Definitely not some measured, long term, rational out of the gate.
The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used.
I'm sure there were some people cargo-culting this stuff, but suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting.
(Of course, we've all had bosses that went to some marketing seminar and come back having been tricked^Wsold into buying some wizz-bang widget that we need to now integrate because of a sunk-cost fallacy, but I thought everyone was on the same page that this is not how normal procurement was supposed to work.)
> the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used.
That is way too charitable, people were being fired based on these metrics and people were absolutely talking about token burn as being a metric for productivity (do I really need to link the Jensen Huang quote?). That isn't an indication of this hysteria being based on "just trying to see if the tools work".
If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?
Though in theory power tools are faster than hand tools.
The mandate was literally “the more sawdust you create the more money you’ll make”. Nothing of value is learned by that mandate. Sure it’ll make people use power tools but it won’t cause anyone to learn how to use them to make furniture.
They might understand the danger of bad metric but that doesn’t mean they aren’t victims of them. If there was intentionality here it was lazy as hell at best.
from my time in FAANG... that seems about correct. Probably the people at the absolute top don't want to just pointlessly burn tokens, but pass that down the chain and eventually the rumor mill turns that into "tokens are an input for your performance review" and people start running Wiggum loops to fix minor typos or linters or something—especially if you do it at a time when every company seems to be doing layoffs.
You're far too charitable. Understanding has nothing to do with it. Big companies are too far insulated from bad metrics. Middle managers get away with anything and everything because their decisions are too far removed from reality. And they're nowhere to be seen when the other shoe drops. And they'll just leave to a promotion elsewhere if they stay and results are bad.
Everything is far removed from reality in bigco. So you get a bunch of theater and house-playing with "data-driven" posters up on the wall. It's a show that everyone is aware of and seemingly we all still attend.
Most companies focused entirely on doing "what everyone else is doing" at best or "to see if Programmer Joe can be as productive as the entire team so we can fire the rest".
And many indeed fired employees in droves because they were "underperforming in token spend".
When everyone was reading about token leaderboards on all of their social media channels (include social news sites like Reddit and Hacker News) it created token anxiety even at companies that didn’t want a leaderboard. Programmers were afraid that their managers would be secretly ranking them based on token usage and they needed to pump up those numbers to avoid layoffs.
Once teams implemented token budgets in response it creates an ugly situation where a few people feel the need to use as many tokens as they can at the beginning of the budget window to stay ahead.
It’s really frustrating to have this phenomenon leak into a company that was never encouraging or looking for high token use.
employees who are on the ai bandwagon are there for the free management attention.
Management is cooked because the damn market is hard, money is tight and they can't afford to fight the top down love and $$$ thrown at AI.
If you zoom out, all the real money spent on energy to keep AI alive isn't going to be held in nvidia stock for too long. it will burst, but its stupid to time it.
Instead there was FOMO mass hysteria. Now there is a backlash. And a lot of time and money wasted.
Big Corporate managers are much more likely to have felt the need to “do AI” from their VPs, who in turn got it from the executive team, who have probably been under fire to produce a coherent magical AI strategy that makes to company scale infinitely while reducing costs. In that environment it’s much more likely to be copy-and-pasted charts from Gartner and buzzwords overheard at conferences, combined with the hope that somebody somewhere will eventually turn it all into something that resembles forward movement.
We are now seeing that Claude Code can do a LOT of heavy lifting in our day-to-day work, but the bulk of our employees are stuck cost-maxing and literally cannot "imagine how you are running into your session limits". "I'm fine with the $20/mo account."
There's a case for the cost-maxing has hurt our company.
the big tech companies needing to pump demand for compute.
This reminds me of the popular opinion on HN for return to office mandates as executives wanting to recover their real estate investments.
I agree, but for a completely different reason. A lot of executives simply chase trends. This was another trend they copied from each other. No reason to imagine they carefully studied the issue.
The whole tokenmaxxing thing started because Jensen Huang said insane things like having a single engineer spend 250k in tokens or he’d fire him; and that OpenClaw was basically AGI.
> No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget.
Yes the people forcing these mandates absolutely are this stupid because that’s what people like Jensen Huang, Peter Steinberger and Boris Cherney were touting. Seriously have you ever actually talked to an average C-Level about AI? They are absolutely cooked.
You’re the one that’s overthinking it.
Accenture was.
At the IC level, people don't sense the impending urgency for the overall business. They usually sense the urgency for themselves first. AI has completely changed the software industry in 6 months. We went from having AI write some code and copy/pasting to having AI write 99% of the code in 6 months. SaaS went from nice UX and CRUD code logic being a moat to these being nearly free.
Big software companies have to adapt to this new world or they will be outcompeted by smaller, newer, nimbler companies. That's what management is thinking. For ICs, they're usually thinking about their own jobs first.
There was demonstrably zero cost or consequence analysis, which is also why it was dialed back as soon as the (still) subsidized tokens became just slightly less subsidized, and the wise leaders realized they spent huge sums of money with no way of gauging ROI.
LLMs may have their use cases, but let's not make up free excuses for blithering idiots who, by any rights, should all be fired for cooking up money-burning policies that are textbook implementations of Goodhart's law.
Anyway, just needed to get that off my chest.
> Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.
> It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.
Trying to understand your justification for rejecting Hanlon’s razor.
Do you have a source for this?
Also tokenmaxxing was never an intentional and smart strategy employed by companies like you say. It was a mix of fear of missing out, signaling to investors they were in on the hype and recouping investmenets in data centers
Come on now. Let's not think that we are all smarter than management at these companies.
Outside of a few well run companies, it's hard not to feel like the average IC is smarter than their leadership.
Your livelihood now depends on tokens remaining subsidized. How long do you think your engineers will continue to have the independent ability to maintain your codebase if the tokens got 20x more expensive?
Buy and sip that intelligence straight from the tap.
Of course not. That is not what it achieved or could possibly achieve.
> Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough.
I agree it was about their irrational feelings.
No, it was a sinister way to manufacture your consent to cause cognitive atrophy in your employees so that you lose your ability to independently operate your business.
You'll come to realize this once they begin charging you more and more for tokens but you will probably not blame yourself for it.