Full Stack As the AI bubble continues inflating at lightning speed, the people doing the industry’s grunt work are feeling the churn. In interviews with CNBC, AI engineers from giant companies including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft say that they’ve been under immense pressure to build new products for their employers — except that on many occasions, the features they work tirelessly to deliver are shelved at the finish line. One Amazon AI engineer, who spoke to CNBC anonymously over concerns of retaliation, said that he was assigned an urgent project on a Friday night that was due Monday morning by 6 am. Despite having out-of-town company, he blew them off to spend the entire weekend working on the project — only to learn later that it had been “deprioritized.” This sort of outcome isn’t out of the ordinary at Amazon or at other tech companies, workers told CNBC. These sorts of stop-and-go projects are being assigned and shelved at such breakneck speeds, in fact, that they often go untested, the AI engineers said. And when the tools that do make it to market inevitably break, it’s the engineers’ job to fix it, often resulting in middle-of-the-night troubleshooting sessions between coworkers. Across companies, workers say that the general vibe is that their superiors are more interested in satisfying investors and keeping neck-and-neck with competitors than benefitting users. Others said their initial jobs didn’t even have to do with AI to begin with, but were switched over from other teams without much training due…AI Engineers Say They’re Burning Out as Bosses Whiplash From One Desperate Idea to Another