[baconmania]

The implication that tokenmaxxing was an intentional and thoughtfully considered approach rather than blind hype-following by an overpaid manager class who are too far removed from value to understand the downsides of LLMs is hysterical beyond belief.

[SR2Z]

I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust.

The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used.

I'm sure there were some people cargo-culting this stuff, but suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting.

[cyphar]

Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world.

(Of course, we've all had bosses that went to some marketing seminar and come back having been tricked^Wsold into buying some wizz-bang widget that we need to now integrate because of a sunk-cost fallacy, but I thought everyone was on the same page that this is not how normal procurement was supposed to work.)

> the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used.

That is way too charitable, people were being fired based on these metrics and people were absolutely talking about token burn as being a metric for productivity (do I really need to link the Jensen Huang quote?). That isn't an indication of this hysteria being based on "just trying to see if the tools work".

If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?

[dijksterhuis]

> If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?

because that would require actually admitting that employees are the people in an organisation who are responsible for the success of that organisation, rather than the people higher up the org chart.

[HDThoreaun]

The logic of trusting employees who are worried that power tools will replace them to utilize power tools effectively is completely backwards in any sane world. People don’t like change, sometimes it needs to be forced on them.

[agentultra]

Doubt. People brought in all kinds of web applications in the early Web 2.0 era because corporate IT was being too stingy (for a lot of reasons). People will find efficiencies on their job on their own. No need to denigrate them.

[dijksterhuis]

> who are worried that power tools will replace them

maybe, just maybe, it would have been a better idea to engage with employees first rather than posting on linkedin about how everyone is going to lose their jobs.

cos it's the kinds of people trying to force this stuff on employees that are the ones who have been shouting about that from the rooftops.

[paulddraper]

Because those power tools had just been invented and no one had experience with them.

Though in theory power tools are faster than hand tools.

[JoshTriplett]

So do a workshop on power tools, measure their efficacy and the quality of the result, do some demonstration videos on power tools, get people to compare, seek feedback on their usage. Don't count electricity and sawdust, or you'll find people getting very good at expensively turning blocks of wood into sawdust.

[trescenzi]

The level of trust in leadership is remarkable. There’s reasonable ways to have people try power tools. Have one team use power tools and another hand tools and see the outcome.

The mandate was literally “the more sawdust you create the more money you’ll make”. Nothing of value is learned by that mandate. Sure it’ll make people use power tools but it won’t cause anyone to learn how to use them to make furniture.

They might understand the danger of bad metric but that doesn’t mean they aren’t victims of them. If there was intentionality here it was lazy as hell at best.

[hcs]

> If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust.

Or count the fingers, I guess. It's all fun and games until someone looses AI.

[Arainach]

> the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting

They don't. They want some metric to support what they want to do and don't care about good metrics at all.

I've spent the vast majority of my career in FAANGs and it's been the pattern everywhere.

Right now my org has a senior director who is constantly battering managers to tell their reports to fill out the weekly surveys.

Why are the employees not filling out the surveys? Because instead of the old once a year large survey with questions about various levels (including local teams where management cared about the numbers and I could see the actions they took) we now get a survey every week with questions that are meaningless and I have no answer for.

"How does team X deliver on its priorities"?

Team X has O(10K) peoples and a barely countable infinity of projects. Most of which I don't know about and most of which I'm not supposed to know about since things are compartmentalized. So I don't know what team X's priorities are, I don't know how they deliver on them, and I never will know. Asking me and my colleagues is a waste of time and money.

...but none of that matters because the directors want "data" and they want a dashboard showing that we're all giving them "data".

[geophile]

Bad managers, in general, grab a metric and then unthinkingly optimize it. I’ve never worked for FAANG, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have bad managers too.

[mh2266]

> suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting.

from my time in FAANG... that seems about correct. Probably the people at the absolute top don't want to just pointlessly burn tokens, but pass that down the chain and eventually the rumor mill turns that into "tokens are an input for your performance review" and people start running Wiggum loops to fix minor typos or linters or something—especially if you do it at a time when every company seems to be doing layoffs.

[apsurd]

> but suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting

You're far too charitable. Understanding has nothing to do with it. Big companies are too far insulated from bad metrics. Middle managers get away with anything and everything because their decisions are too far removed from reality. And they're nowhere to be seen when the other shoe drops. And they'll just leave to a promotion elsewhere if they stay and results are bad.

Everything is far removed from reality in bigco. So you get a bunch of theater and house-playing with "data-driven" posters up on the wall. It's a show that everyone is aware of and seemingly we all still attend.

[BobbyJo]

Yeah, the rationalization after the fact is kind if absurd. IME, the reasoning underlying tokenmaxxing at the corporate level was "we need to leverage AI as much as possible as fast as possible because we're scared our competitors will find some leverage before us".

Definitely not some measured, long term, rational out of the gate.

[tough]

Worse, tokenmaxxing has been pushed by the labs hoping to charge those tokens by the pound on their API prices eventually, even if temporarily hiding such costs behind "highly subsidized plans" or frequent bug-induced "reset buttons"

[Anon1096]

I would wager most if not all of the tokenmaxxing was done on enterprise API priced plans, not subscription plans. You can't actually token"max" if you are limited in the amount of tokens you can use per 5 hours.