Comment by belval
3 days ago
Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.
I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.
I get where you are coming from with this, but in my opinion being able to give feedback in a clear and concise fashion is a skill that people should have. LLMs will help you elaborate but they will also add their own flair by choosing the actual work. You can think "wow that's actually what a better person of me would have written" but you are biasing yourself based on what the LLM understood of your prompt focusing on form over substance.
But as the other comments mention it might just all be bullshit anyway.
The interesting thing about the LLM is that it uses its knowledge of our respective roles, overall product (which is public), and peer review process itself to refine and improve the output in ways I wouldn't have considered.
I always put a lot of time into reviews before. Should I not use the tool to make something even better (within realistic time commitment)?
If I use an AI to create some cartoon graphics for a slide, should I have bettered myself by learning graphic design instead?
> that aren't just BS
Having been on the receiving end of many of these, it absolutely is pure BS and I lose all respect for anyone who themselves have so little respect for their colleague's time as to subject them to the AI-written slop instead of actual genuine feedback.
The whole fucking point is to give them actionable feedback, both good and bad, for them to work on themselves, not some generic hallucinated summary of some bullet points you haphazardly threw together. I can copy/paste the review prompt into ChatGPT myself, thank you very much, I don't need you to do it for me and to pass it off as your own genuine thoughts.
I'll take your word on the reviews you actually received.
As for the commenter you are replying to, you dont have any specific information on the review. Yet you declared its hallucinated, generic, haphazardly thrown together, simply copy pasted, etc. Consider that your conclusions are based off an idea in your head and not his actual review.
Counterpoint: I'm not in the job of managing my colleagues, especially in paragraph-length business professional tone.
If a colleague gave me LLM responses instead of genuine feedback I would never ask them for a review again. Which may be what they were going for. But sadly this is not what I wanted.
Be better. Someone respected your opinion enough to go out and ask for it. Take a minute to reflect.
> we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you need to generate to deal with this silliness.
Why do you think this is what performance review cycles are?
Because Amazon notoriously does "stack ranking". Also, I personally have been in a company going through mass layoffs and they totally use the EoY peer review as the metric to choose whose heads cut.
obligatory citation (this was on HN a little while back) https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/11/03/metrics/
1 reply →
> people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
It's more complicated than this.
The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete. The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but it can be part of an effective workflow to write good feedback.
Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.
I bet the reviews are evaluated by AI too—AI writes, AI evaluates, what could go wrong? :)
I hope it drives a cultural revival in appreciation of laconicism.