Amazon has shut down an internal company leaderboard which ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work.
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…
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 mean just shit on the floor, they’ll get the message real quick. Just doin my job, efficiency is wet fart key to success!
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?
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…
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.
Sounds like call centers.
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?
Time to start with one PR per line of code…
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.
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.
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.
Lmao, I can’t imagine why they have the “thinking” ai’s now.
Ooh new phrase, TokenMogged.
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.
“Claude, write me a recursive AI prompt, then execute it.”
“I’ll be leaving for the day. Notify me if anything changes.”
Wouldn’t even need that. Just give it a mid-way complicated pile of nonsense with reasoning on, and it’ll be crunching on that for the whole day, burning money to do so.
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.
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.
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?
Paywall free link https://archive.is/ydDHO
