Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees

hereticles 25 points 13 comments June 02, 2026
finance.yahoo.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

Daishiman

A metric was introduced. A metric was maximized. The metric stopped being a proxy for anything. A new metric is to be introduced and likewise gamed.

ChrisArchitect

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315583

llbbdd

Kind of surprising. I had interpreted these tokenmaxxing initiatives at some of the larger companies as R&D investment, motivating employees to find the useful applications of a new technology with fairly broad applicability. Obviously some people gamed it, but I wonder if everyone gamed it or if opening the floodgates made for any useful discoveries.

jmchuster

I guess that tokenmaxxing phase has served its purpose, of forcing people's brains to go from "i will never use AI, it's scary and new and useless" to "i must learn to use it, this is the new normal, otherwise i'm getting fired". And now they're able to move to the phase of "let's now learn to actually use it effectively".

RattlesnakeJake

> What happened next was predictable in hindsight. Employees began inflating their scores through tokenmaxxing: running meaningless tasks through AI agents to consume tokens and climb the rankings. That was predictable in foresight.

HellDunkel

"normalised deployments," sounds even worse than tokenmaxxing

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
10,500 stories · 98,695 chunks indexed