At Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and other large companies, devs are purposefully burning tokens (and money!) to inflate their AI usage and hit AI usage metrics which they treat as targets.
Not surprising at all. Every worker everywhere does this if they have some sort of ‘tokens’ they need to consume. Helpdesk ticket count is one pretty common with IT-folks and it’s easy enough to boost if you just write one from every single small thing you’ve done for the day.
None of these obviously are beneficial for the actual work getting done, but as the game is ‘make KPI numbers look good’ then that’s exactly what gets done.
Exactly. I’m not helpdesk anymore, thank god, but my team still has a ton of day to day work that’s tracked in the ticketing system.
Well, for years I’ve been stuck in project hell, doing work that isn’t easily fit into the ticket system. My last review my boss said I had only closed about 1/3 of the tickets of the next lowest person on my team, and that it doesn’t matter except we have a new exec watching that shit, so I have to make it look better.
So the next project I got, I chose to do something manually that I could have automated, that required the help desk to open tickets direct to me about 2-4 times a day whenever someone new needed access to the system I was setting up, until the project was done.
A week in I automated the “manual” task anyway and had a bunch of tickets I could close with a copy-pasted resolution.
I would feel bad, but my co-workers game the metrics even worse than I do.
Not surprising at all. Every worker everywhere does this if they have some sort of ‘tokens’ they need to consume. Helpdesk ticket count is one pretty common with IT-folks and it’s easy enough to boost if you just write one from every single small thing you’ve done for the day.
None of these obviously are beneficial for the actual work getting done, but as the game is ‘make KPI numbers look good’ then that’s exactly what gets done.
Exactly. I’m not helpdesk anymore, thank god, but my team still has a ton of day to day work that’s tracked in the ticketing system.
Well, for years I’ve been stuck in project hell, doing work that isn’t easily fit into the ticket system. My last review my boss said I had only closed about 1/3 of the tickets of the next lowest person on my team, and that it doesn’t matter except we have a new exec watching that shit, so I have to make it look better.
So the next project I got, I chose to do something manually that I could have automated, that required the help desk to open tickets direct to me about 2-4 times a day whenever someone new needed access to the system I was setting up, until the project was done.
A week in I automated the “manual” task anyway and had a bunch of tickets I could close with a copy-pasted resolution.
I would feel bad, but my co-workers game the metrics even worse than I do.