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Comment by isk517

17 hours ago

I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.

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isk517

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darth_avocado  16 hours ago

In my first job ever, I used to get my work done on time and leave. There were a few people who’d stay in the office until late and show up on weekends. Same output, but they got the promotions and my bonus got prorated.

This is the same thing.

  • j-bos  14 hours ago

    At least this one doesn't require spending the manhours moving dung from pocket to pocket, now we finally get credit for automating it!

  • jazz9k  13 hours ago

    While output may have been part of it. It's possible that by staying later (and working longer), they had better relationships with upper management.

    "I used to get my work done on time and leave"

    This sounds like you just wanted to get your work done and not foster any work relationships. This is fine, but you will not get promoted this way (as you've seen).

    Moving up in a company is 30% work and 70% networking/being likelable/noticed.

    I stopped that nonsense years ago. I work for myself now as a consultant. If I work more, I get paid more.

    • Loughla  13 hours ago

      I took a job with the state I live in recently because friends were promoted over competent employees (not even counting myself in that because they were just promoted to my level). New job is fully remote and has a clear path to advancement based on clear work based metrics.

      While it may be true that it's pretty standard, I'm convinced that any organization that relies more on face time and friendships than on actual skill is absolutely toxic.

      1 reply →

    • darth_avocado  11 hours ago

      You’re assuming a lot here. Getting your work done on time and leaving doesn’t equate to not being likable. If it was a popularity contest, I would’ve been around the same as the people who were pretend working, if not more. My partner and my director wrote me a recommendation letter before I left, which I wouldn’t attribute to something they’d do if I was a nobody.

      There are other reasons why the bad behavior gets rewarded. If the management is incompetent, they genuinely focus on the optics and not on the actual work. And if they are competent, they understand that the people who stay behind unnecessarily or come over the weekends are more exploitable in the long run. And if the people in management are the kind of people who stay behind unnecessarily, having a team full of people who do the same, rewards them as well.

    • watwut  11 hours ago

      You just described a bad management - the one that favors butt in seat and rewards lack of outside life over actual benefits to company.

bonesss  14 hours ago

That’s the part I don’t get: Engineers are smart enough to ask an LLM to ask other LLMs to ask other LLMs to load the policy manual then count the R’s in “LLM fork bomb”.

Additional story points completed per week, versus token-dollar spent, or some such combo would seem more sane.

But maybe they aren’t really tracking productivity, so tracking tokens is all they have? … I dunno which part of that is dumber.

  • idle_zealot  13 hours ago

    We never figured out how to track productivity anyway. Only macro-level success in achieving measurable goals. Any AI metric besides "are similar goals being met more quickly" is people encouraging specific behaviors decided a priori.

dominotw  17 hours ago

i call BS on this story