But using AI is all about cheating!
Why don't they start a new leaderboard for amount of tax paid in each country?
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.
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?
I love this metaphor. totes stealing it. 😊
It only makes sense if
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.
Like judging how good a driver is by the person with the longest distance a to b.
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 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.
At least once more.
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?
I don't understand how they don't know that as soon as you make a metric, people will try as hard as they can to game it, making the metric useless.
"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.
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
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!
Replying to your comment to hit my required comments per day goal.
K, congratz dude.
Oh no, did using stupid metrics backfire because people are smart enough to game the stupid metric?
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?
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.
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.
Time to start with one PR per line of code…
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.
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.
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?
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 mean just shit on the floor, they'll get the message real quick. Just doin my job, efficiency is wet fart key to success!
I'd have called an employment lawyer. That can easily be discrimination for some medical conditions like crohns or IBS.
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
the use of AI was always for cheating , what did they expect.
I used AI to do all the AI for me and I won AI and now reward is fired...
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