they realised they could squeeze more work from less people
they fired lots of people. and the ones left were happy to do the extra work.
Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
101–110 of 186 posts
Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
For US democracy replace "voters" with "lobbyists"
Voters and lobbyists are the same thing. Regularly telling your elected hire what to do is the onus on all participants in a representative system. The employee you hired isn't a mind reader. The only reason we imagine that there is a distinction is because most voters are too lazy to talk to the person they hired, so those who do stand out.
> Voters and lobbyists are the same thing
one is a large corporation with money paying for access and favors, the other is a regular person who votes. Absolutely absurd.
Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
#103Guys, that article is by a web scraping job search website seeking free publicity.
It will be blocked by the big players such as indeed and LinkedIn, and possibly also blocked by direct corporate websites. So wouldn't take any notice of it.
If the average salary and employment rate both drop then that would be a sign.
Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
#104I think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argument , imagine that ChatGPT makes your average developer 4x more productive. It will take a while before the expectation becomes that 4x more work is delivered. That 4x more work is scheduled in sprints. That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects…
I am not asking this as a gotcha, but a genuine curiosity for you or other people who find AI is helping them in terms of multiples. What is your workflow like? Where do you lean on AI vs not? Is it agentic stuff is tab by cursor? I find AI helpful but no where near a multiplier in my day to day development experience. Converting a csv to json or vis-versa great, but AI writing code for me has been less helpful. Beyo…
I use it a lot for reducing friction. When I procrastinate about starting something I ask the AI to come up with a quick plan. Maybe I'll just follow the first step, but it gets me going.
Sometimes I´ll even go a bit crazy on this planning thing and do things a bit similar to what this guy shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY4sFxLmMvw I tend to steer the process more myself, but typing whatever vague ideas are in my mind and ending up in minutes with a milestone and ticket list is very enabling, even if it isn´t perfect.
I also do more "drive by" small improvements:
- Annoying things that weren't important enough for a side quest writing a shell script, now have a shell script or an ansible playbook.
- That ugly CSS in an internal tool untouched for 5 years? fixed in 1 minute.
- The small prototype put into production with 0 documentation years ago? I ask an agentic tool to provide a basic readme and then edit it a bit so it doesn´t lie, well worth 15 minutes.
I also give it a first shot at finding the cause of bugs/problems. Most of the time it doesn't work, but in the last week it found right away the cause of some long standing subtle problems we had in a couple places.
I have also had sometimes luck providing it with single functions or modules that work but need some improvement (make this more DRY, improve error handling, log this or that...) Here I´m very conservative with the results because as you said it can be dangerous.
So am I more productive? I guess so, I don't think 4x or even 2x, I don't think projects are getting done much faster overall, but stuff that wouldn't have been done otherwise is being done.
What usually falls flat is trying to go on a more "vibe-coding" route. I have tried to come up with a couple small internal tools and things like that, and after promising starts, the agents just can't deal with the complexity without needing so much help that I'd just go faster by myself.
Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
#105It's not AI. We are in a recession caused by fear and instability. Tech may just be dying in general. This could finally be the collapse we have been waiting for. While the US was allowing capitalists to hoard all of the USs excess capital, China was facilitating the development of important industries via central planning. Look at Intel. The owning class has become so greedy and incompetent. They aren't even running…
If you are going to call it a collapse of the US, first understand that it is a UK jobs report, and second, the top line number is job growth. Also, why are you waiting for collapse? year-on-year growth remained positive at +0.49%, marking the third consecutive month of annual improvement and suggesting a slow but steady recovery from the recent market slump.
You're right, things are great in the US market. Totally different.
These are all multi-national corps.
Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
#106It's not AI. We are in a recession caused by fear and instability. Tech may just be dying in general. This could finally be the collapse we have been waiting for. While the US was allowing capitalists to hoard all of the USs excess capital, China was facilitating the development of important industries via central planning. Look at Intel. The owning class has become so greedy and incompetent. They aren't even running…
We are looking at the a reshuffling of the USA economic order. Small businesses are essentially being (slowly) completely erased from the US economy, and monopolies are all that will be left. The middle class is being wiped out. Wealth is being transferred to the top
> Tech may just be dying in general.
Its not just tech, its any company that doesnt have infinite capital to integrate and monopolize every bit of the supply chain.
Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of those people aren’t working in highly-paid disciplines like high tech. Generally those disciplines necessarily have wider spreads. I am perfectly fine with this. If I suddenly have to think really hard at my job all day and do terribly if I’m undersea and still get paid the same or less, I will be left pretty bitter.
Wouldn't AI mean you have to think less hard than before?
No, solving problems yourself is easier than understanding solutions that AI serves to you
Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
#108There has also been a big change in the UK’s tax regime that discourages hiring new workers
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/30/bosses-reeve...
Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
#109I think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argument , imagine that ChatGPT makes your average developer 4x more productive. It will take a while before the expectation becomes that 4x more work is delivered. That 4x more work is scheduled in sprints. That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects…
It would be interesting to see some research on exactly how much sustained productivity boost programmers can get by using LLMs. The reason this is a bit complicated is that the code would have to pass certain quality metrics. In particular when it comes to structural soundness -- whether a piece of code is something you can build on and evolve, or if it is disposable.
I think different generations of programmers have different opinions on what is quality output. Which makes judging the quality of code very context dependent.
If I were to guess I probably get somewhere in the range 10% to 20% productivity boost from LLMs. I think those are pretty astonishing numbers. The last time I got this kind of boost was when we got web search engines and sites like stack exchange.
I would suspect that if people experience 100% or more productivity boost from LLMs, something is off. Either we have very different ideas about quality, or we are talking about people who were not very productive to begin with.
I also think that LLMs are probably more useful if you are already a senior developer. You will have a better idea of what to ask for. You will also be in a better position to guide de LLM towards good answers.
...which kind of hints at my biggest worry: I think the gen-z programmers are facing a tough future. They'll have a harder time finding jobs with good mentors. They're faced with unrealistic expectations in terms of productivity. And they have to deal with the unrealistic expectations from "muggles" who understand neither AI nor programming. They will lack the knowledge to get the most from LLMs while having to deal with the expectation that they perform at senior levels.
We already see this in the job market. There has been a slight contraction and there are still a significant portion of senior developers available. Of course employers will prefer more experienced developers. And if younger developers believe in the hype that they can just vibe-code their way to success, this is just going to get worse.
Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
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