Amazon tells engineers to stop 'tokenmaxxing' to look productive

jqpabc123

They wouldn't need to tell engineers this if tokens were not being used as a measure of productivity. Do as we say, not as we do.

figassis

I get the concept of tokenmaxxing, but instill don’t get how you do that. Do people just do random work unrelated things with their company subscriptions? Or are they just intentionally inefficient at their work? And how would you go about telling an LLM to waste tokens?

blitzar

Amazon should stop ranking employees on the metric "number of tokens burnt"

0cf8612b2e1e

Amazon realized that true productivity comes from RTO.

nasretdinov

Wait until management learns that code itself also is geberally a liability and requires maintenance, is a source of bugs, etc. That's basically why measuring lines of code has been frowned upon for a long time as a measure of developer productivity.

runamuck

I worked for a company where management and peers rewarded "looking busy" vs. actual productivity. Lord help you if someone caught you sitting at your desk silently contemplating deep Architectural decisions. I hated that job.

thewileyone

Just like "lines of code" should never be a KPI.