Hacker News Reader

Comment by laweijfmvo | Hacker News Reader

I work at a FAANG (not Amazon), and have heard this a lot, both internally and publicly. Except, never officially from anyone that mattered (leadership). It always starts with a rumor and/or someone (internal) creating a dashboard/metric, and blows up from there. I've even heard leaders proclaim that it's NOT what they're looking at, and that you better NOT be wasting those expensive tokens.

Now, they might be; they've certainly used silly metrics in the past (LoC, commit count, etc.) without ever fully acknowledging it. But I don't believe that it's as simple as more tokens = more better.

View on HN

Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams.

We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings. Haven't opened them to everyone yet as some kind of leaderboard, so at least that's nice.

Lots of rumors token spend will be involved in perf reviews. Leadership denies it... but then holds more meetings telling us how important it is to increase our token spend and discussing inadequacies from the token spend dashboards.

Interesting. When you say leadership along with manager meetings, are you referring to managers, who might just be exacerbating the rumors I mentioned, or actual company leadership, like Directors, Vps, etc? And are they saying “AI usage”, or explicitly “Token count”?

Executive leadership talking to the managers in their orgs.

I wish I was kidding, but they really are pushing increased token usage. Like I said, we push back. When we push back they acknowledge it's a bad metric and lately have started to add qualifiers about how we don't want to burn tokens unnecessarily and in fact we should be looking to use tokens more efficiently.

And then in the next meeting we are once again talking about how to encourage our teams to use more tokens.

The goal is to increase AI usage of course, but the only metric they track to measure progress on that goal is token usage. Also endless presentations of vibed tools that we never hear about again after a week. Get a lot of those too.

I do not want FAANG and FAANG does not want me. So, as a goblin, I must ask: how is your and your team's morale doing?

People in FAANG likely worked hard to get in there or lucked out or some combination of both. I feel like my soul would be crushed if I hacked away at Leetcode for months on end just to babysit and gaslight some algorithm into asymptotically following my instructions.

Mixed bag. Some engineers are excited about the company giving them a blank check to explore a new tool. Some engineers are upset because they feel their skills are being devalued by leadership.

Overall I would say most are exploring the new tools while waiting for the madness to subside. Work in $BIGCORP for long enough and you get used to leadership being out of touch with the work on the ground.

Engineers in $BIGCORP jobs are by and large not the hacker types anymore btw.

I work in a FAANG. My sense is that most of my teammates are loving the AI. Personally, I hate the AI tools and the hype around them and what it has turned this job into. My own morale has never been lower in the 7 years I've been there and I'll probably try to switch careers or semi retire sooner or later.

I have also considered switching careers, but my employer is not really enthusiastic about AI, so I am trying to hold out for as long as I can. As in, my employer does not pay for nor use any AI at all.

I feel like the economic value of talent is about to be in an interesting position sometime in the not so distant future. Perhaps talented engineers use AI is a more talented manner, but I am not sure that is entirely true nor will it remain that way forever.

I'm in a large-ish peer group for engineering managers. AI token over-use is a growing problem.

The problem explodes at any company that puts up a token use leaderboard or hints that they might do layoffs for engineers that refuse to use AI tools. This triggers a race to use as many tokens as possible to stay ahead.

Anecdotally, the problem is worst among devs who read a lot of social media. Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and others are filled with recycled viral stories about companies going AI-native and firing people who don't use enough AI. Anxieties are high right now so nervous developers see this and think they must burn tokens faster than their peers to avoid an inevitable culling.

Enterprise consulting here, it is getting ridiculous, with forced trainings, workshops and hacktons to motivate use of AI in daily activities.

Stuff that could be easily done as shell scripts gets asked how could we make an agent out of it.

I recently left a FAANG. Shortly before I left (for unrelated reasons) the director of my org got scolded by the VP he reported to because token usage in his org was low. After that the ICs in my org were told to use ai for everything or there could be consequences for their careers.

I wonder if we will ever reach a point on society where tokens just become the universal currency. We will all work for tokens, pay our bills in tokens, make purchases in tokens, strippers will dance for tokens, etc..

I'm kidding, of course... but human stupidity is infinite, so...

Systems where the money is redeemable for something make a lot more sense than what we're doing with dollars. It's easy: you value the money if you value the thing it's redeemable for. When you exchange that kind of money with people, you know something about which values you share with them.

When it comes to dollars, it's hard to know what "value" even means.

> I recently left a FAANG.

Congratulations!

In our place it is really a thing and comes from leadership. They feel like they spent a lot on copilot and they want to see people using it.

It's too bad that they go with a safe enterprise option that is so deficient that the outcomes will be bad and lots of people will learn useless lessons that don't translate to state of the art tools and usage patterns

I tried to have copilot create a powerpoint slide with some content and a rough design idea. It created an empty powerpoint slide with the default template, told me to download it, then created a separate bit of text and told me to copy and paste it in (random bullet point nonsense), no design elements. Whereas claude actually created a slide, with color and formatting, and the content was generated and fit it. Copilot feels like Chatgpt 3.0

Yes the PowerPoint generation was one shot only, it would let you make one and then if you wanted to make changes it would tell you to do it yourself lolllll. I mean what's the point then. The only option was to roll a whole fresh try.

Not sure if this is still the case, I rarely use PowerPoint.

Yes agreed. It's actually the office version of copilot which isn't much to write home about.

Apparently the github one is more useful for its target audience.

GitHub's Copilot CLI is nice enough; now it is not as well-packaged as Claude Code, but I like being able to use their harness in my emulator of choice, and it gets better at the little stuff every week.

The GitHub one is trash

My friend at Google says they have a "ai-usage" dashboard that tracks everyone's ai token usage as well as aggregated per team, per org, etc. There's a sign on it that says "don't use this for perf reviews!" but I think everyone knows that that's exactly what they're going to use it for.

We got an email stating our managers would be monitoring our usage. I got an angry slack scolding for zero AI use, which was simply that I'd been signed on with an alternate version of my email, and they hadn't accounted for that.

I feel like it depends on the leader. I've definitely seen leaders value LoC beyond reason and cause worse, bloated codebases by rewarding cowboys with 10k line PRs.

Big companies have thousands of leaders. Many good, many bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com