Fuck y'all, I'm Tolkienmaxxing.
picks up a copy of The Silmarillion and starts reading
*Cue They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard* 😎🥳🤘
All this time I assumed destroying the world was just an easily dismissed, unfortunate consequence, turns out it's their main objective after all.
Most people have learned by now, that “lines of code“ is a terrible metric for evaluating productivity. Why are we doing the exact same thing with AI tokens now?
Because middle manglement has a constant compulsive need to justify their existence by finding new ways and metrics to "manage".
I’m no developer, just so some casual scripting for my job, but lines of code being a performance metric is a hilarious notion. Like, the indicator of good code is that it’s efficiently written in a small number of lines. It’s similarly just as easy to waste tokens on nothing of value.
Not sure this fully qualifies as a perverse incentive or malicious compliance, but it tickles my schadenfreude sense all the same
maxxing
It's 'maxing'. It's like 'faxing', 'taxing', or 'relaxing'. Here's your tree.
One of the KPIs of my job is how well I integrate AI into my team. My boss automatically gets my AI usage from reports on the admin centre of our M365 instance. I was asked last week why I had 2 days of zero Copilot queries. I had to type up an explanation lest this gets recorded as me being non compliant.
Thinking I will need to build an agent that does some tangentially related questioning daily so that I don't get written up or cross examined again.
Would they even be able to tell if you just submitted every prompt twice, and thus doubled your usage?
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.
I need to start doing this... I think I recently got flagged for not using AI enough...
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