Many Gen Z employees say ChatGPT is giving better career advice than their bosses::Nearly half of Gen Z workers say they get better job advice from ChatGPT than their managers, according to a recent survey.
Asking ChatGPT for advice about anything is generally a bad idea, even though it might feel like a good idea at the time. ChatGPT responds with what it thinks you want to hear, just phrased in a way that sounds like actual advice. And especially since ChatGPT only knows as much information as you are willing to tell it, its input data is often biased. It’s like an r/relationshipadvice or r/AITA thread, but on steroids.
You think it’s good advice because it’s what you wanted to do to begin with, and it’s phrased in a way that makes your decision seem like the wise choice. Really, though, sometimes you just need to hear the ugly truth that you’re making a bad choice, and that’s not something that ChatGPT is able to do.
Anyways, I’m not saying that bosses are good at giving advice, but I think ChatGPT is definitely not better at giving advice than bosses are.
I’m not touting the merits of “prompt engineering” but this is a classical case.
Don’t ask “how can I be a more attractive employee” ask “I am a manager at a <thing> company. Describe features and actions of a better candidate/ employee.”
You will get very different answers
Well, yes, but lets get real here… Asking your boss about career advice is very often worse.
You are better with useless random information collected on the internet than what has been finely tailored against you.
Don’t forget well-meaning advice from someone incompetent who failed upwards but still lacks the self-awareness to see it. I’ve had a few of those.
For these kind of generic questions, ChatGPT is great at giving you the common fluff you’d find in a random “10 ways to improve your career” youtube video.
Which may still be useful advice, but you can probably already guess what it’s going to say before hitting enter.
Yeah for questions like that, take the top 10 results on google, throw them into a blender, and that will be ChatGPT’s answer
How would ChatGPT know what I want to hear?
Because of the way you phrase it.
You only tell chatGPT your side of the story. And chatGPT is just a word predictor. If you offer it 2 options, and for one of them you use words that are on average 20.69% more positive to describe the option than the other one, chatGPT just fills the blanks and will see that that option is more positive, therefore it will probably recommend that.
ChatGPT has no intelligence or reason, it’s just a word predictor. It doesn’t use logic. It won’t do an analysis of the impact of each alternative, it just has some inputs and is asked to predict what the next word will be.
This is why it drives me insane that people call it AI
We’re just word predictors too.
Yeah noticed this when I started to make chatgpt write more sentences in essay’s I was doing. When you make chatgpt write the next sentence in a paragraph 9/10 times it just rewrites what you wrote in a different way.
Ask like an engineer, it will answer like an engineer. Ask like a moron, it will answer like a moron – all that is inherent in the training data, in the question/answer pairs the thing was trained on. Ask it to impersonate a Vulkan, it will get better at maths: My armchair analysis of that is that Vulkans talk quite formally and thus you’re getting more from the engineer and less from the moron training set.
I actually saw an article on researchers that found it answers better if you ask it to answer like it was in star Trek
Which definitely can’t be the case because Star Trek technobabble makes sense is what I’m saying, but the language mirrors that of what you see on an engineer forum so the increased accuracy smears over.
Somewhat relatedly if you want to talk about real-world warp engines (there’s some physicists with some ideas or maybe better put speculations) it’s probably going to start talking in StarTrek technobabble. Less “turn it off and on again”, more “reinitialise the primary power coupling”.
Haha chat gpt is really just the memory parasites from Rick and Morty.
It’s great for brainstorming and getting started on a problem, but you need to keep what you said in mind the whole time and verify its output. I’ve found it really good for troubleshooting. It’s wrong a lot of the time but it does lead you in the right direction which is very helpful for problems where it’s hard to know where to even start.
Nonsense. Not “about anything”. ChatGPT gives correct advice in many fields, some of which are directly verifiable - for example programming.
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I mean google search kinda famously sucks these days bc it’s been SEO’d and ad-promoted to death
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Well, I don’t have any experience asking it for career advice, but I have worked with it quite a bit and it’s quite shitty once you get to anything that starts resembling complexity. This is definitely not a tool I’d go to for any advice beyond the simplest ones.
Surprisingly, I’ve had the opposite effect. Wherein, it has increased my productivity by tenfold and has helped with code review and/or confirming various logic, etc. Although, I wouldn’t necessarily take what it tells me as gospel from a recommendation standpoint in terms of my career as a whole. I’ve definitely caught it numerous times being wrong, but the inaccuracies pale in comparison to what it gets right, imo.
Don’t get me wrong, it saved me a ton of time. Just recently I needed some coding help that would probably take me hours of searching. Doesn’t mean I’d trust it with advice, that’s something entirely different than spitting out code that works half of the time.
When I tried to use it for code-related questions, it straight up made things up that didn’t exist.
That’s my biggest issue with AI. I’ve tried using it to help me code and it’s a way more often than not. It’s great for doing find/replace or guessing what I want a function to do and giving me a skeleton that I can change to do what I want. But anytime I try to do something a bit advanced, it chokes.
Like this week I needed help with a regex match pattern, and it straight up gave me wrong code multiple times in a row. And not even multiple wrong answers, the same goddamned wrong answer 3 or 4 times in a row.
Same here. The most I get out of might be a pointer to a module that could be a better approach, but the code I get from ChatGPT is usually worthless.
I treat it as my water cooler talk, and maybe I’ll come away with a few new ideas.
Like rubber duckying?
Exactly!
I actually wonder if that’s a benefit for young people just starting out on their career journey. It’s mostly about feelings and a general sense and not specific opportunities to advance a career. In a lot of ways, a well established manager whose from another generation is not in time with those feelings and the difficulties with navigating them in a complex corporate environment.
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Nah… it says more about them than it does their bosses or AI chat programs.
Unsurprising. Managers have their own goals in mind and how you fit into them. They don’t care so much about where you end up, but what you can help them with.
ChatGPT just wants to be loved.
I have never, ever asked my boss, or chat gpt, about career advice. :)
me too
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Yep. Weekly 1:1 meetings for the first year at least. Go to every two weeks after if preferable.
Is the advice something along the lines of once you have a couple years of relevant experience start looking for a new job that needs that experience?
Because that’s how you get good increases in income at least in your early career.
Later on you’ll hit a plateau of sorts where changing employers to get a raise is trickier because they’re concerned about paying too much for you to come on board, so your job search will take a bit longer. But someone will probably hire you eventually for a good sized increase.
I don’t see how that’s news, management is incompetent by default. You could ask a frog and get better answers than you would from most management teams.
This really depends on whether the manager has a degree in business or in something useful.
Well, yea, if you ask some giant tobacco company and ChatGPT if you should take up smoking you can guess who gives the better answer. ChatGPT makes up a lot of shit but it’s not as self interested as the vast majority of bosses.
My generation sucks!
