One of the KPIs of my job is how well I integrate AI into my team. My boss automatically gets my AI usage from reports on the admin centre of our M365 instance. I was asked last week why I had 2 days of zero Copilot queries. I had to type up an explanation lest this gets recorded as me being non compliant.
Thinking I will need to build an agent that does some tangentially related questioning daily so that I don’t get written up or cross examined again.
Did you use AI to come up with the explanation?
No but I definitely should have haha. Would have improved my metrics.
I’ve heard meta engineers get judged on metrics like how many comments they made on PRs. So, engineers set up their agents to comment on every new PR. Now every PR in the company has thousands of repetitive comments on it.
Also, to meet this tokenmaxxing quota, engineers are setting up their agents to run all night long while they sleep.
I’ve heard hints they sometimes give GPU farms busywork, to meet utilization targets apparently stipulated in sales contracts.
Fuck y’all, I’m Tolkienmaxxing.
picks up a copy of The Silmarillion and starts reading
That’s my preferred strategy too. Currently building lego Rivendell, reading the Hobbit to my kid and looking for a new LotR edition to buy. (I want a modern Dutch edition with separate map, but it doesn’t seem to exist.)
That’s how I read it first and was confused!
*Cue They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard* 😎🥳🤘
Ugh why does everything need to be “____maxxing”?
I hate this terminologymaxxing, too. /s
Maxmaxxing
[Crysis voice] MAXIMUM. MAXING.
what have you not taken the max pill? are you a lame little maxcel?
Don’t want to start maxx-gate
Or armaxxgeddon
IKR minning is where it’s at.
Most people have learned by now, that “lines of code“ is a terrible metric for evaluating productivity. Why are we doing the exact same thing with AI tokens now?
Before ai, my company’s misguided kpi was the number of merge requests
At least that one worked well for me since I’m generally making many small changes to an existing code base
You would be surprised to know how many managers still rely on this metric, even if it’s not part of their KPIs.
Because companies have been talking up how their adoption of AI is going to make them faster and more able to capitalise on opportunities in order to prop up their valuations for a while now and it seems to work as far as share price goes.
Being able back up this talk with metrics showing that their employees are all in on AI reinforces this, since the share price is the metric the business optimises for over product development employee reviews will index on this over cost effectiveness, and at most big tech companies engineers are very much making every decision with an eye to performance review optimisation (i.e. how it will affect their next review rather than the product they are building)
There is also some lesser incentives in that meta employees care directly about the meta share price since a lot of their compensation is in the form of RSUs.
I’m not condonig this as a desirable state of affairs, just explaining the incentive curve that the actors are following.
Because middle manglement has a constant compulsive need to justify their existence by finding new ways and metrics to “manage”.
I’m no developer, just so some casual scripting for my job, but lines of code being a performance metric is a hilarious notion. Like, the indicator of good code is that it’s efficiently written in a small number of lines. It’s similarly just as easy to waste tokens on nothing of value.
I love this story:
A division of AppleComputer started having developers report LinesOfCode written as a ProductivityMetric. The guru, BillAtkinson, happened to be refactoring and tuning a graphics library at the time, and ended up with a six-fold speedup and a much smaller library. When asked to fill in the form, he wrote in NegativeLinesOfCode. Management got the point and stopped using those forms soon afterwards.
At least luddites broke the machines in their protest.
Feeding machines to get a pat on the head from the bosses is seriously fucked.
I guess anyone working for ‘meta’ was already a cunt to start with though.
All this time I assumed destroying the world was just an easily dismissed, unfortunate consequence, turns out it’s their main objective after all.
Prompt engineer job description: Vibecode your tokenmaxxing
I need to start doing this… I think I recently got flagged for not using AI enough…
Do you not use it enough because yet get bad results? I discovered that, no matter how smart the LLM might be, its first attempt is never its best work. Tell it to review its work (or its plan, if using planning mode). If it makes any changes, tell it to review its work again. Repeat until there are no more changes.
(You don’t actually have to do this repetition manually; just tell the AI to do it in a loop. I recommend making it into a
SKILL.mdso you don’t have to explain the loop every time.)With these loops, I get better results AND burn lots of tokens. (Yes, it feels strange that excessive token consumption is actually considered a good thing)
Yeah I can see the temptation. Ai usage is part of my kpis and is the one place I got dinged on my review. I thought i was insulated as a “partly coding” position, but they put me against full time coders so I look even worse
I guess they’re trying to force change, make us figure out how to make it work. The skeptic in me thinks it rewards people who have time to screw around, but when I set aside a week to see what I can do, I did increase my ai use.
I did find some useful tasks that also increase my “agentic” score! But my “quality” score (ai generated lines I accept) is stick at zero. We currently pay a flat fee but that’s changing next months to pay per token
You are scored on how many ai lines you accept?
Hopefully not. The kpi just states usage.
Looking at the report provided by the ai vendor, there are several measures that might apply. There is also a “quality” measure that seems to be the number of lines accepted. I don’t have any indication that they card about that, but it is there
Not sure this fully qualifies as a perverse incentive or malicious compliance, but it tickles my schadenfreude sense all the same
AI going from ‘It’ll make everything so much more efficient!’ to deliberately doing everything as inneficiently as possible is just… idk beyond even satire at this point.
Desperate corpos do desperate things
Not surprising at all. Every worker everywhere does this if they have some sort of ‘tokens’ they need to consume. Helpdesk ticket count is one pretty common with IT-folks and it’s easy enough to boost if you just write one from every single small thing you’ve done for the day.
None of these obviously are beneficial for the actual work getting done, but as the game is ‘make KPI numbers look good’ then that’s exactly what gets done.
Exactly. I’m not helpdesk anymore, thank god, but my team still has a ton of day to day work that’s tracked in the ticketing system.
Well, for years I’ve been stuck in project hell, doing work that isn’t easily fit into the ticket system. My last review my boss said I had only closed about 1/3 of the tickets of the next lowest person on my team, and that it doesn’t matter except we have a new exec watching that shit, so I have to make it look better.
So the next project I got, I chose to do something manually that I could have automated, that required the help desk to open tickets direct to me about 2-4 times a day whenever someone new needed access to the system I was setting up, until the project was done.
A week in I automated the “manual” task anyway and had a bunch of tickets I could close with a copy-pasted resolution.
I would feel bad, but my co-workers game the metrics even worse than I do.
Am doing something related at work as we got the directive to actively use AI, so I might as well use the best model available, which happens to be very expensive. It’s also not so smart for our work so I have to kick it multiple times… What can I do, it’s part of my performance objectives now.
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