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Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

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Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

#81
post #9

I 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…

>That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users.

The absolute best outcome of LLMs, and frankly where it seems to be headed, is the death of bloated one-stop-shop-for-everyone software. Instead people will be able to use their computers more directly than ever, without having to use/figure out complicated unintuitive swiss army knife software to solve their problems.

LLMs today can already make people the exact tools they need with no extra feature bloat or useless expansive packages. An print shop who just resizes their photos and does some minor adjustments not available from free tier software is no longer a slave to paying adobe $40/mo to use LLM's will not be slotted in to replace devs on adobes dev teams. They can't work on a photoshop size codebase. However they will likely cut demand for Photoshop. Very few people will mourn the death of having to pay monthly for software just because there is a language barrier between them and their computer.

Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

#82
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don’t ask the agent to do something complex. Break it down into 10 manageable steps. You are the tester and verifier of each step. What you will find is that the agent is much more successful in this regard. The LLM has certain intrinsic abilities that match us and like us it cannot actually code 10,000 lines of code and have everything working in one go. It does better when you develop incrementally and verify each…

Spot on - that is exactly my experience when working with LLMs.

Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

#83
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. I agree that the former is a strong signal. However the latter doesn't tell you anything without further context: did interest rates go up, because the economy was strong, or did rising interest rates dampen the economy? (It's similar to how you can't tell how hot it is in my apartment, purely from looking…

In this case it was widely publicised that interest rates went up to try to bring inflation down (which was significantly above the 2% target). Growth was weak to unremarkable although the hiring market was good for job seekers at the time shortly before the interest rises were introduced.

Growth in the US, and Europe to a lesser degree, was very strong in this period, so it was natural that their interest rates went up. And when interest rates go up in the UK's two primary trading partners, it doesn't really have any choice but to hike rates with them, lest people flee the pound and make inflation even worse. It was unfortunate that this had to happen in a weak growth regime, but the British economy is such a boondoggle at the moment I don't think the alternative would've been any better.

Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

#85

Okay. It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. It's kind of funny that reliable data analysis has never been part of the AI hype when you consider that AI is used for data analysis.

Yes, but overall job ads are up. Pay is going up. But specifically entry level is down significantly since Nov 2022. All of your points - interest rates, post pandemic hiring boom would apply to market as a whole. Not saying it’s causation like the article claims, but there’s at least some correlation trend.

An awful lot of graduate positions in the U.K. are things like customer service, account management, paralegal, data analysis.

These categories have seen broad application of AI tools:

- CS, you’ll most likely talk to an LLM for first tier support these days.

- Account management comprises pressing the flesh (human required) and responding to emails - the latter, AMs have seen their workload slashed, so it stands to reason that fewer are required.

- Paralegal - the category has been demolished. Drafting and discovery are now largely automated processes.

- Data analysis - why have a monkey in a suit write you barely useful nonsense when a machine can do the same?

So - yeah, it’s purely correlative right now, but I can see how it being causative is perfectly plausible.

Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

#86
post #14
post #9

I 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've personally managed to produce roughly 8x the production outages and show-stopper bugs than I did before LLMs, so thing are looking pretty good!

So 4x more productive from WFH and 8x more from LLMs. The standard is now 32x more productive than 5 years ago.

Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

#88

Okay. It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. It's kind of funny that reliable data analysis has never been part of the AI hype when you consider that AI is used for data analysis.

and an increase in employer taxes for each employee introduced in the UK this year

Re: Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

#90
post #23
post #9

I 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 get very good results from Claude Code, something like a 3x. It's enough that my cofounders noticed and commented on it, and has had a lot of measurable results in terms of saving $ on infrastructure.

The first thing I'll note is that Claude Code with Claude 4 has been vastly better than everything else for me. Before that it was more like a 5-10% increase in productivity.

My workflow with Claude Code is very plain. I give it a relatively short prompt and ask it to create a plan. I iterate on the plan several times. I ask it to give me a more detailed plan. I iterate on that several times, then have Claude write it down and /clear to reset context.

Then, I'll usually do one or more "prototype" runs where I implement a solution with relatively little attention to code quality, to iron out any remaining uncertainties. Then I throw away that code, start a new branch, and implement it again while babysitting closely to make sure the code is good.

The major difference here is that I'm able to test out 5-10 designs in the time I would normally try 1 or 2. So I end up exploring a lot more, and committing better solutions.

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