Hacker News Reader

Comment by eunoia | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com