Amazon tells engineers to stop 'tokenmaxxing' to look productive

(tomshardware.com)

21 points | by speckx a day ago ago

15 comments

  • runamuck 21 hours ago ago

    I worked for a company where management and peers rewarded "looking busy" vs. actual productivity. Lord help you if someone caught you sitting at your desk silently contemplating deep Architectural decisions. I hated that job.

  • figassis a day ago ago

    I get the concept of tokenmaxxing, but instill don’t get how you do that. Do people just do random work unrelated things with their company subscriptions? Or are they just intentionally inefficient at their work? And how would you go about telling an LLM to waste tokens?

  • jqpabc123 a day ago ago

    They wouldn't need to tell engineers this if tokens were not being used as a measure of productivity.

    Do as we say, not as we do.

  • akeel_mohamed 21 hours ago ago

    [flagged]

  • 0cf8612b2e1e a day ago ago

    Amazon realized that true productivity comes from RTO.

    • iugtmkbdfil834 21 hours ago ago

      It is funny how much companies move in tandem when it comes to this stuff.

  • blitzar a day ago ago

    Amazon should stop ranking employees on the metric "number of tokens burnt"

  • thewileyone 6 hours ago ago

    Just like "lines of code" should never be a KPI.

    • bradknowles 5 hours ago ago

      AWS did that, just before they switched to tokenmaxxing. One of the many reasons that I’m happy I don’t work there anymore.

  • nasretdinov 21 hours ago ago

    Wait until management learns that code itself also is geberally a liability and requires maintenance, is a source of bugs, etc. That's basically why measuring lines of code has been frowned upon for a long time as a measure of developer productivity.

    • pjmlp 15 hours ago ago

      Unfortunately that argument failed for offshoring, and nowadays most corporate consultancy always has an offshoring component.

      AI is here to stay even if the outcome is sloppy for some cases.

    • pvibby762 19 hours ago ago

      FIFY: Wait until management learns.