Amazon Employees Say AI Is Just Increasing Workload

Ancalagon

Let the execs eat cake. Stop correcting the AI's mistakes.

quantified

Come on. Machines that save physical labor can shorten the workday, but don't. They do lessen the calories you burn. Email, laptops and phones, all the cogntive and information inventions increase the workload. Either expectations rise (hello 3am Slack message) or employees are trimmed.

8note

interested in what part - i found making qcli agents to run through SOPs was real effective and turned 20min of busy work async. there might be a misattribution though. over time, id say the top down initiatives and quality at tracking them has gone up maybe 100% used to be one big project for getting rid of oracle that went for 3-7 years, but nowadays theres maybe 5 per month that disrupts the whole company at once. There's a desire to make that LLM/agent based, but the agent still doesnt cover all the communication overhead to actually communicate the change across teams for deployments, nor is it so seamless that you dont have to take time out to understand whats happening and schedule the work, even if it is sometimes just approving an automated code change

lovich

Yea. They are half assed tools that can do _something_ but aren’t a magic bullet, yet executives put guidelines in like increase productivity by 100% because they either believe or, want to manifest into reality, that they are a magic bullet for the deadly sin of paying employees. So now expectations are based on a false reality and everyone has to work harder.

HoldOnAMinute

This is happening to me too. I am so productive now, with this super power, that my reward is to be given more work.

ta9000

Duh, it’s Amazon. They love piling more work on. Why anyone still works there is beyond me unless they have no other choice. The word was out a decade ago.

wolvoleo

Not seeing this yet but our place is still trying to figure things out. We have strong KPIs on how much we use copilot so I must say woof woof to it every day or so to make sure it shows me as an active user (luckily it only shows the latest date someone has used it in each application). For programming I find it pretty useful. For MS Office it's so far not a hell of a lot more useful than clippy. The one thing it's good at is finding old stuff in SharePoint and Outlook but that's more a sign of how terrible the search functions are in those than of how good copilot is.

k32k

This year is either going to show that LLMs are really going to be super-transformative, or, the investment thesis is a basket-case. Strap in.

lowbloodsugar

> The AI tools ultimately helped the company in its quest for more output, but didn’t help the employee who is looking to ease her work burden That seems like it’s doing exactly what it is supposed to. Did people think that AI would give them a four hour work day? Have you not lived under capitalism for years now?