We've always laughed at efficient managers who measured programmer productivity by lines of code written or story points closed.
Meet Tokenmaxxing.
Business Insider dug up something wonderful: inside Western big tech, internal leaderboards have appeared where engineers compete to burn the most tokens in AI tools. Leaders earn titles like "Token Legend", honor, and potential bonuses.
Management's logic is simple: if a developer spends a lot of tokens, it means they are "all-in" on AI, automating their work, and delivering 10x results. Jensen Huang from Nvidia even seriously states that if an engineer with a $500k salary doesn't burn at least $250k worth of tokens, it's a cause for deep concern.
You know what happens when you give smart engineers a stupid metric that affects their promotion? Goodhart's law in action (when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and everyone starts hacking it).
🧠 Developers do exactly what smart lazy people with dumb KPIs should do. They didn't start writing code faster. They just write scripts that fire junk queries to LLMs in an infinite loop to inflate their metric before Performance Review.
What's the dumbest efficiency metric you've ever been forced to adopt in your career? Share in the comments 👇
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