got that new feature submitted for review. I managed to get it all on a single line of code! No, that one line has like 5000 characters, why do you ask?
“Sorry, can’t add that feature. That would take at least another 20 lines of code and I can’t lose my leaderboard ranking. Not with Steven in second place…”
I’ve said it for years: qualitative is better than quantitative. It’s just that it doesn’t look as nice and objective on reports. This obsession with numbers has been a bane on society for a long time.
I love this metaphor. totes stealing it. 😊
Nobody is asking the question “If you have to use AI that much, doesn’t that mean you aren’t very good at your job? 🤔”
I’m asking it all the time, but now only the AI will talk to me…lol.
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.
personally oversaw a 300% increase in lines of code committed. 40% reduction in delays and 60% reduction in feature implementation design cycles. As a result, increased company revenue by 30%
This is all the explanation you need on why they’re doing this bone headed shit. It’s not their problem in a few quarters when they jump ship after padding their resume on the company’s dime.
Sure. But I haven’t seen credible evidence that any of this drove any revenue.
Correct features, thoughtfully planned, and expertly executed, at the right time, sometimes drive new revenue.
AI slop is about 99% orthogonal to anything that helps drive revenue.
People will claim it helps with timing, but timing only works if the feature is correct and AI makes organizations that rarely got things correct in the first place even less likely to get things correct.
- you want to drive up adoption because
Right? How do you even cheat on a ruleset this dumb? You don‘t. It was a stupid contest from the start.
If they’re ranking you based on AI usage, they’re going to use that when they make decisions about raises and promotions. It may be a stupid contest but the employees are part of it whether they like it or not.
You can bet your ass I’d be trying to pad my numbers.
If they’re ranking you based on AI usage, they’re going to use that when they make decisions about raises and promotions.
By not promoting the people on top of the ranking who can’t do things without AI and waste a lot of resources, right?
…right?
Well they do stack ranking. The promotions are not guaranteed, but the firings for people at the bottom of the leaderboard are.
I mean miles driven is at least proportional to amount of useful work, more miles is more distance they’ve transported cargo. The AI usage leaderboard is useless.
Only if you assume that all miles are correctly headed towards the destination. 2 drivers are given the same 3 places to deliver packages to.
one drives 2000 miles, the other 50.
Admitted though now that I actually think about it, I guess we already have that level of stupid assumptions. After all the normal system of pay for many jobs is by the hour. Which I suppose has all the same flaws.
After all the normal system of pay for many jobs is by the hour. Which I suppose has all the same flaws.
Yes! It does. I felt that I had to get out of hourly billing consultancy programming, because I code so fast I would have gone broke.
No, because you can keep making circles around the hq. Miles go up, not useful at all.
Oh no, did using stupid metrics backfire because people are smart enough to game the stupid metric?
C-suite smart
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?
Measuring this and PR counts.
Ah yes, the “I want to see 1000 lines of code, even if it only takes 50” type of manager.
A steadfast replacement of engineers in leadership with MBA’s over the last decade plus.
Money found a place in the tech chain and has since ruined it.
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.
Time to start with one PR per line of code…
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.
I think because tokens are the only measure of AI use bean counters have
Moar tokens = Moar AI Literate
Even though it’s super fucking easy to burn through tokens and it’s such a garbage metric to begin with.
Ooh new phrase, TokenMogged.
Lmao, I can’t imagine why they have the “thinking” ai’s now.
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…
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.
rewards like new running shoes?
Actually you could exchange for general gift cards.
The companies generally know it can be gameified. Most people don’t bother, so they don’t really care too much.
Even if Fitbit only allowed data from wearables, you could still hook up a wearable to a fan or similar and get similar results. There’s not really a way to avoid it.
Also had a coworker who would put the Fitbit on the handle of his motorcycle while he was driving and the vibrations were interpreted as running.
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.
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.
I’d have called an employment lawyer. That can easily be discrimination for some medical conditions like crohns or IBS.
I mean just shit on the floor, they’ll get the message real quick. Just doin my job, efficiency is wet fart key to success!
What the fuck? Who has enough money/time in this world to keep tabs on toilet passage?
Jim Beam, Amazon, Tyson Foods…the list of companies that monitor employee bathroom breaks is not short
It was easy. The bathrooms were near the entrance, where the receptionist could see us and tick their boxes…
I remember reading about a case a few years ago where a warehouse couldn’t figure out which of its workers was just periodically taking shits in random corners of the warehouse. I think I’m starting to understand a different angle to that story, though.
Just imagine the scenario, you arrive at work and you see your boss at your desk with a smirk on his face. “Hello Carole, starting today I want you to keep tabs on those bathrooms got it?👏🙂”
But he, it’s 2026 now. We have AI toilets. The more often you have the runs, the more tokens you can use there. Go get your daily dose of castor oil and become a high-ranker.
Prime opportunity to leave some toilet paper on the receptionist’s desk after each visit.
Sounds like call centers.
With wireless microphones, maybe you can keep talking on the toilet. The company could even provide you with a laptop or tablet to take with you. D:
the use of AI was always for cheating , what did they expect.
