Amazon has shut down an internal company leaderboard which ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work.
I worked once in a company where they noted down how many times each employee went to the toilet in a day. if you had the runs they would write you up. needless to say, I lasted just about 3 weeks before I quit.
This here sounds very similarly stupid.
I’d have called an employment lawyer. That can easily be discrimination for some medical conditions like crohns or IBS.
What the fuck? Who has enough money/time in this world to keep tabs on toilet passage?
Sounds like call centers.
With wireless microphones, maybe you can keep talking on the toilet. The company could even provide you with a laptop or tablet to take with you. D:
Jim Beam, Amazon, Tyson Foods…the list of companies that monitor employee bathroom breaks is not short
It was easy. The bathrooms were near the entrance, where the receptionist could see us and tick their boxes…
Prime opportunity to leave some toilet paper on the receptionist’s desk after each visit.
Just imagine the scenario, you arrive at work and you see your boss at your desk with a smirk on his face. “Hello Carole, starting today I want you to keep tabs on those bathrooms got it?👏🙂”
But he, it’s 2026 now. We have AI toilets. The more often you have the runs, the more tokens you can use there. Go get your daily dose of castor oil and become a high-ranker.
I remember reading about a case a few years ago where a warehouse couldn’t figure out which of its workers was just periodically taking shits in random corners of the warehouse. I think I’m starting to understand a different angle to that story, though.
I mean just shit on the floor, they’ll get the message real quick. Just doin my job, efficiency is wet fart key to success!
My company is doing this too. Measuring this and PR counts.
What’s it about technical leadership and having no fucking clue how anything works?
Measuring this and PR counts.
Ah yes, the “I want to see 1000 lines of code, even if it only takes 50” type of manager.
A steadfast replacement of engineers in leadership with MBA’s over the last decade plus.
Money found a place in the tech chain and has since ruined it.
I don’t get it. Are they rewarding people for using it more? It’s not really a tool to reward over using more or less. Just seems strange.
I think because tokens are the only measure of AI use bean counters have
Moar tokens = Moar AI Literate
Even though it’s super fucking easy to burn through tokens and it’s such a garbage metric to begin with.
Ooh new phrase, TokenMogged.
Lmao, I can’t imagine why they have the “thinking” ai’s now.
Time to start with one PR per line of code…
The further you get from the front lines the less you have a grasp on day to day operations, especially when the job changes. Double that for leaders that never held technical positions, and come from other areas that guide their view on things.
Then you have the power imbalance with a hierarchy, if someone is responsible for your job you are more likely to just say “yes” to bad ideas than push back on them. Even when a manager is receptive to feedback that doesn’t mean the ICs are going to give the feedback, or they get demoralized when their ideas aren’t taken for valid reasons.
If a metric becomes a target…
How many times do we have to teach you the same lesson, old man?
ctrl + f + goodhartThere it is 👍
If a metric becomes a target, It ceases to be a good measure. If it ceases to be a good measure, It will want a glass of milk. If it wants a glass of milk, It will want a cookie. If it wants a cookie, It will need to become a target. If it needs to become a target, It will want to be a measure.
At least once more.
The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself.
– Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
This hits so hard
Or, to put it succinctly, that which gets measured gets done, and the people in charge of measuring don’t know what’s important.
And then, eventually realizing this, they hire consultants for $$$, who offer two things, further tips for goosing numbers in silly ways, and also just direct advice for how to treat employees like utter shit, with a sharp, stainless veneer of “smart (because $$$ spent) business strategy”.
Exactly what I said would happen.
Me smrt billionaire, me track token quantity. Dat look good. Use most tokens iz gud. Wat does kwalitee mean?
Goodhart’s law in action.
Ironic that cheating the system is exactly what Amazon execs are doing all day every day.
Execs and management lie at every town hall but then act appaled if someone lies on their resume.
Because they can, of course. They get to hold those with the weaker position, to a higher standard. Partly why they are terrified of us being in the stronger position, they project their fear that we would treat them as they treat us.
Back in the day I worked at a place that gave everyone pedometers and encouraged everyone to get in at least 10,000 steps a day. Yes, employees were ranked.
Guys in the machine shop figured out you could attach it to a power drill and register 10,000 steps in a couple of minutes.
Why yes, yes the idea was discontinued after that…
That’s a good idea. An alternative is to put it on your masturbating wrist, and rub one out. That’s got to go a long ways to the daily count. Probably works better for men than women.
I knew someone who put it on their happy dog’s tail, and he wagged his way to 10K steps.
Our company did something similar, but you could bring your own (like a Fitbit) and it would sync its data from Fitbit. The thing it didn’t check was the type of data it was getting. The Fitbit app allowed you to manually enter data, not just data it captured from the device. So this got sync’d to the company app as if it was actual data since it didn’t mark it any differently.
I would sit in bed at night and enter a random feasible number every time to hit my goals and get a cut of those sweet rewards.
The companies generally know it can be gameified. Most people don’t bother, so they don’t really care too much.
Even if Fitbit only allowed data from wearables, you could still hook up a wearable to a fan or similar and get similar results. There’s not really a way to avoid it.
rewards like new running shoes?
Actually you could exchange for general gift cards.
I used AI to do all the AI for me and I won AI and now reward is fired…
Paywall.
But yeah, I would have done exactly what I imagine they did - just waste as many tokens as possible in a loop, and continue actually working.
Just kidding, I’d be updating my resume and interviewing elsewhere instead of working.
the use of AI was always for cheating , what did they expect.
Paywall free link https://archive.is/ydDHO
A friend of my worked at a company where they had metrics on Claude code usage and some employees just started multiple agents on the same project where one was tasked to implement a feature and the other was tasked to remove that same feature…
Reminds me of an old story where a pizza place held a competition among the employees, to see which cashier could convince the most people to upgrade their medium pizzas to a large. The POS system was set to track whenever a medium was upgraded, and would award the cashier one point. The employee with the most points each week won something like free movie tickets.
Employees would put on their best salesmen pitches, trying to get customers to upgrade their medium orders to larges. But one cashier always won, pretty much without exception. He was going to see a new movie every week for free. And he didn’t even seem to be trying.
His trick was that whenever a customer ordered a large, he would just put it in as a medium and then immediately upgrade it. It gave him the point for the upgrade, with zero actual sales effort on his part. So every time he had a customer order a large, he got a point by default. Customer ordered three large pizzas? Three points. He didn’t even bother trying to convince people to upgrade their pizza sizes, because the free points from every large order were already enough to let him win every week.
The neat thing is you don’t even need AI for that!
AI once again taking jobs from human workers smh
Look mom, I found the infinite productivity glitch. Production hit infinity% thanks to copy pasta!
Replying to your comment to hit my required comments per day goal.
K, congratz dude.
But using AI is all about cheating!
Why don’t they start a new leaderboard for amount of tax paid in each country?
How come people with MBA studies are too dumb to see that easily cheated metrics, are easily cheated? What do they actually teach in those studies? Have 5 mission statements that are the exact opposite of how we actually act, and fire people do line go brrr? That’s it?
I don’t understand how they don’t know that as soon as you make a metric, people will try as hard as they can to game it, making the metric useless.
